The Moto 360: Wrist Full of Awesome
I’ve now had the watch strapped to my wrist for 16 days. At the time of writing this late into the evening, minutes from midnight, the watch still has a 33% charge after 16 hours of use. This is with the latest software update from Android Wear, 4.4W2.
I frankly wasn’t expecting much from this watch; it sounded fairly gimmicky and there wasn’t many situations where I could see it being useful, but I still wanted to play with it. I saw it a bit like a more affordable Google Glass, but boy was I ever wrong.
A fews years back I went a little overboard with watches. There’s something about the engineering, utility and look of them that always got me intrigued, but over the years I’ve lost interest. The design of them have gotten clunkier, the material cheaper and became prohibitively expensive. When Motorola decided to get into the watch business, my curiosity was piqued again. Opening the box on my new toy, it looks and feels like a watch except for the completely black face. It’s very minimalist for what’s on the market nowadays which is normally all about “bling”. A simple crown with a golden accent and a soft, black leather strap held together with an aluminium milled clasp. It’s definitely not big but what’s there is done with quality and purpose in mind. Needless to say, the watch feels right at home, comfortably on my wrist.
When turned on, the watch greets you and explains how to use this amazing device; swipe up for cards, swipe right to dismiss them, swipe left to see more contextual information, tap on them to do an action (not all do this; for example, on the watch face open up google voice search). Simple enough, but the power isn’t with touch actions, it’s with the voice commands.
I flick my wrist ever so slightly towards my eyes, waking it up, the face of the watch lights up telling me the current time. I whisper “Ok Google” (because my roommates are asleep) and the screen turns white with a big Google logo and a simple instruction to “speak now”. I can then say a multitude of commands to do special functions like “take a note, write a blog post about the Motorola 360”, or can ask a multitude of questions that it answers gracefully. These voice commands are becoming very apparent as being the real power of wearables. It doesn’t work so well with the phone because you have to take it out of your pocket, chuck in the pin, then press the microphone icon to talk to it. It’s simply too much futzing about before you can even do anything. While it’s on your wrist however, it’s easily accessible and these issues fade away. You can reply to email, texts, take notes, asks for directions, calculate a tip, ask to take your heart rate and more.
However, not everything is perfect, far from it. I will concede that the software is still not complete as far as I’m concerned. My grievances are miniscule, but they do add up. For instance, there are some features in Google Now that simply do not work on the watch but works on the phone, which I can’t understand why that would be. The other day, while I was walking in the rain and holding the umbrella with my hand, a song came on that I wasn’t keen on listening and wanted to skip it, I quickly said “Ok Google, next song”. I was expecting it to work like it does on my phone, but it didn’t. Instead it pulled up a google search on my watch for ‘next song’. Small annoyance, yes, but things like this infuriate me because I expect it to work like it does on the phone.
Small annoyances aside, the watch is a real winner for me. I originally bought it simply to test it out, play with the novelty and try out some ideas for simple apps. Now that I’ve had time to use it however, it’s completely changed my perspective. This is not a novelty gadget, this is actually extremely useful for me and in a multitude of situations.
The other day, I was on my motorcycle and heading towards a literal sausage festival (technically, salami). I knew the area it was in, but didn’t know the exact location of the town hall; while at an intersection waiting for the lights to turn green, I bring my watch up to my helmet and say “Ok Google, navigate to Northcote Town Hall”. I was surprised that the watch even caught my voice over the sound of my motorcycle exhaust, but surely enough, it was now calculating my route and was displaying my instructions on my wrist. While I’m riding towards the location, the watch would vibrate and display the action that’s coming up (Turn right on X in 400m), a quick glance and I was good to go.
Another example is the subtle notifications. I was in a meeting and waiting an important email to come through, instead of interrupting the speaker by bringing out my phone, a quick glance at the watch when it buzzed would let me know who just emailed me. It’s a lot more socially acceptable to look at your watch than it is to look at your phone. My only concern with this would be the security aspect of it; I don’t want people nearby to know if someone sent me a text, message or email with something confidencial in it. I was really hoping for it to have a security feature behind it where it doesn’t display the incoming notification right away without a user input like tapping the screen or pressing the crown.
Probably the biggest annoyance I’ve discovered (please Moto, fix this) is the charging screen. The Moto 360 comes with this very neat little dock that does inductive charging and turns the watch into a nightstand clock of sorts. It’s a nice feature to have, but what I hate about it is that it’s impossible to turn off the screen at all, which pisses me off to no end since I can’t sleep with any light. You can’t press the crown to make it sleep, or anything else. The only workaround I discovered is to turn on ambient screen from my phone, waiting for the screen to dim, then turn it off again, which will then make it go dark. Why can’t I have control over the sleeping function of my watch? To further rub salt into the wound, you can’t use Google Now when charging. I would love to wake up in the morning, press the crown on the watch (or tap the screen) to view the time, then simply say “Ok Google, what’s the weather going to be like today?”. Nope. Does not compute. It will ignore your simple commands, then I have to unlock my phone and go to look at my Google Now weather card to view the temperature, like a neanderthal.
Like I said, very small niggles in hindsight and something that would easily be fixed with a software update (I hope). I’m more annoyed that this went overlooked when they shipped the product. Does nobody at Motorola have a nightstand that they charge their watch on and have an obsessive dislike for light in any form when trying to sleep?
Just me? Hm. Maybe I should invest in a coffin.
