GoKawiilThe $150 Motorola Moto Watch had all the makings of a rare find: serious fitness credibility at a budget price. When Motorola announced a partnership with Polar, along with dual-band GPS and week-long battery life at this price, I thought this could be the brand's big return to relevance in wearables. After weeks of testing, the Moto Watch instead feels like a kid trying their hardest to stand out in a sport, only to walk away with a participation trophy.
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 its 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 versus the heart rate metrics from the Polar H10 chest strap. Vanessa Hand Orellana/CNET
The graphs looked similar at first glance, with matching peaks and valleys during the laps when I picked up my pace. The average heart rate was only one beat off from the chest strap. But the watch seemed to smooth out the spikes, and the max heart rate was off by seven beats (173 bpm on the watch versus 180 bpm on the chest strap). That kind of gap is pretty standard for wrist-based tracking, which measures blood flow rather than the heart's electrical signals. Still, you may not be getting full credit for your effort if you plan to use this as a serious training tool.
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