> 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).
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.