Motorola’s long-awaited circular Moto 360 smartwatch launched, available today for $250

Motorola has finally officially launched its much-leaked circular smartwatch, the Moto 360. Pricing has been set at $250 with a leather strap, and it goes on sale in the U.S. at noon today ET . If you want it with a silver or black metal strap, you’ll have to wait until sometime in the fall and pay $300 – or buy it today and add the metal strap later for $80 …

There aren’t really any surprises: it has a 1.5-inch circular face, runs Android Wear, has built-in heart-rate monitor and pedometer functions, offers wireless charging and includes Google Now support. While that round face made it interesting when we first saw leaked images, LG’s G Watch has stolen some of its thunder there.

Motorola claims “all day battery life,” something cast into doubt ahead of the launch by a WSJ review which reported that it had to be charged twice a day – since supported by a review in The Verge.

This and the fact that Motorola leaked pretty much everything in advance of the official launch goes a long way to explaining the rather muted reaction the watch is getting, despite Motorola president Rick Osterloh suggesting that the Moto 360 is a significant improvement on competitor offerings.

I think the first watches that shipped have been really bad. A number of manufacturers were willing to ship products that I felt were not appropriate for consumers.

The biggest problem consumers said they had with them was that they really didn’t look appealing. The difference in our initial approach has been to focus on that problem and solve it.

The watch does seem to be of widespread interest, though: the official site was failing to load for quite some time. We’ll be bringing you our own video review shortly.