You just need to rest the 360 in its cradle to top off, which requires a flat surface. Unfortunately, the Moto 360's coolest charging trick, inductive charging, is also its drawback. The battery starts to dip down at night, and you'll definitely need to recharge in that included cradle before going to sleep. This is similar to what other Android Wear watches like the Samsung Gear Live and LG G Watch achieve. With ambient mode off, which keeps the screen dark most of the time, battery life can lean towards two days. I tried pairing with a Nexus 5, and a Samsung Galaxy S5. A recent firmware update has improved things: continually connected with an ambient always-on screen, the Moto 360 now lasts about 20 hours on a charge. The Moto 360 originally had pretty bad battery life, lasting less than 12 hours without fiddling with settings. Moto 360 (round) next to Pebble Steel (square): Pebble has more than double the battery life. Its Texas Instruments OMAP 3 processor looks less robust on paper than the processors on Samsung and LG's watches, but performance for all everyday Android Wear tasks feels about the same. The rest of the Moto 360 is similar to other Android Wear watches: 4GB of onboard storage, 512MB of RAM, and a microphone for voice commands. People need help integrating one into their everyday lives. It's not enough to throw a heart-rate monitor on a watch. The heart-rate accuracy seemed to vary at times, too. It might say "15 minutes to go," but it's hard to tell whether the app's using heart-rate data or something else, and what you should do next. A separate "heart activity" app aims to measure your active motion each day: 30 minutes of moderate activity, for five days a week. After a few seconds, its continuous readings stabilized.īut Motorola's app, and Google's, for that matter, have no coaching mode no way to calculate target heart rate. Sometimes my heart rate wasn't recognized I had to adjust the watch. You can have it ping your heart rate via a cool-looking Motorola app that looks like a needle spinning on a gauge, or you can use Google's own parallel app. The optical LED-based heart-rate monitor on the back is a little like the one on the Samsung Gear Live and works the same as other wrist-worn heart-rate monitors. This is the same as every other Android Wear watch to date. And since there's no speaker, you can't use the Moto 360 as a speakerphone, either. But it only uses that voice recognition for Google Now searches and text transcription: it can't make audio phone calls or send voice messages. ![]() It recognizes my voice at near-whisper in crowded rooms, subvocally even, and I've rarely seen it fail. Motorola prides itself on excellent microphones, and the Moto 360 is better at understanding what I say in a crowded room than any other smartwatch I've seen. You need a flat surface to place it on, which rules out backpacks or airline seat pockets. It's also not a perfect travel charger - the cradle's big, and the inductive charging doesn't use magnets or use any manner of clip-on. It actually makes a really cool bedside clock, but not a great alarm, because it lacks a speaker (it vibrates instead). ![]() A gentle blue ring shows the charge progress. ![]() Just drop the watch in and it starts charging, while the display flips to a bedside-clock mode. The included charger and cradle are clever, too. Sarah Tew/CNETīesides being round, the Moto 360 has a few other hardware distinctions from other Android Wear watches I've used: its contact-free inductive charging and dock (which uses similar technology as other inductive charging mats and accessories, like those for the Nexus 5), its heart-rate monitor, and its improved noise-cancelling microphone technology. The charge cradle turns the watch into a bedside clock.
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