Review: Motorola Moto Watch

The latest Moto Watch is a remarkable step up. Motorola is one of the fastest-growing mobile companies in the world. Its phones are reasonably priced, have great battery life, and are easy and fun to use. Those characteristics haven’t necessarily crossed over to its watches, however. Last year, I tried the Moto Watch Fit. It was … OK. But $200 is way too much, and there’s no reason to buy a cheapish, Android-compatible watch when the Garmin Vivoactive 6 or the CMF Watch 3 Pro are sitting right there.

This year, Motorola has taken another stab at it and partnered with Polar, the fitness tracker company. This makes good sense. Polar’s fitness wearables are scrupulously accurate, but I’ve always found the interface to be obscure and difficult to interpret (unless it’s the company’s heart rate monitor, in which case, full steam ahead). This year’s Moto Watch is better-looking, offers better fitness metrics, and is a little cheaper. It’s almost a good option, but not quite.

Long Live

Photograph: Adrienne So

The Moto Watch is good-looking! It resembles the Polar Unite ($200), Polar’s entry-level fitness tracker, down to the second Polar-style wide side button. The big, basic black watch (Motorola hilariously calls this “volcanic ash,” but it is black) has the standard pin toggles to swap out the watch bands, which is nice if you like fashion and already have a ton of cheapish accessories to swap out.

The display is big. It’s a pretty sharp-looking, 1.43-inch OLED Corning Gorilla Glass touchscreen display; all the dozens of Motorola’s proprietary watch faces look pretty nice and bright on it. The bezel has two buttons on the side. You can push and twist the crown to turn on the watch face and scroll through apps. The other is a Polar-style Function button that I assigned to take me straight to the exercise modes.

This Android smartwatch is compatible with Android 12 and up and supports Bluetooth 5.3 (I paired it with a Moto G phone). Unlike many watches at this price point, it also has onboard dual-frequency GPS, so you don’t need to use your phone to take it out on hikes or runs.

There are two main selling points to this watch. First, the battery life is incredible. I’m very active and track multiple activities each day. I’m also a really restless sleeper, which can affect battery life quite a bit. Motorola claims you can get up to 13 days on one charge, and I got 11 with adaptive brightness on and raise-to-wake enabled.

It’s important to note here that with health-focused smartwatches, your mileage really can vary a lot. Probably the most battery-life-eating function is blood oxygen measurement, which you can toggle to measure manually, continuously, or only at night.

It has one microphone and one shockingly loud speaker that sounds relatively clear. Unfortunately, I mostly hear the speaker during one instance, which I will discuss later.

The second, of course, is that Motorola has integrated Polar’s specialized wellness platform into the watch. In addition to the aforementioned dual-frequency GPS, there is an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor, an ambient light sensor, and an e-compass. Aside from Garmin, most fitness trackers and smartwatches with these sensors and a bright display typically offer no more than a week of battery life. Motorola has accomplished this handily.

Turn It Off

Photograph: Adrienne So

It’s really interesting to see Motorola render Polar’s UI usable with its signature fun colors and cute, readable designs. The best way to describe it is that everything looks much less technical. Polar's UI is very technical. I have been reviewing fitness trackers for years and am still a little unclear on how I’m supposed to affect my autonomic nervous system (ANS) status to boost my recovery.

However, rendered here in Motorola’s Watch app, everything looks fun and easy! Motorola (and Polar, I guess) uses Apple’s “close your rings” approach, with active minutes, steps, and calories. I particularly like that you can now use Polar’s sleep tracking with a cheaper Android watch. Polar takes into account sleep time, solidity (whether or not your sleep was interrupted), and regeneration to give you a Nightly Recharge Status.

You can still click through and see your ANS, but there’s a lot more context surrounding it. Also, the graphs are prettier. I compared the sleep, heart rate, and stress measurements to my Oura Ring 4, and I found no big discrepancies. The Moto Watch tended to be a little bit more generous in my sleep and activity measurements (7 hours and 21 minutes of sleep instead of 7 hours and 13 minutes, or 3,807 steps as compared to 3,209), but that’s usual for lower-end fitness trackers that have fewer and less-sensitive sensors.

On that note, I do have one major hardware gripe. Onboard GPS is meant to make it easier to just run out the door and start your watch. I didn’t find this to be the case. Whatever processor is in the watch (Motorola has conveniently chosen not to reveal this), it’s just really slow to connect to satellites and iffy whenever it does. This isn’t a huge deal when I’m just walking my dog or lifting weights in my living room, but it constantly cuts out when I’m outside and doesn’t have the ability to fill in the blanks, as another, more expensive fitness tracker would do.

It’s just really annoying to constantly get pinged about satellite loss and to have a quarter-mile or a half-mile cut out of your runs. That’s how I know the speaker works—it was constantly telling me it lost satellite connection during activities.

Finally, the screen and buttons are really sensitive. It does give you an option to lock the screen, but even then, I found myself accidentally unlocking it from time to time and turning the recording off when I didn’t mean to.

As I write this, I have seven different smartwatches from different brands sitting on my desk. If you’re looking for a cheap, attractive, and effective Android-compatible smartwatch, I would say that the CMF Watch 3 Pro is your best choice. However, I do think the integration with Polar was well done, and the price point is not that bad. I’m definitely keeping an eye out for what Motorola might have to offer in the future.