Tech Tools: Moto 360 smartwatch – €300

The Apple Watch may be making waves in the smartwatch market, but that’s no use to Android users. The good news is that there are plenty of options out there that work with Google’s system.

And the Moto 360 is nice. Although it’s thicker than your average watch, as smartwatches go it looks quite sleek. It has a round face rather than the square blocks we’ve come to expect, and comes in a variety of finishes and colours, and two sizes versus the original’s single size offering. That means if you don’t like the chunkier look you can go for the 42mm version. The women’s version comes in rose gold, which is a nice finish.

The Moto 360 is one of the Android Wear devices, which means it is optimised for use in wearables. The platform itself is not perfect but it gets the job done.

The Moto 360 has got what you’ve come to expect from a smartwatch: fitness and health tracking, a heart-rate sensor and the ability to add your own apps. That’s where the watch stumbles a little. While other platforms offer you the option to automatically instal apps with a watch version, Android Wear required you to go and find them yourself. It’s a minor complaint but solving it would make the setup of any android Wear device – not just the Moto 360 – much simpler.

Some apps are pre-installed. Moto Body records your activity, from steps to “heart minutes” – ie your active exercise – and gives you periodic updates during the day. Translate will make sense of spoken languages for you; Maps, as you’d expect, helps find places around you before handing over navigation to the phone. Because you will still need your handset. A lot of apps will only give you notifications on the phone, and to perform any deeper tasks you’ll need to switch to a bigger screen. Still, it makes sense of all the vibrate alerts that you might otherwise ignore throughout the day.

Here’s what the Moto 360 doesn’t do: it won’t take photographs, and you can’t use it to make or take calls, because it doesn’t include a speakerphone. For most people, neither of those omissions is a deal-breaker.

You can interact with it via voice though, giving it instructions using the “Ok Google” command. It doesn’t have the personality of Siri, but it does get the job done – most of the time at least. The voice ability is extended to other apps, such as OneNote, which allows you to take voice notes and save them to your account.

It wasn’t all plain sailing. At one point I set the lock pattern and forgot it a day later. That involved a factory reset to get back into the watch. And then there was the day that the watch, despite being fully charged, died shortly after I put it on my wrist.

And there is one thing to keep in mind. While most people would argue that it halts the antisocial habit of checking your phone 10 times an hour, checking your watch is arguably a little more rude.

The good

The Moto 360 is a more affordable Android watch, starting at €300. It looks good, particularly the rose gold option, and it does exactly what you need it to. The charging dock is easy to use and difficult to mess up, giving your watch somewhere nice to rest for the night as it charges. And speaking of charging, you don’t have to hook the watch up very night. In my tests, the watch consistently delivered close to two days of use without needing a charge.

The not so good

The security side of things could be a little better. While forgetting the lock code prompts a factory reset – protecting your data – it doesn’t stop anyone from resetting the watch and using it as their own.

The initial set-up – mainly downloading the watch-compatible apps – is tedious too.

The rest

The Moto 360 doesn’t do phone calls, so if you have dreams of that Dick Tracy moment, forget it. It comes with 4GB of internal memory and the second-gen version has an updated processor.

The verdict

HHHH A sleek Android watch that won’t break the bank.