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.
The old http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoactv smartwatch by Motorola also had a OMAP3 CPU and somewhat surprised that was not mentioned as a possible reason for the company's over-comfort with such a dated part in contrast to the alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
Not power hungry for a phone but for a watch it's a dog. Recharge a watch twice a day, how is that "not THAT power hungry"?
A watch needs an order of magnitude less CPU power than a phone, perhaps several. In 2014 if you see a watch product with a smartphone CPU, you know they blew it.
You mean it /should/ use an order of magnitude less CPU power, but ATM that's not the case - smartwatches seem more like a previous generation of smartphones sized downwards, with a patched OS.
I don´t know if it makes much sense comparing a smartwatch with a traditional watch.
They share only the form factor. I would go as far as saying they do not even share the functionality of keeping track of time: nowadays traditional watches are basically used only as fashion accessories (as the article points out), since for most people that function has been carried out by mobile phones since the first Nokias.
A Smartwatch is more like a lightweight (in every sense) smartphone, with the significant drawback of having much less space available for a battery, but I agree completely that having to charge it twice a day is a deal breaker, and not acceptable from a user standpoint, regardless of the feat of engineering the watch actually is.
Most of the current crop of smartwatches trying to be lightweight smartphones are all turkeys and have fizzled. Kind of like the early tablets that tried to be computers when the actual product demands a 8-10 hour (work/school day) battery life. Battery life is even more critical with a watch which needs to last at least 16 hours, hopefully quite a bit longer, and you probably want it to keep telling time even if the main battery goes out unless that battery lasts the better part of a week. So the correct way to design a smartwatch is to, as Apple did with the ipad, figure out the device size and computing capabilities backwards from the battery life and then go to market when you're happy with what's possible.
The Pebble, to it's credit, has a Cortex-M microcontroller instead of a smartphone SoC and get's up to a week of battery life.
On the side note, people need to stop doing benchmarks on a freaking watch. The spec war on smartphones was ridiculous enough, and now they are bringing it to wearables.
"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.
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.
Historically they did. But leakage is growing faster than dynamic power is shrinking, and the performance of the wires is falling behind meaning all the transistors must be comparatively larger.
That's what I thought, too, but I asked an electrical engineer friend of mine, and he said they would increase power. I just looked it up now, using the term "die shrink" (couldn't think of it earlier), and, sure enough, you're right. Not sure why he said otherwise...
Depending on the context, your friend may be right.
Power dissipation in a CMOS gate is made up of two primary components: static leakage and dynamic losses. Dynamic losses are related to the "dissipation" capacitance (Cdiss or Cpd in CMOS datasheets) and the switching frequency. If you want to understand why, consider charging an RC circuit. How much energy is lost to the resistor and how much is stored in the capacitor at the end of charging? How does the selection of the resistor and capacitor value impact this ratio?
So for minimum dynamic loss you want to minimize Cdiss which involves making gates as small as possible. However, this makes the static leakage higher. So it may not be universally as simple as "a smaller process is lower power". For a system which spends most of it's time in sleep, or clocks slowly it may actually be better to eat the dynamic loss of a larger process in order to get the lower leakage, which is something I believe TI did with some of the FRAM '430 parts (but I can't find the link now).
All else being equal, it drops consumption. But generally when you go down in process, you increase what you pack on the die, bringing the power back up.
The A7 doesn't really do that though, it was created in no small part to provide the same power as the A8 with much better efficiency, and to be paired with an A15 in big.LITTLE for transient high load (which isn't necessary in a smartwatch)
Phone-oriented SoCs have aggressive frequency scaling and power gating, such that the newer chipsets have lower power consumption in ordinary usage and only scale up to similar power usage in high-utilization applications.
If that's really the reason, then that's pretty much a failure. According to ars' synthetic battery life test, the Moto 360 is the worse. It has a slightly bigger battery than the Samsung, and has only 56% of its battery life.
PS: it's not only in ars' synthetic test but also real life reviews said the battery life is too low.
"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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily. Remember the huge problem with 2013 Nexus 7 having wifi and bluetooth on at same time? Many bluetooth keyboards and some other accessories just wouldn't work at all with wifi enabled. It was broken for the longest time. Looks like it still is not working properly for some users:
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
On the other hand this means that a second iteration of the Moto 360 will easily have a better battery life just by having a Cortex A7 CPU or even better, a Cortex A53, 50% more efficient than A7 and due next year. Something like a Snapdragon 410 with only 2 cores and no LTE modem would be great. The target is 130mw / core.
EDIT: apparently the G Watch and Gear Live have a Snapdragon 400 with 3 core deactivated. So I guess they could do the same with a 410.
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoactv smart watch that was ceased in 2013 has a OMAP3 CPU and with that, can see why they went down that path for a initial product that may of very well been ready much earlier than now for release. Though why not released with the other two upon launch does go against that.
I do find the whole battery issue somewhat concerning and watch wise I'd be expecting a weeks usage and until then and for many this is another device to add to the charging schedule if acquired.
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 ).
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?
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.
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.
It seemed to me like the watches were in there for size comparison. Even on the costs are wildly different, they show that the Motorola isn't outlandishly large or heavy compared to other fashion watches.
The comparison was about acceptable diameter, thickness and weight for watches. The price is not relevant to point out that the 360 is within "normal" size parameters, and significantly below the upper bound for weight.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Smart glasses might be better for some people, but the issue is that no one likes wearing glasses. We developed plastic things you physically press onto your eyeball with your finger because people both (a) need to see, and (b) hate wearing glasses.
Lots of people like wearing a watch. It combines a small bit of practical benefit with the appeal of jewelry/fashion, and it doesn't have the downsides of glasses like pinched noses and ears or the mild social drawbacks (loads of people, my girlfriend for one, hate the way they look in their glasses).
People do wear sunglasses for fashion, but most people would find it uncomfortable and awkward to wear them all the time, indoors and out. Maybe that changes in the future, but right now, I'd bet loads of money on watches over glasses if the contest is between the two.
I enjoy wearing my glasses, as it allows me to see :)
Regardless I think smart glasses are much more useful than a smart watch mainly because of how it can overlay things into your field of vision. Word Lens is a really cool example of this feature(realtime ocr/translation/overlay in your language of choosing).
nice points, I was thinking sunglasses. But my main point was display size: it's a problem for phones, far worse for watches, but no problem for glasses.
Ulimately, yes, smartcontacts or implants, but a long way off. I like eyetracking: only render the bit you're looking at (lower res peripherally). Need super low latency though.
It is really cool to see how history repeats itself in such a predictable fashion. According to the International Watch Magazine, at first wristwatches were seen as a passing fad, with some men even saying that "they would sooner wear a skirt than a wristwatch" [1].
Of course, on the beginning of the miniaturization process, wristwatches were not as good as pocket watches. But they are less clumsy, easier to access, keeps both of your hands free. Most importantly, they are worn visibly all the time, a pretty neat characteristic for a fashion item. Wouldn't it be better if that iPhone 6 you are planning to buy were kept in constant display for the eternal envy and adoration of your peers, instead of hidden in your pocket 80% of the time?
It is hard to try to predict the future. Instead, I like to talk about scenarios. And I cannot discard a scenario where a smartwatch is your primary "identification" device and smartphones, tablets and laptops are only big screens with greater computing power, to be accessed and unlocked through your smartwatch. Is that too far-fetched?
> Most of us stopped wearing watches the moment we got cell phones.
Is there a source for this at all beyond personal experience? I wouldn't expect that to be the case in general - I definitely wouldn't see the smartphone as the successor product to the watch.
I can't even find a correlation that suggests a permanent replacement of watches with phones. MarketWatch [0] have a graph showing a decrease in watch sales from 2007-2009 but that had recovered fully by 2012.
While smartwatches might fail I don't think these manufacturers will have a valid claim that they failed because they'd already ruined the watch market.
This article from Timex claims the USA total sales market for watches, more or less pre-cellphone, was 1.2 billion, because timex had $400M revenue and 1/3 of the USA market.
This article claims the 2013 sales for Rolex were $4.5B and they had ten percent of the world market for mfgrs, and the USA is ten percent of the world market for sales, so a comparable USA total sales market is perhaps "four billion" to one sig fig or less.
So the sales in the USA have monetarily in nominal dollars roughly tripled. This is probably flat when corrected for inflation. On one hand minimum wage has gone from $3.80 to $7.25 which is barely doubling, then again the standard of living has inploded since then because virtually all expenses have increased at a far faster rate. Still to less than one sig fig I'd say the market is vaguely flat when adjusted for inflation.
Then again I read this comment and went to the deli to pick up a breakfast and my banana, strawberry, and tea observations of people in line ahead and behind me, and the employees, and customers at tables, were 17 people, one rather gaudy gold mechanical watch, one cheap digital watch, three bracelets (one looking like a medical alert bracelet). Two women furiously texting away (perhaps to each other). One woman listening to music on her iphone with the iconic white earbuds. One guy talking on unidentified smartphone.
My guess, looking at sales figures, is the market has dried up for anyone not willing to spend $2000+ on a watch, has exploded as conspicuous consumption for $2K+. The Chinese only made 600M disposable watches for the 7.1 billion of the world population who aren't 1%ers, and I suppose thats believable, if 99%er watches are value engineered to only last a year or two for $10 at walmart, I'd estimate I'd only see a couple in my trip to the deli, and thats what I saw.
If they could sell to 10% of the smartphone population, which admittedly sounds optimistic for a wristwatch with a 3 hour battery life, then their theoretical sales could be severely market disrupting. I'm not seeing it happen.
To some extent wristwatches are another cultural trap. Only about 1 in 40 people watch "Survivor" despite it being freely aired, yet its supposedly our defining influential cultural entertainment. So wristwatches could very well "define our culture", at least as we currently define culture, even if only low single digits of the population purchase them. A play on words due to multiple definitions is "don't have to be popular, to be popular". Or rephrased almost noone needs to wear wristwatches for us to describe ourselves as "everyone" wears wristwatches.
I would put very big money on smart watches not failing.
What we're seeing now is something we see often in newish technologies - we take an existing technology and attempt to shoehorn it into another.
A smartwatch should not be an analog to a phone. It also probably shouldn't be a watch. But as happens so often, we say "put phone plus watch = product?"
There's very little here that's exploiting the advantages of a wearable on the arm. When wearables start exploiting their physical advantages, they'll stop being cool tech toys and start being useful.
"we take an existing technology and attempt to shoehorn it into another."
Not financially, which is a HUGE problem for smart watches.
I'm considered an unamerican weirdo crazy, at least in part, because I dropped like four hundred bucks on a smart phone and pay only $22/month just for service, instead of paying $100 on a two year contract like a real American, who can just barely afford a $100/month callphone bill but could never financially survive a single one time $400 expense.
These watch guys think they're going to sell $300 one time expense watches to a people who as a group have already proven they would rather pay loan shark interest rates rather than pony up a couple hundred bucks to buy their phone. This is a recipe for disaster.
The only way smart watches can possibly survive is by being bundled into a contract with AT&T or whoever, say an extra $50 a month for two years on their existing contract which would be a modest 150% APR loanshark-grade loan. You "know" the consumers are not going to be able to pony up $300 cash because they're already self selected as loanshark victims.
Health monitoring stuff is in that category. It could become a thing in itself, especially if other sensors are added. eg blood sugar, not just for diabetics, but dieting, sport, concentration. general health.
Absolutely. But first gen smartwatches have barely-functioning sleep and step monitors. That's not worth $250.
Another huge problem with the self-quantification trend is there isn't much emphasis on doing stuff with that data. There's a fervor about knowing about yourself, but a large gap in utilizing that data.
Smart watches could very well fill that role. A nice first step would be to stop calling them smart watches. Wearables isn't much better.
yes, it's very plausible as a thing in itself. They can succeed without replacing smartphones.
Computers keep shrinking, from mainframes to desktops, laptops, smartphones. I'm curious about the next smaller form-factor, and argue it's not watches, but glasses. That was the claim I meant to make.
Exactly. Out of all the things a smartwatch could do, only health tracking is something that your smartphone can't do. The successful smartwatch will not be a little window to your smartphone, but a high quality health tracker that integrates perfectly with your phone and ALSO shows you the time and notifications.
I'm with you on that, at least in the short term. I honestly don't see a single proper use case why I would want to put some dorky 'smart'watch (which isn't really that smart because it can't work without a cellphone) that I need to take off every night and recharge (maybe even recharge during! the day like with the Moto360 apparently).
How hard is it to take out your phone, which is with you in your pocket or on your desk already anyway to see a notification?
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
Exactly the case, and it really undermines the whole article. The general floating point performance (non GPU) is entirely irrelevant for the general uses of this device. Other subsystems might be faulty, or it could be a faulty device, but it certainly isn't floating point performance.
One line in the article that gave me a chuckle was We can say that Android Wear looks much better on a round screen. The OS was clearly designed with circular displays in mind—every button is round, producing a cool circle-within-a-circle look on the 360. Contrast this with the Verge who said that Android Wear was designed and looks better on a square screen, and is forced onto a round screen.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.