GoKawiilFrom this point on, every gripe I have with this device can be traced back to the fact that the Moto Watch does not run Google's Wear OS. It sure as hell looks like it does, and the UI is close enough that you could be fooled into thinking "Motorola" just skinned it. But it's not, and Real Time OS has enough limitations that you'll soon find yourself running into walls. I did wonder if this is part of why I've been so disappointed by this thing: The similar iconography raised my expectations beyond the point where they could have ever been met.
Even setting up the watch wasn't without its hiccups, for which you'll need to download the Moto Watch app. Two restarts later, I was able to get into the setup screen, which gives you the impression you can activate the watch without setting up a Motorola account. But, if you don't set up an account, the app will just freeze until you restart (again) and hand over your email. Then you're met with the tutorial, guiding you through the basics of the UI, where the animations and transitions all stuttered and froze while I was working through them.
There are several things the watch does that are baffling because they demand you make more effort than you should expect. Take notifications — most watches will default to relaying the notifications you get on your phone and let you pick and choose any differences manually. That's not an option here, and so you'll have to scrub through the list selecting only what you think deserves to reach your wrist. I get the logic, but the fact it's this way by default means it's too easy not to activate, for instance, Google Calendar reminders.
The watch will do plenty of the basics, including telling the time, while also tracking your heart rate, steps and calories burned. It offers stopwatches, timers, dashboards for your sleep tracking, a compass and remote camera shutter. You will be able to make calls from your wrist, when tethered to your phone, and there's even a dialer app inside the watch itself.
But because this isn't a Wear OS device, you don't get third-party apps. When it comes to adding music to the watch, you'll only be able to do so via whatever you have stored on your device. Not to mention there's no access to Google apps, no mobile payments and the manufacturer hasn't made any attempt to remedy that omission. The more you go looking for reasons to use this thing, the more reasons you find to not even try.
To burnish its fitness-tracking bona fides, "Motorola" paired up with Polar on the health and fitness features. There's Polar branding on the packaging, and on the health pane in the app, but not on the watch itself. Open the health tab and you'll instantly see some beautifully presented data to help you understand your vital statistics. Up top, you'll get the now industry-standard three rings denoting your steps, calories burned and active minutes. From there, you'll get dedicated sections covering activity, sleep, recovery, a log of your recent workouts, heart rate and physical stress levels.
Given the Polar tie-up, I hoped the Moto Watch would redeem itself with its health and fitness tracking prowess. Unfortunately, it fails to do the things even basic wearables from a decade or more were managing, such as automatic activity detection. If you go for a walk or a run, this thing isn't going to start automatically logging what you're doing. Maybe the watch is targeted toward people who are so obsessed with tracking their stats that they'll always start their watch before a workout. But, if that was the case, why are so many of the promotional images people wearing the Moto Watch in civilian clothes, rather than head-to-toe Gymshark?
At the very least, the list of exercises you can add to the quick shortcut menu is so vast you'll probably find your sport of choice. It's not just the standard ones like running and outdoor cycling, but things as diverse as boxing, jazz dancing, zumba, judo, kabaddi and hula-hooping. The options broaden out to include kite flying, tug of war and even darts.. Just don't forget to set the watch to record because even if you've sweat yourself inside out for 90 minutes, it's not going to notice unless you do.
And despite the promise of dual-frequency GPS, I actually found its performance here to be a little less than perfect. At times, I'd be outdoors and the watch couldn't find a signal, even without any tall buildings around — in areas where I've never had a problem before. This became more vexing when the outage was temporary, meaning you'd regularly have to deal with the watch's pre-recorded voice warnings.
If there's one area I cannot fault the company, it's in the battery life, which lasted longer than the promises. Even with the always-on display active, I was able to stretch this to eight days before I had to drop it on its charging puck. Although the less charitable explanation for that is that it was such a bad experience I had to force myself to make an effort to use the damn thing.