I’m a fan of wrist-mounted time measuring devices (commonly referred to as watches). Although my true passion lies in mechanical watches I do have a great deal of interest in smartwatches. I own a Pebble and find it to be surprisingly useful. It’s obviously a first generation (at least this time around, I did have a watch made by Fossil that ran PalmOS back in the day) device and I’ve been looking forward to seeing where the market heads to next. Of all the newly announced smartwatches Google’s Moto 360 is the most interesting to me. It seems to be a well thought out design and I was thinking about picking one up but Google, in my opinion, failed in one department: size:
The round watch is about 46 mm in diameter. That sounds big — I have a 42 millimeter watch that I consider large — but Wicks made a good point. If the watch was rectangular, it would feel and be even bigger with a 46 millimeter face, with the corners cutting into wrists
46mm? Wow! That’s way too large for my girl-ass wrists. Big watches are all the craze today, which can make finding a watch difficult for me since anything over 40mm begins to look stupid, but it would be nice if Google made the Moto 360 in a more reasonable size. According to the article Google believes women will be willing to buy a 46mm watch but I’m not so sure. Some women do buy larger watches but from what I’ve seen most continue to wear small watches.
One of the things Pebble got right was the form factor. The Pebble isn’t overly large. It uses a display that sips power so the small battery can still provide between five and seven days of juice. With a color touchscreen I believe Google had to increase the Moto 360’s overall size to get a battery large enough to keep the display powered for an extended period of time.
It will be interesting to see if the Moto 360 takes off. I’m not sure if the gargantuan size will hurt or help sales. But I can say for certain that the technology is really cool.