Motorola Moto X, Moto G and Moto 360 hands-on

Motorola Moto 360 hands-on

This is the Motorola Moto 360 and we've all seen it before. More than once. Its been official for some 5 months now but we've been impatiently waiting for it to become available and it finally has, sort off. You can get the Moto 360 in the States but not outside of it yet. So it leaves us yearning users with three options - importing one from the US or waiting for Motorola to release it on other continents too, and hope that this isn't another Moto X (2013) affair where Motorola took its sweet time and brought the device outside of the US some good 4 months later.

The Moto 360 is the first rounded smartwatch to become available and the first Android Wear one in the US. It looks gorgeous and feels premium. It's actually lighter than its main rivals from LG and Samsung but feels more solid in the hand.

Motorola Moto 360 hands-on

The display is one of the smallest among its smartwatch peers at 1.56" but feels among the biggest thanks to its round shape and the fact that the display takes up the entire watchface, there are no bezels. Motorola achieved this by placing all of the display drivers in that little letterbox-like black spot at the bottom of the display, allowing the diagonal to expand to the very outer-edge.

The Moto 360 sits comfortably on our wrists thanks to a smooth and slightly curved design to its bottom. It has a heart-rate sensor on the bottom that can constantly measure your hearbeat and will automatically detect whether you're in Inactive (40-92 bpm), Active (92 - 129) or Vigorous (129-185) mode. That means that unlike Samsung's Gear series it will know when you're exercising without the need for manually activating the mode.

Motorola Moto 360 hands-on

The Moto 360 has the same 320 x 320 resolution we've seen on many a smartwatch (the round-faced LG G Watch R is one) and the display looks pretty sharp. Colors are saturated and the screen get as bright as you'd like. It also adjusts to ambient lighting automatically so that you needn't go into the settings menu every time your eyes hurt from it. It's an LCD and not OLED so you don't get as deep blacks as we would have liked.

The Moto 360 will come with a genuine leather strap immediately for the price of $250 but there are steel black and silver options that will retail with the watch for $300 this fall. Additionally, if you go for the Moto 360 now with the leather strap you could just get a steel band separately when they become available, for $80 a pop.

Charging the Moto 360 is done by nestling the watch into its suave little bedside cradle. It uses coils embedded into the heart rate sensor to charge. It also converts the Moto 360 into a bedside watch - ingenious.

Motorola Moto 360 hands-on

The Moto 360 uses Android Wear, an OS built by Google from the ground up to serve our wrists. It's made to work with your Android phone and allow you to send voice commands to do different things.