Ethan Carter
Every criticism I have about the Moto Watch stems from its lack of Google’s Wear OS. While the design and user interface might lead you to believe that Motorola has merely customized Wear OS, it actually runs on Real Time OS, which comes with significant limitations that become apparent fairly quickly. This discrepancy may have contributed to my initial disappointment; the familiar iconography raised my expectations beyond what could realistically be fulfilled.
Setting up the watch presented its own challenges, requiring the installation of the Moto Watch app. After several restarts, I finally accessed the setup screen, which misleadingly suggests that you can operate the watch without creating a Motorola account. if you skip account creation, the app freezes until you restart it and provide your email. Once you get past this hurdle, you’re introduced to a tutorial that walks you through the interface, but the animations and transitions lagged, creating a frustrating experience.
The watch features several perplexing aspects that demand more effort than users might expect. For instance, notifications. Unlike most smartwatches that automatically relay notifications from your phone and allow you to customize which ones you receive, this watch requires you to sift through a list and manually select what you want to be notified about. While this approach has its rationale, the default settings can easily lead to missing important alerts, such as Google Calendar reminders.
On the functionality front, the Moto Watch covers the essentials, including displaying the time and tracking your heart rate, steps, and calories burned. It includes features like stopwatches, timers, sleep tracking dashboards, a compass, and a remote camera shutter. You can also make calls from the watch when it’s paired with your phone, and it even includes a built-in dialer application.
The absence of Wear OS means you’re limited to the pre-installed apps. When it comes to adding music, you can only access what is stored on your device. There is no support for Google apps, no mobile payment options, and Motorola has not attempted to address these shortcomings. The more you explore the watch’s capabilities, the more you uncover reasons to reconsider its utility.
In an effort to enhance its fitness tracking credibility, Motorola collaborated with Polar for the health features. While you can see Polar branding on the packaging and in the health section of the app, it is absent from the watch itself. Opening the health tab reveals well-presented data that helps you monitor your vital statistics. You’ll find the now-standard three rings representing your steps, calories burned, and active minutes, along with sections dedicated to activity, sleep, recovery, recent workouts, heart rate, and physical stress levels.
Despite the collaboration with Polar, I anticipated that the Moto Watch would excel in health and fitness tracking. Unfortunately, it falls short of even basic wearables from years gone by, lacking features like automatic activity detection. If you go for a walk or a run, the watch does not automatically log the activity. This may appeal to users who meticulously start their watch for every workout, but promotional images often show individuals wearing the Moto Watch in casual clothing, raising questions about its target audience.
On a positive note, the range of exercises you can add to the quick access menu is extensive, catering to various sports. It includes not just common activities like running and cycling, but also less conventional options such as boxing, jazz dancing, zumba, judo, kabaddi, and hula-hooping. You can even select activities like kite flying, tug of war, and darts. Just remember to activate the recording feature because, even if you’ve exerted yourself for a good 90 minutes, the watch won’t automatically recognize it.
Despite the promise of dual-frequency GPS, I found its performance lacking. There were times outdoors when the watch failed to acquire a signal, even in open areas where I had previously encountered no issues. This problem became even more frustrating when it was a temporary loss of signal, leading to frequent interruptions from the watch’s pre-recorded voice alerts.
One area where the company excels is battery life, which exceeded expectations. Even with the always-on display activated, I managed to stretch battery life to eight days before needing to recharge. Although, one might argue that my experience was so disappointing that I had to force myself to engage with the device.
Daniel Mercer
Brandon Fletcher
