Motorola Moto Watch – Totally inept

I have high expectations for this watch, expectations that I can reveal even now that it cannot possibly fulfill. There are so many initial problems to even get started with the watch, that we help each other, me and my colleague Elias.

Constant and confusing mistranslations

The problems completely pile up in an almost comical way. When we start the watch for the first time, there are instructions on the screen to download the “Moto Clock” app. There is also a qr code you can scan to find the app more easily. The problems here are several. For one thing, the app you are about to download is not called Moto Klocka, but Moto Watch, and the qr code that appears on the screen does not work. We even test by trying it in multiple Android phones with the same disappointing results.

It should be mentioned here that Motorola previously licensed its name to other watch manufacturers, so there are several Moto Watches that the Motorola we know has nothing to do with. And thus more apps than the right one for our particular watch.

Once we found the right app, it gives a very amateurish impression. It is obviously poorly translated so almost every time the watch is mentioned we get a new and fantastic, but completely misleading name. It starts with the phrase “Welcome to Moto Dial”, then the watch is called “Your motorcycle watch”.

Motorola’s own descriptions at the launch of the watch were what gave me higher expectations. I tested the Moto Watch Fit this summer and it was a cheap watch with slimmed-down but still perfectly fine features. A slightly more lavish model with technology from the established sports watch company Polar seemed very promising. Motorola had learned its lesson and taken the next step. I thought.

GPS that often fails to find position

Among Motorola’s descriptions of the watch we can find GPS with dual frequencies so you get the position without having to carry the phone with you and then these activity and health insights with Polar as an authority. We hardly notice any of this when we test.

At first it is difficult to even get the watch to find position. In the watch screen, I’m only prompted to launch the Moto Watch app to update location data and to make sure the phone is connected. Many attempts and long waits for open spots later, we still haven’t received a GPS contact. Double checks all permissions. Everything looks right. Starting to doubt that the watch even has the GPS the manufacturer claims.

Maybe it’s some temporary problem, so I reset the watch to factory settings and start over, going through all the hurdles of the initial settings. Phone and watch are connected and the app signals that the watch is connected with a full battery. Now, after another long wait and on about the tenth attempt, the watch shows that it has been positioned so I can start my first real workout.

Now the watch works acceptably for a few training sessions. I also measure my sleep. The battery lasts about a week or a little less, but depending on how much I exercise. A night’s sleep measurement takes a few percent, a three-hour walk with GPS takes the battery level from 50 percent to 25 percent. An hour of running reduces the battery by approximately 10 percent.

Training is interrupted and disappears

While using the watch, I often get confusing, hard-to-interpret system messages. During a run, I notice when I look down at the watch that it shows 2 km even though I ran closer to 7 kilometers. None of the buttons on the screen except the End button respond to presses, so I end the workout and start a new one. Then the watch says, even though it was connected to the phone just before I started the session, that the memory is full and that workouts can therefore disappear from the watch. This is especially strange because the following days I can see these workouts on the watch, but they never transfer to the mobile app. On the other hand, later workouts sync without problems.

Further problems when I start my new training session, because then the watch complains that the GPS signal is weak and I have to get to an open area, this despite the fact that I am already on a very open area at the edge of the beach with a completely clear view.

The watch also showers me with confusing prompts because time and time again the sleeve of the shirt, or something else comes to the watch’s spin button so I can be thrown into functions I didn’t ask for. “Do you want to continue with your incomplete tasks?”, “The next time you put the clock in sleep mode, the clock will be activated automatically”. Many times also the buttons I can press to confirm are contradictory, like when after I finish a workout the watch says “Training distance is too short to record, do you want to resume anyway?”. No, wait, I just said I wanted to finish…

Polar’s contribution almost invisible

With this watch, Motorola has a collaboration with Polar and actually just during the test I get an email from Polar saying that my account with them will be deleted soon if I don’t confirm that I want to keep it. So I have tested several of their watches before. It is clear that Motorola does not use the same extensive reporting and analysis at all. I see in the Moto Watch app that it says the sleep and activity summaries are created using Polar, but it’s not a clear improvement in quality compared to what I got in the Moto Watch Fit last summer, more of a different way of showing snapshot data. I can’t understand how Polar can think of putting their name and stamp of quality on this.

During the weeks I use the watch, I only get a training diary and no directly useful trend reports or conclusions about what information the watch has collected. That and the constantly recurring bugs and problems mean that the Moto Watch does not live up to even low expectations at all.