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 Old outdated processor that isn't as power efficient as current gen processors.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.
