
Moto 360 review – Beautiful outside, ugly inside - palebluedot
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/moto-360-review-beautiful-outside-ugly-inside/
======
UnoriginalGuy
This article is very strange, on page 2 they spend tons of time lamenting the
360 for having a terrible CPU, then run tests they themselves created which
don't really support the level of disdain they're showing.

They then almost completely ignore the results of their own tests but tack on
a point about "well floating point sucks, so that explains our criticisms."
Except it doesn't. A much more likely candidate (which they themselves hint
at) is using poorly performing storage or having software glitches.

So I cannot tell if the author didn't understand the results or just wanted to
moan that the 360 had an old CPU and didn't really care what the data actually
said (they also provide no source for the power consumption claims).

I won't be buying a 360 simply because it has terrible battery life and costs
$250. But this article is a little off. The second page just isn't consistent
with itself.

~~~
Steko
The CPU benchmarks don't make it a good CPU. It's old and power hungry, that's
primarily why it sucks.

~~~
kenrikm
The age is not an issue, people thought the iPhone 4 was wicked fast at the
time, the speed seems adequate for a smart watch I would contend the software
is too bloated - Java is not the fastest tool in the shed. However the fact
that it's power hungry is a deal breaker in a watch.

~~~
higherpurpose
Cortex A8 was considered power hungry even for its time, among other 40nm
chips.

Cortex A9 was both a more efficient and more powerful chip. Now, what most
OEMs use in low-end phones, and even smartwatches is Cortex A7 which is
roughly as powerful as Cortex A8, but far more efficient, both because of its
design but also because it comes at 28nm.

I think this comparison was made by ARM itself:

[http://archive.linuxgizmos.com/ldimages/stories/arm_cortexa7...](http://archive.linuxgizmos.com/ldimages/stories/arm_cortexa7_comparison.jpg)

It's really strange that Motorola would go for the 3 year old Cortex A8 core,
when Cortex A7 has been available for more than a year, and several chip
makers produce them in different varieties.

~~~
threeseed
Cost and Availability are two big reasons to use an older technology.

------
DannyBee
"The Bluetooth phone-to-watch connection is unstable and loses connection
randomly. Every android wear device we've tested does this".

I've tested all of them (literally), on 3 very different phones (GS5, LG3,
Moto X) , and _never experienced this_.

Without any more data on the test environment, one might think they would stop
to check whether the problem is on their side if it happens _all the time_ on
_every device_.

It's like saying "Every table we tried had objects roll off them. Therefore,
they are bad tables" (or you know, the floor you put them on wasn't level)

~~~
com2kid
Bluetooth is _very_ finicky.

* The version of the OS running on the phone can impact BT stability

* What other BT devices you are paired to can impact BT stability

* The RF environment you are in can impact BT stability

Reliably replicating Bluetooth bugs is... interesting.

~~~
threeseed
One of the advantages of being Apple.

They have almost all their users on the latest OS, they control the stack end
to end and everyone is quite fine if features are only supported on certain
models.

~~~
martiuk
One of the advantages of having a Nexus/Play Edition Device.

They have almost all their users on the latest OS, they control the stack end
to end and everyone is quite fine if features are only supported on certain
models.

~~~
petersellers
What about the other 79.1% of android users?

[http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html](http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html)

~~~
Chestofdraw
71.2% can be ignored since android wear doesn't support them. My own
experience in wearable tech is that 68.7% of our android users are running 4.4
and the nexus 5 is twice as popular as the next most popular phone.

------
post_break
The battery life is crucial on a device like this. Moto screwed this device up
big time. Old outdated processor that isn't as power efficient as current gen
processors. Battery that lasts 24h at most, for a watch, that is off unless
you turn your wrist. I would have paid more for higher battery life and a
modern processor. This processor is from 2010, I just don't understand.

~~~
georgemcbay
Agreed, I was looking forward to this smartwatch and don't really care about
the raw "speed" of the CPU (as long as it can run the watch face displays well
and have basic music controls I'm good, not going to ask it to do much...),
but by all reports (common theme in all the reviews I've seen) the battery
life is pretty horrific.

There's no way I'm ever buying a smartwatch that doesn't _easily_ get 1 full
day worth of life without a recharge. I wouldn't put up with that on a
smartphone, and a smartphone is MUCH easier to randomly recharge during the
day than something strapped to your wrist is.

OTOH, there's no way I'm buying a clunky dorky smartwatch either and the Moto
360 is by far the best looking of the bunch, so I guess I'm waiting until next
year's batch until Moto fixes the battery problem or some other company fixes
their industrial design problems.

~~~
wastedhours
YMMV based on amount of notifications/calls, but I'm getting around 36 hours
on the G Watch. Obviously it isn't what you'd call pretty, but looks like with
the R they're making progress toward a proper watch design. Maybe next year
they'll have full screens that look like the Withings one...

~~~
deong
That's about the same as I would get on the Gear Live if I skipped charging it
for a night. On a normal day, I take it off the charger around 8:00 or 8:30,
and I'm usually going to bed around 2:00 with 45-ish percent left.

------
nacs
The comparison chart and cover photo show other "real watches" like the "Tag
Heuer Aquaracer 300M" which costs only.. $2,300 (
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055NBVDM](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0055NBVDM) ).

Ars Technica reviews are usually good but they couldn't have found a watch
that's not 10X the Moto's price to compare aesthetics to?

*Edit: Corrected site name.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I think you meant Ars, not Anandtech.

As for the comparison, I'm sure that was a bit tongue and cheek. No one buys a
> $1k watch for functionality. Anyways, if you ever get a chance to attend
Basel World, I highly recommend it.

~~~
sosuke
Thanks for the Basel World link, I hadn't heard of that before but their brand
book is really cool.

[http://media.messe.ch/epaper/BASELWORLD/2014/Baselworld_Bran...](http://media.messe.ch/epaper/BASELWORLD/2014/Baselworld_Brand_Book_2014/index.html)

[http://www.baselworld.com/en-US/The-
Show/BrandBook2014.aspx](http://www.baselworld.com/en-US/The-
Show/BrandBook2014.aspx)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I went there on a whim when I was living in Lausanne. It was crazy: the lowest
priced watches on display were around $40K.

------
ekianjo
> While the outside is a good expression of what a smartwatch should be, the
> inside is fatally flawed. Motorola inexplicably chose an ancient 1GHz
> single-core Texas Instruments OMAP 3 SoC to power the 360. For some
> perspective, that's a 2010-era processor in the same league as the iPhone 4
> or Nexus One. Smartwatch processors don't need to be as powerful as their
> smartphone companions, but there is no reason for them to be old. It's
> almost as if Motorola raided a dumpster outside the TI factory for parts.

Haha, this is a good joke. Why do you need to have so much CPU power for a
smatchwatch anyway, that won't be driving tons of pixels every microsecond ?
What's really the issue there? We still use MUCH older processors in
calculators as well, for very specific reasons too and for battery life.

~~~
wmf
Yeah, a single core seems like it ought to be enough for a watch. The real
problem is that it's an old, power-hungry core with an old GPU.

~~~
deong
Pretty much all the watches are single-core. Most of them are using a
Snapdragon 400 (quad-core) but with all but one of the cores disabled.

------
hyp0
Smartwatches will fail. It _seems_ a cool idea, but like Dick Tracy's wrist-
phone, wrist-calculators, and wrist-watch computers (they've been around for
many years), they won't take off. Most of us stopped wearing watches the
moment we got cell phones. Smartwatches are awkward, and an even smaller
display than a smartphone - which are currently increasing in size.

Better is a bare headsup device - a "display" as big as you like, without
being bigger. Google Glass _sans_ camera (so no privacy concerns til we're
ready for it). It can even have the time in the corner...

 _EDIT_ yes opps, s/phone/watch/. Ironically cut/paste was failing on my
smartphone, as was I.

~~~
bookwormAT
"Smartphones will fail."

I guess you mean "smartwatch". Phones have been pretty successful so far ;)

Anyway, I think I do not agree with you, since I got the early ugly firstrun
Android wear device from I/O, the LG Watch.

My experience is that the watch is by no means the next step in the evolution
of personal computers or anything. But it is a very useful accessory for the
computer you already have in your pocket.

Once you have it on your wrist you notice that

\- phone ringtones are awkward and annoying to anyone around you.

\- opening and unlocking your phone 125 times per day (This numbers is from
Google) just to check for information and if there is something you need to
act on right now is incredible annoying.

\- voice commands, as limited as this is right now, is only useful if you can
trigger it immediately when you need it. The few voice commands I find useful
(set alarm, remind me to...) are much much more convenient if I can just say
them.

So my point is that the watch is much more useful than a case, and only
slightly less useful than headphones. If they start being equipped with more
sensors and the cost falls below $80, they will become even more interesting.

~~~
manicdee
I gave up on watches when I was a PC service tech. Anything on your hands or
wrists was just an invitation for the jagged-edge-fairies to get their claws
in.

So I haven't used a watch for about 20 years.

I don't look at my phone anywhere near as often as 120 times per day. I have
headphones with play/skip buttons, so that covers about 97% of my interaction
with my phone during the day.

~~~
51Cards
The form factor may not be for you however I find my smart watch to be an
amazing time saver. That's the joy of diversity... the ability to have
products that match our preferences. I never ever wear headphones with
play/skip buttons but I understand their appeal for people they work for.

I get the same benefits noted above from my smartwatch, first the Pebble and
now the LG. They have become a priceless part of my daily routine.

~~~
epaladin
Out of genuine curiosity, what do you use the watch for that you would
associate with time savings? I've been curious about these things, but haven't
been sure as to if they're a product in search of a problem for the current
implementation and limitations.

~~~
51Cards
I was gifted a Pebble over a year ago and I admit I thought it was a bit of a
gimmick at the time. I did however start wear it out of consideration for the
person that gave it to me and the novelty of a new toy. :) (note too that I am
an old-timer who still wears a watch regularly)

What happened however surprised me. I found the simple change of having
notifications pop up on my wrist was saving me from pulling the phone out of
its holder over and over during a day every time it chimed with an email or
message. I get a ton of communication during the day but 70% of it doesn't
require a response from me immediately... the remaining 30% however does. I
was now able to filter incoming messages with barely an interruption to what I
was doing at the time.

From there I expanded Apps to bringing up my calendar overview, putting
navigation directions on my wrist, using silent alarms (wrist vibration) to
alert me during meetings, etc. It allows me to be more connected to my phone,
without being more connected to my phone, if you know what I mean.

Now I have since moved to an LG watch and I do like it. No more week long
battery life but it will go over a day easily. Lots more gimmicky applications
like remote camera control, etc. but also useful things, like ticking items
off my Keep grocery list as I wander the store... without holding my phone.

Is it perfect for everyone? Nothing is. :) But I will stand corrected for my
early mocking of the form factor. I "don't leave home without it" now.

------
sspiff
I find it weird that they're critizing the CPU for being old, as if age itself
is a bad thing.

I find it hard to believe an OMAP3 at 1GHz would be insufficient to power a
smartwatch. Perhaps something is wrong with the software, they're using slower
memory chips, or the NAND is of the slow & cheap variety.

I currently have a 1GHz MIPS-powered Android smartwatch (pre-Wear though), and
it's plenty fast. Battery life is not great (1-2 days), but this is a cheap
SoC, produced on 45nm, with WiFi and bluetooth running all the time.

I'm honestly quite amazed at how much technology we manage to push into such
small, battery powered packages!

~~~
masklinn
> I find it hard to believe an OMAP3 at 1GHz would be insufficient to power a
> smartwatch.

That's not the claim being made, especially given it's compared to similarly-
clocked SoC.

The article makes two claims: 1. the watch stutters which may be caused by the
low floating-point performances (benched very low), and 2. the SoC is power-
hungry leading to miserable battery life.

The difference? The other SoC are based on Cortex A7, which was created in
part to provide equivalent performances but much better efficiency than the
A8:
[http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-1...](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-10-19%20at%2012.30.25%20PM_575px.png)

~~~
sspiff
I find that floating point story hard to swallow. It looks like they went
"huh, this CPU benchmarks roughly as fast as the others, but we find it slow
in practice. Only floating point benchmarks lag behind the competition, so
that must be why!".

Floating point instruction are rarely used in common software. They're
important in rendering (which is offloaded to a GPU in this case) or
scientific computing (which is irrelevant here, unless you were planning to
fold genomes on your watch).

It's possible that this OMAP came without an FPU to save space and power.

Most Linux software for ARM is compiled with softfloat anyway, because it
rarely matters for end users, and lots of ARM boards don't have an FPU. Some
distributions have a separate armhf version, which does use hardware floating
point operations.

~~~
pm215
The quoted /proc/cpuinfo reports vfpv3 and neon, so it does have an FPU (and
it even has the Neon SIMD instructions, which not all SoCs of that era do).

From my perspective the softfloat-vs-hardfloat balance has tipped and I would
say that "most Linux software for ARM" is now hardfloat rather than softfloat.
But your view on this kind of thing depends a lot on whereabouts in the
embedded world you are: if you're at the trailing edge then you'll see a lot
more ARMv5 non-FPU devices.

------
TickleSteve
Can someone tell me why they're using a full Android stack for Android Wear??
To me its doing nothing that small (read very power efficient) micro such as
an STM32 or an MSP430 could do with much more efficiency.

There is no reason whatsoever to run Linux/Android/Dalvik/etc on a device that
just needs to run a Bluetooth stack & LCD. Doing this using an STM32 would
give you an order of magnitude (guess) improvement in power efficiency with no
difference to the user.

~~~
dmethvin
It reminds me of Microsoft's early attempts at portable devices, where they
seemed to think they needed a huge chunk of the Windows desktop API and its
conventions in a phone or tablet. Watches are not phones, they're peripherals,
and they don't need such a bulky software stack. Maybe Apple will handle this
differently.

~~~
Someone1234
Apple already have a more efficient software stack. However Apple are also
targeting fewer hardware differences (which, I suspect, is why Google is
sticking with a bytecode-based language, to target "everything").

Google's ART (Dalvik "replacement") initiative might help with power usage a
little (as well as loading times). But unless there is a massive shift in the
way Android works, I cannot see Google making enough changes to make Android a
really great watch OS.

------
thomasahle
I'm a bit disappointed this review doesn't go more into details on how the
watch is to use on a daily basis. We've had months to talk about the technical
specifications and looks, but now they've finally got one! Did it make them
use their phone less? Did it last from morning to evening at typical use? When
was it the most useful? When was it the least? The article doesn't seem
interested in these issues at all.

------
jonifico
All in all, I think it's too much of an experimental product to be spending
$250 on. I'm not exactly wealthy to throw money away like that.

------
oostevo
I should preface this by saying that I know very little about batteries and
consumer electronics, but a little about watches.

The problem of how to keep a mostly or completely analog watch wound
throughout the day was solved a very long time ago. I wonder how feasible it
would be to use something like the rotor weight from an automatic
mechanical[1] or automatic quartz[2] watch as a trickle charger.

Would that just be too little added energy for the added complexity?

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_watch)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_quartz)

~~~
gnopgnip
[http://www.withings.com/activite/en-US](http://www.withings.com/activite/en-
US) This watch takes a different meaning of smartwatch, but it's closer to a
year of battery life.

~~~
arrrg
It’s not really a smartwatch (not that it matters). I do like the different
approach and I think it’s very promising, but it’s still very specific in what
it does. It’s an activity tracker plus watch. There is nothing wrong with
that, but it’s also limited to just that. I would expect more from a
smartwatch (but maybe no one needs a smartwatch anyone and this is a much more
promising model for the future).

------
peterclary
The bottom line is it's a "crushing disappointment after six months of hype".

------
michaelhoffman
This watch looks really great except for the battery life. I hope that
Motorola keeps working on it. I would love a longer-lasting successor. I'm
worried that the poor reception due to the battery life might kill the whole
concept.

------
frik
With an e-ink display the battery could last month (think of Kindle e-ink
display).

~~~
wvenable
E-ink doesn't update fast enough or well enough for a watch. Have you ever
used a Kindle? The Pebble uses an "E paper"[1] display which doesn't use a
backlight and that watch can last a week. Battery life is proportional to how
often the display is updated.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Wristwatches](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper#Wristwatches)

~~~
sundvor
Aye. I saw the Moto360 battery Hangouts test results and thought, well, I'm
happy I got my Pebble Steel this year. It's an awesome device with fantastic
looking always on screen that doesn't try to be too much (I have a smartphone
for that!). And battery life is measured in days, not hours.

When my low battery warning comes on at 20%, I've still 4x longer to go than a
fully charged Moto360 - given a few notifications on each device.

~~~
nilkn
Pebble Steel looks great. If only it had a round display.

------
smackfu
I think it's fine to create an artificial battery benchmark to compare
watches, but unless that is representative of actual use, it shouldn't be used
as the "real battery life" or anything.

~~~
rtkwe
They say as much right in the article. They know their test is artificial and
is only useful as a comparison between the devices.

> The test sends a Google Hangouts message to the watch every 15 seconds, and
> uses ADB over Bluetooth to turn the screen on every 15 seconds. It's a
> fairly heavy usage example, but it allows us to compare battery life across
> Android Wear devices with a fair amount of scientific rigor.

~~~
smackfu
Exactly. I just worry that 219 minutes will get bandied about as "what Ars got
for the battery life."

------
spindritf
What does "terrible performance" mean? Why is there some convoluted benchmark
instead of a description -- better yet, a video -- of how it actually works?

What is it like to use one every day? Is it useful at all? I don't get hangout
requests every 15 minutes, does the battery last a day of normal usage?

I remembered why I don't ready tech press any more.

------
bkeating
Dat wrist tho....

~~~
mkonecny
It's a brown metal bar.

