This is the unpacking of the Moto360 Android Wear Smartwatch :

Moto 360 on charger

All wrapped up

Packaging

The packaging is very well done :

Contents

Inside, it comes with :

• Moto 360 Smartwatch.
• Qi charging stand.
• 550 mA USB charger (cable and charger are one piece).
• Quickstart manuals.

Out of the box, you’ll probably need to charge the watch and then update it. You may need to do a couple of updates and unfortunately this may require multiple charge sessions (it won’t do an update with <80% battery).

The Charger

Side view of the charger

The charger has some good heft to it – it doesn’t slide around easily because of its weight and the rubber feet at the base. When your phone is charging, it functions like a nightstand clock, displaying the time and amount charged. A tiny blue light at the bottom of the stand indicates it’s charging. Not too bright either :

The Moto 360 Charging

It even works on other 3rd party Qi chargers.

The Watch

In addition to a capacitive touchscreen, it has the following sensors :

• Pedometer (9-axis sensor).
• Optical heart rate monitor (on the back).
• Ambient light sensor (inside the “flat tire” on the front).
• Two microphones (for taking orders and noise cancellation I guess?).

The watch uses Bluetooth 4.0 and Wifi to connect to your phone. After downloading the Android Wear and MotoConnect apps from the Google Play Store, you’re all set to go.

Usually, you can make the watch screen come on with a dramatic flick of your wrist. If not, you can always punch the button on the side to make the screen turn on or off. I find the wrist flick works 95% of the time for me – and sometimes when I don’t need it (like which driving).

The Android Wear 5.1.1 update fixes a lot of problems and battery life seems better. The settings menu does not really fit the rest of the theme after the update though.

The watch is pretty cool and playing around with watchfaces is pretty fun. Battery life is kinda wonky but I do find I don’t need to reach for my phone as often and it’s pretty handy for things like bike riding.

It looks great, feels great :

Battery Life

Powering the Moto 360 is a 320 mAh battery – seems pretty small but it seems to do the job.

I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now. I usually have it on from 8:00 to 18:00 and it’s in the high 60% range with the Android Wear 5.1.1 update. Before the update, it was around the high 40% range. This is with “Ambient Mode” turned on – where it dims the screen for a bit instead of shutting it off right away.

It takes about an hour to charge completely – Though I’ve seen it go from ~60% to ~80% in about 10-20 minutes when I tried topping it off before heading out after work. It does get a little bit warm on the charger and I heard rumours of screen burn-in but so far so good.

I do find changing the watch faces often does kill the battery though.

Summary

I think it’s a gorgeous smart watch. Only crummy parts is the sluggishness (slow processor) and battery life. Aside from that I think it’s pretty awesome. Can’t wait for the next version from Motorola.

Lovely shots of the Moto 360 on my skinny arm :