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:Circular LCDs (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a new thing called "fashion".
I'd much rather have a round watch than the current trend of recangular smartwatches.
Re:Battery life seems to be a killer (Score:5, Interesting)
I gave up on the Pebble long ago (found it mostly useless), but one thing I do remember is that I was constantly running out of battery while out and about. I've been using an LG G watch for quite a while now, and running out of battery has never been an issue.
It is counter intuitive, but the LG's ~36 hours better life actually works much more reliably for me than the Pebble's two days (when it goes all buggy) to 7-8 days (when it doesn't, and you mostly ignore it), The reason is that I *know* I charge the LG every night, just like my cell phone. I quickly got into the habit of setting the watch down on it's charger thing as I put my wallet, phone, whatever on the nightstand etc. The LG is forgiving enough if you do forget to charge that you'll probably make it at least till noon the next day, but I almost never forget for the simple reason that it's a short, consistent pattern.
With the Pebble, I didn't want to wear out the battery by partially discharging each day then charging back to full each night (TBH I don't know if it's battery works that way, I just figure less charge cycles is probably "good" somehow.. shrug). So I tried to remember to check, pay attention to the low battery alert, whatever. It just didn't work. It was much more tedious and failure prone then just knowing I set something in a certain place each night. Sure, I could have just said screw it and charged it every night regardless, but then it's only equivalent to the Android options at best.