Moto 360 Reviews Arrive 87
An anonymous reader writes: Reviews for the Moto 360 smartwatch have started to roll in. David Pierce at The Verge praises the design: the circular display is framed by an unadorned, stainless steel shell, and fastened to your wrist with a simple leather strap. At the same time, he criticized the battery life, saying the device averaged around 12 hours of use before it needed to be charged. Pierce adds, "The Moto 360's most impressive feature is that I stopped noticing it almost immediately. Whenever I wear the LG G Watch or the Samsung Gear Live, I'm constantly compelled to fidget with it; there's this unexplainable feeling of having something alien on my wrist that is there because I need to use it. The 360, on the other hand, just vanished into the spot left on my wrist by the Seiko watch that conveniently died this week." AnandTech takes a deeper dive into the device's hardware, noting that the TI OMAP 3 processor is built on a somewhat old 45nm process, which necessitates higher power consumption than newer, smaller processes. The Wall Street Journal says it's easy to get used to speaking into your watch for basic functions, but the software — and thus, the Moto 360 as a whole — still isn't quite ready for prime time. However, almost all the reviews agree that the smartwatch's time is coming.
Re:Battery life seems to be a killer (Score:5, Informative)
The whole "partial discharges are bad" thing dates way back to the old days of timer-based NiCd chargers. Back then, chargers were dumb - they terminated the charge cycle based solely on a timer, and not based on detecting a full charge. The infamous "memory effect" wasn't actually the thing at play in most cases there - it's actually extremely difficult to reproduce outside of a lab. The problem was simple overcharging due to dumb timed chargers. As far as users were concerned, the symptoms were the same as "memory effect" so the myth stuck.
In general, partial discharges/recharges of a lithium-ion are far less stressful to it than a full discharge/recharge. However - li-ion/li-po batteries tend to lose capacity more rapidly if they are routinely kept at a high state of charge. Lithium batteries are "happiest" when they hover around 50% state of charge. (This is one of the reasons Teslas default to only charging up to around 80% unless you specifically "top it off")
Lead-acids like most non-EV car batteries are quite different beasts - they are happiest when fully charged, and will lose capacity RAPIDLY to sulfation if let to sit when partially discharged.