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Motorola Moto 360 Review

An attractive update to the Moto 360 series.

3.5
Good
By Angela Moscaritolo
Updated March 19, 2020

The Bottom Line

The latest Moto 360 is pricey, but it remains one of the better Wear OS smartwatches you can buy.

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

Pros

  • Classic watch design
  • Always-on display
  • Ample fitness features
  • Customizable action button

Cons

  • Expensive
  • Short battery life
  • Google Assistant can be temperamental
  • No built-in sleep tracking

Motorola Moto 360 Specs

Phone OS Compatibility Android, iOS
Watch OS Wear OS
Processor Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100
Display Size 1.2 inches
Display Type AMOLED
Fitness Features GPS, Heart Rate Monitor, Accelerometer
Estimated Battery Life 12 hours
Separate App Store
Phone Call Capacity
Compatibility Android, iOS
Heart Rate Monitor
Sleep Tracker
Battery Life 12 hours

here's a lot to like about the third-generation Moto 360. Unlike the first two variants, which were produced by Motorola itself, this $349.99 Wear OS-powered smartwatch is made by licensee eBuyNow. Like its predecessors, the latest model looks good, boasting a classic round design. It has many of the features you expect in a $300-plus watch, including an always-on display, water resistance, ample customization options, support for contactless payments, and background heart rate monitoring. It does a good job tracking workouts, and the Google Fit app can help motivate you to move and provide stress relief through its guided breathing feature. The Apple Watch Series 5 remains our Editors' Choice, but the Moto 360 is a solid alternative for Android users.

No More Flat Tire

The Moto 360 features a brushed rose gold, silver, or black stainless steel body with a shiny bezel, and includes two 20mm straps. You get a black or white silicone strap that's good for use when working out, and a brown or black leather band for when you want a more sophisticated look. Our silver test model came with black silicone and a brown leather strap. It weighs 1.8 ounces without the strap, which felt substantial on my wrist, but not overly heavy.

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Previous versions of the Moto 360 featured a rather infamous black gap at the bottom of the display that made it look like a flat tire. Fortunately, the third-generation model's 1.2-inch always-on AMOLED (390-by-390) display fills the entire round watch face, so there's no more flat tire look, a major aesthetic improvement.

In terms of sensors, the watch features an accelerometer and gyroscope to detect movement, a heart rate monitor, and an ambient light sensor so it can automatically adjust its brightness depending on the light. It also features a GPS and a barometric altimeter so it can track your activities without your phone. As for other specs, it has a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal memory, and a quick charging 355mAh battery. The watch runs Google's Wear OS 2.0 and is compatible with Android 6.0 and higher, as well as iOS 10.0 and higher.

Pairing the Moto 360 with my iPhone was as simple downloading the Wear OS by Google app (available for Android and iOS) and following the on-screen directions. The app lets you sign in with your Google account to sync your contacts, calendars, and notifications to the watch. There are several default watch faces to choose from, and plenty of Google Play apps that offer more options to personalize how it looks.

A swipe from left to right on the watch face brings up virtual assistant notifications, such as calendar events. A swipe from the bottom to top displays app notifications. In testing, the Moto 360 did a good job displaying calendar events and app notifications from Coinbase, Gmail, Slack, Snapchat, and more. The watch alerts you to incoming notifications with a light vibration.

A swipe from top to bottom brings up the status panel, which shows remaining battery and lets you access customizable quick settings, including airplane mode, battery-saving mode, Google Pay, and a flashlight feature that illuminates your screen when you need light. Other quick settings include theatre mode, which disables your screen and notifications, and Do Not Disturb mode, which turns off vibrations and notifications.

One swipe from right to left brings up the Google Fit app, which automatically tracks your steps, Move Minutes, and Heart Points. You can keep swiping left to see other tiles, including the weather and your next calendar event. You can easily customize these tiles, removing ones you don't need and adding others such as a heart rate tracker or timer, but you can only have up to five.

Fitness Features and Apps

When you first sign into Google Fit, you enter your height and weight, and it gives you daily goals for Move Minutes, Heart Points, and steps, though you can edit those goals in the app. You earn Move Minutes for any activity that involves movement, like walking or taking the stairs, and Heart Points for more demanding activities like power walking and jogging.

A blue ring shows how close you are to reaching your daily Move Minutes goal and a green ring indicates your progress toward your Heart Points goal. These rings can help motivate you to get moving.

During workouts, the Moto 360 also tracks your average heart rate, average pace, calories burned, distance, heart rate, and steps. Unfortunately, it doesn't feature a built-in sleep tracker, a limitation it shares with the Apple Watch. You can, however, download third-party apps from the Play Store that claim to track your sleep.

The watch features two physical buttons on the right side; the top one launches the apps screen and rotates up to access notifications or down for the status panel. The lower one is a customizable action button that can be programmed to launch the app of your choice. I customized it to launch the Fit Workout app, which lets you easily track and record your walks, runs, yoga and strength training sessions, and many other sports and activities.

In the Google Fit settings, you can opt to enable background heart rate monitoring, which tracks your heart rate changes throughout the day. You can also manually check your heart rate whenever you want. I particularly like the Google Fit app's guided breathing feature, which offers a two-minute meditation exercise with relaxing on-screen visuals indicating when you should inhale and exhale. If it senses you're moving during the exercise, it will instruct you to be still, and at the end shows how the mediation affected your heart rate.

In the Play Store, you can search for apps and games with your voice or browse them by category. The Play Store's selection is a big draw to Wear OS; you can get Google apps like Maps, streaming services like Spotify and Pandora, fitness-focused apps like Lifesum and Strava, games like Zombie Killing, and more. That said, the selection of Wear OS apps pales in comparison with what's available for the Apple Watch, in terms of both quantity and quality.

I downloaded the Spotify app, which worked fine on the Moto 360, but felt a bit laggy. It lets you scroll through playlists, play and pause tracks, and skip forward or back, all from your wrist.

Water Resistance

The Moto 360 has a 3ATM water-resistance rating, meaning it's splash and rain resistant, so you can wear it for a sweaty workout without worry. eBuyNow says it has passed a 10,000-stroke swim test and can be safely submerged in water up to 98 feet deep, so you can wear it when casually swimming. I wore it in the shower and it held up perfectly.

That said, the company advises you to avoid prolonged water exposure. It's also not suitable for "high impact water sports, diving, or exposure to extreme water pressure." If it comes in contact with salt water, or even sweat, be sure to rinse it with fresh water to avoid damage. Also make sure it's fully dry before putting it on the charger.

At the risk of stating the obvious, you should avoid getting the leather strap wet. If you're heading to a hot yoga class or another sweaty workout, use the silicone band.

Connection, Battery Woes

There are several ways to access Google Assistant on the Moto 360. You can use the wake words, "OK Google" (as long as you enable "OK Google" detection), long press the top button until you feel the watch vibrate, or swipe left to right and tap the microphone button. With Google Assistant, you can set timers, alarms, reminders, find information online, send messages to contacts, control connected smart home devices, launch apps, and more.

Unfortunately, Google Assistant was a little hit-or-miss in testing. It worked at times, but often didn't respond or gave me a variety of error messages, either because the watch lost its connection to Wi-Fi or my phone. On the second day of testing, the Moto 360 wouldn't reconnect to my phone via Bluetooth, so I factory reset the watch and that fixed the problem.

In testing, the watch got just 12 hours of battery life with heavy use, including tracking an early yoga session plus two walks with my dog Bradley, one with GPS enabled. I also had notifications, tilt-to-wake, and background heart rate monitoring enabled, all of which are battery intensive. In comparison, the Apple Watch Series 5 easily lasted a full day with heavy use in our testing.

I moonlight as a yoga teacher and hoped the Moto 360's battery would last long enough so I could use the watch to control Spotify during my 7 p.m. class, but it died just as class was starting. On the plus side, the Moto 360 charged from zero to 100 percent in just one hour, as advertised.

A Solid Wear OS Smartwatch

Priced at $349.99, or just $50 less than the Apple Watch Series 5, the Moto 360 is on the high end of the smartwatch market. It has an attractive design and a rich feature set, bolstered by the Play Store. It excels at displaying notifications and has a variety of fitness features that can help motivate you to get active. Its short battery life is disappointing, however, and we experienced some annoying connection glitches. Overall, it's one of the better Wear OS watches you can buy, though we continue to recommend the Apple Watch for iPhone users. And if you're looking to save money, it's worth checking out the Fitbit Versa 2, which doesn't offer as much in the way of apps, but has more advanced fitness features for nearly half the price.

Motorola Moto 360
3.5
Pros
  • Classic watch design
  • Always-on display
  • Ample fitness features
  • Customizable action button
View More
Cons
  • Expensive
  • Short battery life
  • Google Assistant can be temperamental
  • No built-in sleep tracking
View More
The Bottom Line

The latest Moto 360 is pricey, but it remains one of the better Wear OS smartwatches you can buy.

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About Angela Moscaritolo

Managing Editor, Consumer Electronics

I'm PCMag's managing editor for consumer electronics, overseeing an experienced team of analysts covering smart home, home entertainment, wearables, fitness and health tech, and various other product categories. I have been with PCMag for more than 10 years, and in that time have written more than 6,000 articles and reviews for the site. I previously served as an analyst focused on smart home and wearable devices, and before that I was a reporter covering consumer tech news. I'm also a yoga instructor, and have been actively teaching group and private classes for nearly a decade. 

Prior to joining PCMag, I was a reporter for SC Magazine, focusing on hackers and computer security. I earned a BS in journalism from West Virginia University, and started my career writing for newspapers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

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