Moto 360 Sport review – a smartwatch with GPS tracking

Motorola’s had a pretty good track record with its Android Wear devices. Its first Moto 360 smartwatch was one of the best early wearables, and the 2nd Gen model it launched late last year was even better, offering more customisation options and a sleeker, more attractive design that came in two sizes, so you should find one that suits.

Now we have the Moto 360 Sport, which, as its name implies, aims to bridge the gap between smartwatches and fitness trackers. With built-in GPS, optical heart rate monitor, a silicone rubber strap and a new adaptive display for easy reading both indoors and out, it sounds like the perfect combination for those after something a bit more watch-like than your average fitness tracker. In reality, though, it stumbles over a number of hurdles, starting from its basic design right through to its rather limited fitness features.

Looking for something a bit less sporty? Check out our best smartwatches from 2015

Design

For instance, its silicone rubber band is a logical choice when it comes to wiping off sweat and grime after exercise, and it’s certainly more comfortable to wear than the metal and leather straps of its non-Sport Moto 360 cousins. However, that doesn’t stop it from picking up all manner of dust and dirt on a daily basis, as you can see in these pictures.

It’s not easy to clean either, as its soft, spongy finish simply won’t let go of whatever’s stuck to its surface, regardless of how hard you scrub it. This leaves it looking rather ugly next to its glossier, metal siblings, and the fact you can’t replace the strap means you’re also stuck with it for the duration of the watch’s lifespan.

It’s amazing just how much dust and lint the 360 Sport picks up

With a 45mm diameter, the Moto 360 Sport errs more toward the size of the larger 2nd Gen Moto 360, but it didn’t look too big even on my fairly petite wrists. It also has an IP67 rating, which means it’s both dust-tight and water resistant, albeit only up to a metre for a duration of 30 minutes. That makes a quick dip fine but you shouldn’t do any serious swimming with it, so you’ll need to look elsewhere if you want something for the pool, such as the Misfit Shine or Garmin Vivoactive.

Fitness tracking

Instead, the Moto 360 Sport is aimed almost entirely at runners, and its optical heart rate monitor and built-in GPS go a long way to help separate it from other Android Wear smartwatches. GPS in itself is a rarity among smartwatches, and while we’ve seen heart rate monitors appear on a number of other Android Wear watches before, the Moto 360 Sport can track your pulse continuously throughout your workout to give you real-time feedback on how your pulse rate’s changing and where it falls within Motorola’s pre-defined heart rate zones.

These range from warm-up all the way up to vigorous and intense exercise, and are a useful indicator if you’re trying to keep your heart rate within certain boundaries. You do have to remember to turn on Motorola’s Moto Body app before you see this information, though, as it won’t do it automatically. Luckily, Motorola’s included a great big Start button in the middle of the display to save you from finding the app in its menus.

Moto Body

Once Moto Body is enabled, you can set specific time, distance or calorie goals, or simply jump into Quick Start mode if you’re in a hurry. A simple double tap on the screen will then pause the timer if you want to take a break, and tapping ‘End’ will save your data to its 4GB of internal storage, after which it will sync to your phone when it’s back in range. It can also share this data with other apps and services such as Fitbit, Strava, MapMyRun, UA Record and Google Fit.

However, one of the Moto 360 Sport’s main downfalls is the lack of customisation options. For instance, you can’t set the heart rate boundaries yourself to really help you fine-tune your exercise plan, and its day-to-day non-Moto Body data simply isn’t very useful, regardless of whether you’re a fitness buff or an occasional gym-goer. For instance, when you don’t have Moto Body enabled, the Sport will measure your steps, track your supposed heart activity and record the number of calories you burn each day through exercise in addition to those burned while resting (your basal metabolic rate).

However, I managed to comfortably exceed my heart activity goals simply by walking between the office and my nearest tube stop every day, which takes around ten minutes each way. There’s no way to change this goal in the app to require more exercise either, making this particular metric more or less redundant unless you’re a real, first class couch potato. Its calorie burn data also seemed to be very generous, and I didn’t find its graph data particularly helpful or easy to decipher.

^ Moto Body’s initial homescreen is reasonably informative, but its graphs are next to useless, as you can’t tap on them or zoom in any further to make its intervals more legibile

Admittedly, the proper Moto Body run data is more detailed and therefore more useful, but it’s still not completely perfect. It includes graphs showing your pace, heart rate and calorie-burn per minute over the course of your workout, some data on how your distance and pace compares to your current records, as well as how long you spent in each heart rate zone.

However, there still aren’t many ways to interact with the data, and its map data is all over the place. The Sport’s GPS tracking is good enough to get the basic gist of where you went, but my route was always full of jerky points and corners, even on relatively straight roads, and half the time it didn’t even register me as being on the road at all, instead veering off into nearby buildings. It is useful not having to carry your phone around with you, but I wish the Sport’s GPS was better.

Display

This is a real shame, as the Moto 360 Sport’s new adaptive 1.37in, 360×325 resolution display is excellent. Instead of using a standard IPS or AMOLED panel, the Moto 360 Sport has what Motorola calls an AnyLight screen. This is a unique type of hybrid display that can automatically adapt to the level of natural light available, reflecting the light when you’re outside but still providing a legible screen when you’re indoors. It works brilliantly in practice, keeping colours bright and crisp regardless of viewing angle.

The screen also has an ‘Always-on’ mode, which turns everything black and white when you’re not looking at it. This is particularly handy when you’re exercising, as it means you don’t have to press the Sport’s crown to turn it on manually, or make a concerted effort to twist your wrist in order to activate its ambient light sensor, which once again makes a return appearance at the bottom of its (almost) circular display. Even better, enabling ‘Always-on’ doesn’t use the Sport’s backlight, so it’s power efficient as well as practical.

Battery Life

However, even this isn’t enough to prevent the Sport’s 300mAh battery from konking out after little more than a day. With the screen brightness set to Auto and ‘Always on’ enabled, I finished the day with around 30% battery life, but when it eats around 20% overnight, you’ll definitely want to leave it charging up overnight before you go out again the next morning.

Turning on GPS for a quick run didn’t seem to impact the battery life hugely, though I didn’t try and run any marathons with it admittedly, we’ll be investigating such battery drain further over the weekend.

Conclusion

The Moto 360 Sport is a competent smartwatch with the makings of a great fitness tracker, but Motorola needs to put a lot more work into its Moto Body app before it can really become a viable alternative to other fitness devices. Powered by a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and 512MB of RAM, the Moto 360 Sport certainly isn’t wanting for speed, but its meagre battery life pales in comparison to Motorola’s regular Moto 360 devices, and its GPS isn’t as accurate as it could be, making it neither a particularly good smartwatch or a desirable alternative to an all-out GPS-enabled fitness tracker. In our eyes, the Garmin Vivosmart HR is still one of the best fitness watch hybrids currently available, but if GPS is important to you, you should consider the Garmin Vivoactive instead.