Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Motorola Moto 360 smartwatch announced, coming this summer



Motorola has announced the Moto 360 smartwatch, based on Google's Android Wear technology. While the LG G Watch may be the first device based on Android Wear, Motorola has chosen to turn away from the usual square and rectangular design with a beautiful design of their own.

Based on the promo images, the beautifully designed Moto 360 looks more like a more like a designer wristwatch that happens to have a touchscreen, rather than the majority of smartwatches which tend to be quite obviously smart devices on your wrist.



The Moto 360 is round and made of what looks to be metal though Motorola just says it uses "premium materials". It will feature swappable wristbands,  with offer metal and leather options for those bands and will reportedly be released in Summer.

Jim Wicks, the lead designer of the Moto 360 partook in a Google+ Hangout session at 2PM EST (11AM PST), where he discussed the design of the device.



Wicks just said that the diameter of the Moto 360 is 46 mm which translates to about 1.8-inches. Wicks said that the benefit of the round design was actually that it offers the most screen real estate without compromising functionality, and without causing comfort issues. If the watch face were any bigger, or were angular, it would run into problems of hitting your wrist bones. Interestingly, though probably not surprising, the watch face is "orientation-free". This means that you can wear the watch on whichever hand you prefer, and flip it to the direction that is most comfortable (since there is a plunger on one side), and the screen will automatically orient itself so it appears properly to you.

The device has been "designed to be water resistant", but there was no more info available on that. Wicks has also confirmed that there is no camera on the device, because he said that the team just didn't see it as a necessary addition given what the aim of a smartwatch would be. Unfortunately, there wasn't any other info to be had on the specs or battery life of the device. In fact, there weren't even any questions regarding those issues. But, it was confirmed that compatibility will be quite wide. The Moto 360 (and we'll assume this is true for most if not all Android Wear devices) will be compatible with any Android device running 4.3 or higher.


source - Motorola
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