GoKawiilThe Moto Watch feels like a kid trying their hardest to stand out in a sport, only to walk away with a participation trophy. Having spent years reviewing pricey fitness trackers and smartwatches, I know how rare it is for a relatively affordable $150 device to arrive with real fitness credibility, so I was genuinely rooting for this one. When Motorola announced a partnership with Polar, along with dual-band GPS and week-long battery life at this price, it sounded like a breakthrough moment. I thought this could be Motorola's big return to relevance in wearables.
Then I actually used it for a few weeks and reality set in.
Motorola isn't a stranger to this space. The Moto 360 helped define early Android wearables back in 2014, and made a strong impression doing so. But the years since have been relatively slow on its wearables front. This new Moto Watch is its most serious attempt at breaking through the space in a while, and the Polar partnership gives it a level of fitness-tracking street cred that's rare at this price.
But theory and execution don't quite align here. At $150, the Moto Watch isn't trying to compete directly with higher-end wearables from Samsung or Google; rather, it's trying to carve out a league of its own with this big-screen 47mm watch. And it's no home run -- yet.
The Moto Watch has a metal frame and rotating crown that can be used to navigate the screen. Vanessa Hand Orellana/CNET
The Polar partnership, tested
The Polar integration is the headline feature that had me excited to put it through the paces. The brand is synonymous with accuracy among serious endurance athletes, and its H10 chest strap is the gold standard we reach for at CNET for heart rate benchmarking on other devices.
So I took both to a college track -- three miles (12 laps) -- with the watch unpaired from my phone and the chest strap recording simultaneously for comparison. The watch consistently kept up, but I noticed it struggled to keep pace during my sprints.
The workout summaries showed similar numbers, which is why I prefer exporting the raw, second-by-second heart rate data to get more granular. The Polar app makes it easy to export a spreadsheet of your HR data, but the Moto Watch is running it's own app, and there was no export option. I had to settle for comparing the snapshot of metrics that I got from the workout summary.
The Moto Watch workout summary vs. the heart rate metrics from the Polar H10 chest strap. Vanessa Hand Orellana/CNET
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