Motorola’s Android Wear-powered Moto 360 has disappeared from its U.S. website just as we’re expecting the company to unveil the 2nd-generation model next week at IFA Berlin. The change was first reported by Droid-Life.
The Moto 360 is perhaps one of the most — if not the most — popular Android Wear smartwatches, and now it appears that the device’s update to Android Wear 1.3 is now rolling out to the masses. The update was officially announced last week, and comes packed with new interactive watch face support, a new watch face called “Together,” and other great new features…
Motorola has officially mentioned the update on their support site:
We are rolling out a new Android Wear software update for Moto 360 by Motorola. With this update we have added support for new features and fixed some issues to improve your experience… This software update will be rolled out in phases to Moto 360 users over the next few days. When you receive the update, you will receive a notification on your watch.
According to the company, the update packs all of the features Google mentioned in its official blog post. You’ll get the aforementioned interactive watch face support, the Together watch face, Google Translate for Android Wear, a new Weather app, notification privacy improvements, and of course the usual bug fixes and improvements.
Here’s the full change log:
| Interactive Watch Faces | Interactive watch faces make it easier to stay connected. With just a tap on your watch face, you can change its design, reveal more information, or even launch a specific app.
You can download interactive watch faces from Play Store. To set up, touch and hold on the current watch face, then scroll left/right to select the one you just downloaded. You can also select it from the Android Wear phone app. |
| Together Watch Face | Two Android Wear users can stay close throughout the day by turning their entire watch face into a space for sharing. Once you’ve paired your watch face with a partner’s, you’ll be able to share things like photos and emojis, and more.
To set up, touch and hold on the current watch face, then scroll left/right to find the Together watch face. You can also select it from the Android Wear phone app. |
| Google Translate for Wear | Translate a conversation into any of the 44 available languages, then flip your wrist to show the translation to someone else. When they respond in their own language, flip your wrist back, and you’ll see in a translation of what they’ve just said.
The watch must be connected to a phone with internet access via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. |
| Weather Microapp | Shows current weather conditions and four-day forecast for your current location. To open the weather microapp, swipe left on the watch face, then scroll down and tap Weather. |
| Privacy improvement for notifications | Your notifications won’t show in full screen until the watch is oriented in a way that only you can see it. This feature prevents others from reading an incoming notification when your watch screen is pointed away from you. |
| Bug Fixes | A variety of system optimizations to improve performance and stability. |
Make sure that your watch has at least 80% battery, and also remember to keep your Android Wear companion app up to date for good measure. Motorola says the update is rolling out “over the next few days,” so be patient as it makes its way to your watch. Or just keep mashing the “System updates” button in Settings. It’s up to you.
On the off chance that you have a home-made cable for connecting your 360 to a PC, you can download the Android Wear 1.3 OTA now.
Recently we revealed that Motorola’s new smartwatch passed through the Brazilian equivalent of the FCC. In it, the filings indicated that Motorola is clearly working on two sizes for its next generation Moto 360 smartwatch. Moto 360L and Moto 360S will seemingly keep the same ‘flat tire’ on the bottom of the screen, and similar round metal cases but there are clear differences. Today, both big and small versions of the Moto 360 have popped up in individually leaked photos.
The update to Android Wear pushed back in May bumped the base Android version to 5.1.1, but the most recent update — the one that packs all the nifty interactive watch face features — keeps the OS at 5.1.1 while bringing Android Wear to version 1.3. The update has slowly been rolling out to all Android Wear watches over the last week or so (none of them are too dated for updates quite yet, thankfully), and OTA download links are starting to trickle in. Find them (via Android Police) below the fold…
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The SmartWatch 3 is one of a few first-gen Android Wear devices that’s still sold on the Google Store, and now Sony has published an app on the Play Store that lets you customize all of your device’s default watch faces (via Android Police).
With the app, you can customize watch face backgrounds, hands, time markers, accent colors, and more features. Additionally, you can choose “from a range of widgets” that bring information like the current date and your step count to the front of your device.
There are three basic watch faces that are new thanks to the app: Classic, Watercolor, and Sony. The first is a traditional analog face, the second sports — as you might have guessed — some colorful designs, and Sony is a very basic digital face.
To use this app, Sony says that you have to have the Android Wear companion app installed on your device, and it’s probably a good idea to make sure that you have the latest version of Android Wear installed on your device as well.
You can grab the Sony SmartWatch 3 accessory app on the Play Store for free. If you’re like me, you probably think this means a bunch of awesome new watch faces to try on other Android Wear devices. I’ll save you the time in trying; this is for the SmartWatch 3 only.
In what is probably one of the lesser surprising reports to come out this year, CNET this morning claims that four handset manufacturers — namely, LG, Motorola, Huawei, and ASUS — are all planning to launch new Android Wear smartwatches at the IFA consumer electronics show kicking off late next week. Much-rumored and long-awaited (and highly-leaked?) second generation Moto 360, anyone?
We’ve been seeing leaks of the new Moto 360 for a while now, and ASUS already made its ZenWatch 2 public earlier this year (albeit with very little fanfare). Huawei showed off the Huawei Watch a long time ago, and has yet to deliver, so that company will probably take the stage at IFA to actually announce pricing and availability details. LG is mostly a mystery right now (mostly), but we’ll see what’s up their sleeves soon enough.
We’ll be on the ground at IFA to keep you in the loop, and until then, feel free to read up on the latest on the Moto 360, and check out our Android Wear smartwatch comparison page.
You can ask just about anyone: For quite some time, I thought wearables were on the brink of taking over our lives. And they may still be, but it seems to me that my internal excitement may have been premature. Google Glass fueled most of my anticipation, but smartwatches were definitely an area that intrigued me too. I told myself that all wearables needed was for Apple to make an entrance, and then platforms like Android Wear and Pebble would become quickly ubiquitous.
It may be too early to tell, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening — at least not yet. And while ASUS, LG, Huawei, and Motorola have some revamped hardware entries coming very soon, I’m just not that excited anymore. Why? Mostly because I just don’t have a compelling need for wearables in their current form. I have Google Glass and I have an LG G Watch R, but neither have become anything close to a daily driver for me. I still have no reason to use Android Wear.
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Not long ago, we revealed that Motorola’s next generation smart watch has made its way through testing and registration with the FCC in Brazil. That was after Motorola itself ‘accidentally’ leaked it. Now it seems, people testing the device in Chicago are just walking around and hopping on public transport wearing the unreleased wearable. Google Plus user, Gerrit Gödecke spotted one being worn while riding a Chicago commuter train and managed to snap a few shots.
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Take out your salt shakers, but new images have made their way onto Reddit picturing what is purportedly the case of Motorola’s next iteration to the Android Wear-powered Moto 360.
Interactive watch faces aren’t the only goodie coming in Android Wear version 1.3, apparently. Google Translate is finally getting its own smartwatch app.
Right near the end of its recent Unpacked announcement, Samsung gave us a very brief glimpse at its upcoming wearable. The Gear S2 will be unveiled fully at IFA, Berlin in a few weeks’ time. And now Samsung has published a new teaser video to its YouTube channel.
Watchmaker Fossil is about to launch a new Android Wear-powered smartwatch in collaboration with Intel and today we get our first look at the device during Intel’s IDF developer conference in San Francisco (via Engadget).
The Android Wear smartwatch, which is scheduled to arrive later this year, comes alongside two other wearables from the companies including other wrist worn devices — a bracelet and a more traditional-looking, connected watch that aren’t powered by Android Wear.
It’s not exactly much to look at, as it appears to have a design a lot like the rest of the round Android Wear devices on the market. But apart from looking a lot like a Moto 360, we do get a sneak peek at some variations planned for the device including a selection of metal and leather bands.
No word on pricing or exact availability, but you can expect to hear more in time for the holidays later this year.
Two products with the model numbers 360S and 360L have passed through the telecommunications agency Anatel in the past week. While much information has been omitted from public eyes, a couple details lead us to believe that Motorola is reaching the launch of a successor to last year’s Android Wear-powered Moto 360 smartwatch — and in two sizes.
Update: This post has been updated to include prior knowledge regarding a leaked image of Moto 360 prototypes by Lenovo’s CEO.
Update 2: No surprise, the tweet has since been removed after a couple hours.
What does the smartwatch in the above image look like to you? Yes, it looks like a Moto 360 except, wait — it doesn’t exactly. The watch pictured above just appeared in a video tweeted out by Motorola Mobility, and its differences with Motorola’s first Android Wear watch have led some to believe that it’s an inadvertent leak of the company’s much anticipated successor to the 360. The tweet is still live as of writing.
With Samsung deciding to host its own event to launch the Galaxy Note 5 and S6 Edge+ today, we assumed the company was ditching IFA altogether. Turns out that’s not the case. Right at the end of today’s presentation, the Korean tech giant teased its next smartwatch, the Gear S2. It will be unveiled in Berlin on September 3rd.
Pebble has announced today an update to the firmware of the company’s smartwatch, bringing several features that the community has oft-requested. Most notably, the new firmware brings settings for adjusting font size, backlight, and vibration. Pebble also released an updated version of the Pebble Time’s Android app counterpart, bumping it to version 3.2.0, which brings a new search bar, preserved notification preferences, and other minor changes…
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The original Pebble Time renders…
Update: It looks like you can also snag the Pebble Time from Amazon now, too.
If you’re not a huge fan of platform-segregated accessories, you’re probably also the kind of person that would go for a Pebble smartwatch over the likes of the Android-only Moto 360 or the iOS-only Apple Watch. And if you’re that kind of person and haven’t yet grabbed the new smartwatch-with-a-color-ePaper-display, you now have a couple more retail outlets to pick from.
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Google said back in February that Android Wear support would be coming to Ingress sometime “soon” (with some assuming March), but it looks like the app missed that launch date by, well, a lot. As of today, version 1.81.0 of Ingress is starting to roll out on the Play Store, and with it comes Android Wear support as well as the usual bug fixes…
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Google is working on some tantalizing new features for upcoming versions of the Android Wear software, according to a new report published by Phandroid. Citing anonymous sources, it claims that the next update to Google’s wearable OS will include direct watch-to-watch communication along with some new interactive watch faces. Purportedly, these features were due to arrive on July 28th, but are now not likely to appear until August.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tWsehRHHaw
You know what I haven’t once thought since purchasing my ASUS ZenWatch? “Man, I wish this thing had a software keyboard!” Nope, not even once. But someone clearly has, as the developers behind the 5-TILES keyboard for Android smartphones have brought their signature tile-based keyboard to Android Wear users in the form of a messaging app, called Wear 5-TILES.
Google announced the last major Android Wear update in late April, and that update only just about a week ago started hitting the Moto 360. But that doesn’t mean it’s not almost time for another update to the Mountain View company’s smartwatch flavor of Android. According to the well-connected Derek Ross, Google has another update in the pipeline, and it’s scheduled to be released on July 28th.
There’s no telling what the update might include, but it doesn’t seem likely that it will be any kind of massive overhaul. Rather than introducing a major new version each year as Google has been doing with Android for several years, Android Wear seems to be getting much more iterative updates slowly over time. Derek says that he will have more information to share about the update at some point “soon.”
Until then, don’t get too excited.
Update: The coupon code is now expired.
Earlier today, Motorola and Google dropped the price of the Moto 360 smartwatch down to the bargain price of $150 and now Motorola is offering the device for an even lower $120 with free shipping. The deal applies to the Cognac, Black, and Stone models.
If you’ve been waiting to buy a Moto 360, now might just be the worst time to do so. As can be seen on both Motorola and Google’s websites, the smartwatch is now starting at $100 less than it was yesterday—as low as $150. You can buy the low-end model directly from the Google Store, or you can head over and make one that’s souped up at the Moto Maker for an additional cost.
We’ve been saying this for a month now, but it seems like the 2nd generation Moto 360 must be imminent. The device has been seeing scattered price drops across all major outlets for quite some time now, and this is the first time that the device has actually seen an official price drop. Amazingly, this puts the device at $200 less than the current “flagship” Android Wear device, the LG Watch Urbane.
Owners of Android Wear watches: Does your device, without your intention, regularly go to menu for choosing a watch face? Maybe you’re crossing your arms and you feel a buzz thinking it might be alerting you to a new text message only to see your watch on that darned menu again? I don’t have a real fix for you, but there’s something you might want to try that may alleviate your frustration.
