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Moto 360 review – Beautiful outside, ugly inside

141 points by palebluedot 12y ago

ekianjo 12y ago
> 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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
- masklinn 12y ago
  Have you considered reading the article? > In the CPU benchmark, the OMAP 3 shows very poor floating point performance, a bottleneck which could explain the stuttering and freezing we experience. > The battery life of the Moto 360 is just awful, and that's reflected in our test. Over two runs, the watch averaged only 3 hours and 39 minutes, less than half of what the LG G Watch managed when we reviewed it a few months ago […] Given the SoC, the battery performance isn't surprising. The 360 is saddled with an old, inefficient processor with big, power-hungry transistors. One of the A7's goals was to provide equivalent performances to the A8 with much better efficiency: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-10-19%20at%2012.30.25%20PM_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-1...
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Well, for a smooth user experience in the times you do use them - as the article points out, scrolling is kinda jagged in this device, possibly due to sub-par hardware (or the OS isn't tweaked to the available hardware).
post_break 12y ago
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 Old outdated processor that isn't as power efficient as current gen processors.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.
- moca 12y ago
  The reason is obvious. Moto must have worked on this thing for years, but couldn't make it work well enough. This is the first time that Moto or Google can build something that is marketable. It will take 1-2 generations to be really solid much like Android itself.
  - post_break 12y ago
    You're telling me they worked on this back when the OG Droid was on Verizon shelves? They they didn't look at cpu roadmaps and evolved the device, even to 2013 hardware let alone 2010?
    - moca 12y ago
      TI stopped developing OMAP chip 2 years ago. The natural assumption would be the project was started before that. Due to the complex, it should take more than 2 years for a large company to develop it (startup might do it faster). NOTE: iPhone => iPad also took roughly 2 years, and we all know iPad was started way earlier than that.
      - deong 12y ago
        I doubt this is accurate. Companies do sometimes take a while to get a product to market, but if so, they don't typically do it with parts that they bought all in a batch four years ago. The specs evolve with the design requirements. For another thing, Motorola sold another smartwatch in 2011 using what appears to be the exact same CPU. Which means one group inside the company would have to have built a watch in less than a year, while another group working on a watch in the same company took at least four times as long. It's much more likely that they just had a big pile of CPUs left lying around a warehouse that they never used because the Motoactv was a commercial flop.
DannyBee 12y ago
"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 12y ago
  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.
  - gioele 12y ago
    > Bluetooth is very finicky. Is there any hope that these new wearable computers will lead to the adoption of something better than Bluetooth? Something based on IEEE 802.15.4, maybe?
    - com2kid 12y ago
      BTLE is actually quite simple to understand. BTLE implementations on the other hand, those are horrible. It isn't all that hard to outright crash an iPhone when using BTLE. Other platforms are... interesting. Part of the problem is that the overall big BT spec is rather all encompassing, getting test coverage on it is hard.
  - threeseed 12y ago
    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.
UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
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.
- jmgrosen 12y ago
  "Typically OMAP 3s were built on a 45nm, which puts it at a huge power-usage disadvantage compared to the 28nm LP (low power) process used to make the Snapdragon 400 in every other smartwatch." This line is especially suspect -- all else controlled, power usage should go up with line width, not down. Probably, the reason they chose to go with the OMAP 3 is power usage -- it's so old but well-supported that its drivers have been really optimized and it's quite efficient under Linux.
  - StephanTLavavej 12y ago
    Die shrinks reduce power consumption. 45nm consumes more power than 28nm.
    - stephenmm 12y ago
      Its not that simple. Smaller transistors switch faster and consume less dynamic energy in the process. But the smaller the gate the worse the transistor is at being able to turn off the current and leakage current starts to become an issue. This is the main issue that is killing Moore's law as we are no longer able to ignore leakage current as it becomes more and more dominant to the entire power budget. This along with increased density of the circuits also cause risk of thermal runaway. These factors mean that as we shrink geometries the transistor architecture has to get more and more exotic (while still being manufacturable) to deal with these issues. So, yes the switching power is decreased but EVERYTHING else gets much more complicated.
oostevo 12y ago
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
- shalmanese 12y ago
  It's about two orders of magnitude too little power for a smartwatch.
  - Steko 12y ago
    The problem isn't battery technology, the problem is the popular conception of what a "smartwatch" is.
    - com2kid 12y ago
      Those automatic quartz watches seem to top out in the single digit microamp range. Just spinning up a BTLE chip to receive a message takes far more than that (orders of magnitude), and without some sort of BT connection to your phone, the watch ceases to be smart.
      - Steko 12y ago
        Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I'm not saying a Seiko mechanism is going to power any kind of smartdevice functions (although you might combo a tiny backup quartz mechanism so that when your smartwatch dies it can still tell time). What I am saying is that the problem with all these smartwatches getting shit battery life is just in their design. The Pebble, to it's credit, gets a more than adequate 4+ days of battery life because they were smart and used a microcontroller.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nacs 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
  - jp555 12y ago
    I think you hit on the key point so many are missing; apparel is rarely about functionality. Technologists understand the comparative value of functionality; they generally do not understand the value of fashion. For example, I see so many techies thinking people are "stupid" to keep buying "shiny Apple stuff". That only shows a shallow understanding of "software is eating the world". People spend WAY more money on apparel than they do tech. The next wave of tech growth is much less about smart refrigerators, and much more about smart socks & belts. Just like everyone wears shoes, EVERYONE is going to have a smartphone, soon. This is a profoundly new thing.
  - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
    Yeah, especially given how that one is apparently a pound in weight. How did they even manage that? Fill it with solid iridium?
  - sosuke 12y ago
    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_Brand_Book_2014/index.html http://media.messe.ch/epaper/BASELWORLD/2014/Baselworld_Bran... http://www.baselworld.com/en-US/The-Show/BrandBook2014.aspx http://www.baselworld.com/en-US/The-Show/BrandBook2014.aspx
bkeating 12y ago
Dat wrist tho....
- mkonecny 12y ago
  It's a brown metal bar.
frik 12y ago
With an e-ink display the battery could last month (think of Kindle e-ink display).
- bmelton 12y ago
  Except that it would have to be (comparatively) much dumber than it currently is, and that it would be constantly flickering with every time change.
- wvenable 12y ago
  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
  - av500 12y ago
    the Pebble does not use e-ink, they use Sharp's "Memory LCD" technology which is a low power black and white LCD.
  - sundvor 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      Pebble Steel looks great. If only it had a round display.
- ibrahima 12y ago
  Eh, those Kindle battery life estimates are based on low daily usage IMO. When I'm reading a lot I can easily run down my Kindle in a week. As a watch you would probably be updating the display far more often than an occasionally used Kindle.
thomasahle 12y ago
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.
sspiff 12y ago
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!
- petersellers 12y ago
  >I find it weird that they're critizing the CPU for being old, as if age itself is a bad thing. When you are cramming an old CPU into a tiny, cutting edge device like this, I think the criticisms might be warranted. Especially so considering the poor battery performance of the watch. It might not be entirely due to the CPU but it seems probable that the CPU is a nonnegligible contributor to the power consumption issues.
- masklinn 12y ago
  > 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%202011-10-19%20at%2012.30.25%20PM_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-1...
  - sspiff 12y ago
    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.
hyp0 12y ago
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.
- lutusp 12y ago
  > Smartphones will fail. Not only is this not correct, it's not even a prediction of future events any more. Maybe you meant "smart watches will fail". I might buy that.
- bookwormAT 12y ago
  "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.
  - wastedhours 12y ago
    This. I'm also seeing battery improvements on my phone by not switching the screen on to check it/the time. It is by no means a killer device, but useful for glancing (particularly at work, or at the dinner table where it might not be cool to get your phone out and hang up that PPI spam call...)
peterclary 12y ago
The bottom line is it's a "crushing disappointment after six months of hype".
spindritf 12y ago
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.
smackfu 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Exactly. I just worry that 219 minutes will get bandied about as "what Ars got for the battery life."
jonifico 12y ago
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.
TickleSteve 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
michaelhoffman 12y ago
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.

141 points by palebluedot 12y ago

> 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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
masklinn 12y ago
Have you considered reading the article? > In the CPU benchmark, the OMAP 3 shows very poor floating point performance, a bottleneck which could explain the stuttering and freezing we experience. > The battery life of the Moto 360 is just awful, and that's reflected in our test. Over two runs, the watch averaged only 3 hours and 39 minutes, less than half of what the LG G Watch managed when we reviewed it a few months ago […] Given the SoC, the battery performance isn't surprising. The 360 is saddled with an old, inefficient processor with big, power-hungry transistors. One of the A7's goals was to provide equivalent performances to the A8 with much better efficiency: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-10-19%20at%2012.30.25%20PM_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-1...
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Well, for a smooth user experience in the times you do use them - as the article points out, scrolling is kinda jagged in this device, possibly due to sub-par hardware (or the OS isn't tweaked to the available hardware).

post_break 12y ago

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.

moca 12y ago
The reason is obvious. Moto must have worked on this thing for years, but couldn't make it work well enough. This is the first time that Moto or Google can build something that is marketable. It will take 1-2 generations to be really solid much like Android itself.
- post_break 12y ago
  You're telling me they worked on this back when the OG Droid was on Verizon shelves? They they didn't look at cpu roadmaps and evolved the device, even to 2013 hardware let alone 2010?
  - moca 12y ago
    TI stopped developing OMAP chip 2 years ago. The natural assumption would be the project was started before that. Due to the complex, it should take more than 2 years for a large company to develop it (startup might do it faster). NOTE: iPhone => iPad also took roughly 2 years, and we all know iPad was started way earlier than that.
    - deong 12y ago
      I doubt this is accurate. Companies do sometimes take a while to get a product to market, but if so, they don't typically do it with parts that they bought all in a batch four years ago. The specs evolve with the design requirements. For another thing, Motorola sold another smartwatch in 2011 using what appears to be the exact same CPU. Which means one group inside the company would have to have built a watch in less than a year, while another group working on a watch in the same company took at least four times as long. It's much more likely that they just had a big pile of CPUs left lying around a warehouse that they never used because the Motoactv was a commercial flop.

DannyBee 12y ago

"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 12y ago
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.
- gioele 12y ago
  > Bluetooth is very finicky. Is there any hope that these new wearable computers will lead to the adoption of something better than Bluetooth? Something based on IEEE 802.15.4, maybe?
  - com2kid 12y ago
    BTLE is actually quite simple to understand. BTLE implementations on the other hand, those are horrible. It isn't all that hard to outright crash an iPhone when using BTLE. Other platforms are... interesting. Part of the problem is that the overall big BT spec is rather all encompassing, getting test coverage on it is hard.
- threeseed 12y ago
  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.

UnoriginalGuy 12y ago

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.

jmgrosen 12y ago
"Typically OMAP 3s were built on a 45nm, which puts it at a huge power-usage disadvantage compared to the 28nm LP (low power) process used to make the Snapdragon 400 in every other smartwatch." This line is especially suspect -- all else controlled, power usage should go up with line width, not down. Probably, the reason they chose to go with the OMAP 3 is power usage -- it's so old but well-supported that its drivers have been really optimized and it's quite efficient under Linux.
- StephanTLavavej 12y ago
  Die shrinks reduce power consumption. 45nm consumes more power than 28nm.
  - stephenmm 12y ago
    Its not that simple. Smaller transistors switch faster and consume less dynamic energy in the process. But the smaller the gate the worse the transistor is at being able to turn off the current and leakage current starts to become an issue. This is the main issue that is killing Moore's law as we are no longer able to ignore leakage current as it becomes more and more dominant to the entire power budget. This along with increased density of the circuits also cause risk of thermal runaway. These factors mean that as we shrink geometries the transistor architecture has to get more and more exotic (while still being manufacturable) to deal with these issues. So, yes the switching power is decreased but EVERYTHING else gets much more complicated.

oostevo 12y ago

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

shalmanese 12y ago
It's about two orders of magnitude too little power for a smartwatch.
- Steko 12y ago
  The problem isn't battery technology, the problem is the popular conception of what a "smartwatch" is.
  - com2kid 12y ago
    Those automatic quartz watches seem to top out in the single digit microamp range. Just spinning up a BTLE chip to receive a message takes far more than that (orders of magnitude), and without some sort of BT connection to your phone, the watch ceases to be smart.
    - Steko 12y ago
      Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I'm not saying a Seiko mechanism is going to power any kind of smartdevice functions (although you might combo a tiny backup quartz mechanism so that when your smartwatch dies it can still tell time). What I am saying is that the problem with all these smartwatches getting shit battery life is just in their design. The Pebble, to it's credit, gets a more than adequate 4+ days of battery life because they were smart and used a microcontroller.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nacs 12y ago

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 12y ago
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.
- jp555 12y ago
  I think you hit on the key point so many are missing; apparel is rarely about functionality. Technologists understand the comparative value of functionality; they generally do not understand the value of fashion. For example, I see so many techies thinking people are "stupid" to keep buying "shiny Apple stuff". That only shows a shallow understanding of "software is eating the world". People spend WAY more money on apparel than they do tech. The next wave of tech growth is much less about smart refrigerators, and much more about smart socks & belts. Just like everyone wears shoes, EVERYONE is going to have a smartphone, soon. This is a profoundly new thing.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Yeah, especially given how that one is apparently a pound in weight. How did they even manage that? Fill it with solid iridium?
- sosuke 12y ago
  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_Brand_Book_2014/index.html http://media.messe.ch/epaper/BASELWORLD/2014/Baselworld_Bran... http://www.baselworld.com/en-US/The-Show/BrandBook2014.aspx http://www.baselworld.com/en-US/The-Show/BrandBook2014.aspx

bkeating 12y ago

Dat wrist tho....

mkonecny 12y ago
It's a brown metal bar.

frik 12y ago

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

bmelton 12y ago
Except that it would have to be (comparatively) much dumber than it currently is, and that it would be constantly flickering with every time change.
wvenable 12y ago
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
- av500 12y ago
  the Pebble does not use e-ink, they use Sharp's "Memory LCD" technology which is a low power black and white LCD.
- sundvor 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    Pebble Steel looks great. If only it had a round display.
ibrahima 12y ago
Eh, those Kindle battery life estimates are based on low daily usage IMO. When I'm reading a lot I can easily run down my Kindle in a week. As a watch you would probably be updating the display far more often than an occasionally used Kindle.

thomasahle 12y ago

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.

sspiff 12y ago

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!

petersellers 12y ago
>I find it weird that they're critizing the CPU for being old, as if age itself is a bad thing. When you are cramming an old CPU into a tiny, cutting edge device like this, I think the criticisms might be warranted. Especially so considering the poor battery performance of the watch. It might not be entirely due to the CPU but it seems probable that the CPU is a nonnegligible contributor to the power consumption issues.
masklinn 12y ago
> 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%202011-10-19%20at%2012.30.25%20PM_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4991/Screen%20Shot%202011-1...
- sspiff 12y ago
  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.

hyp0 12y ago

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.

lutusp 12y ago
> Smartphones will fail. Not only is this not correct, it's not even a prediction of future events any more. Maybe you meant "smart watches will fail". I might buy that.
bookwormAT 12y ago
"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.
- wastedhours 12y ago
  This. I'm also seeing battery improvements on my phone by not switching the screen on to check it/the time. It is by no means a killer device, but useful for glancing (particularly at work, or at the dinner table where it might not be cool to get your phone out and hang up that PPI spam call...)

peterclary 12y ago

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

spindritf 12y ago

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.

smackfu 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  Exactly. I just worry that 219 minutes will get bandied about as "what Ars got for the battery life."

jonifico 12y ago

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.

TickleSteve 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

michaelhoffman 12y ago

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.