Hands-on: Moto 360 is a great leap forward for Android smartwatches

Motorola is throwing its hat into the smartwatch ring with today’s release of the Moto 360. According to one Motorola executive, the company "didn’t come to invent a new gadget, but to reinvent the wristwatch." And in a field currently dominated by clunky, square Android smartwatches, the Moto 360 with its circular display and leather wristband actually looks and feels like something you wouldn't mind wearing.

Available Friday from motorola.com, bestbuy.com, and the Play Store for $249, the Moto 360 is made out of stainless steel and comes with three different options for leather straps (classic black, stone leather, and limited-edition gray). There also will be two metal options available for sale later this year, one with a dark finish and one with the classic stainless steel watchband look. Those will retail for $299.

Spec-wise, the 360 sports a 1.6” 320x290 (205ppi) display protected by Corning Gorilla Glass, Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy connectivity, water resistance in up to three feet of water for 30 minutes (IP67), wireless charging, 4GB of internal storage, and 512MB of RAM. It's 46mm in diameter and 11.5mm high.

The Moto 360 also offers a couple of bells and whistles not yet seen on the competition. Perhaps most noticeable is the lack of ports on the watch. That’s because the 360 comes with an inductive wireless charger that doubles as a watch stand. Motorola says the battery is sufficient to power the watch for an entire day; at bedtime, you take it off and lay it on the charger. If you’re traveling, you’ll obviously need to bring the charger along for the ride.

Unlike the other round Android-powered smartwatch, the recently announced and not yet available LG G Watch R, the pixels run right up to the edge, maximizing the display area of the watch. The only slightly odd thing about the display is that the bottom sliver of the watch face is blank, cutting off the minute and second hands as they sweep along the bottom of the screen. According to Motorola, there are “thousands” of apps available customized for the circular 1.6" UI offered by the Moto 360. The watch is also the first Android Wear smartwatch with an ambient light sensor and auto brightness.

Compared to Samsung’s newest offering, the clunky-looking square Samsung Gear S, the Moto 360 looks minimalist. The contrast is especially noticeable once you turn the watches over. The Gear S has pogo pins for charging and a SIM card slot in addition to the heart rate monitor, while the Moto 360 has the kind of smooth back you’d see on an old-school wristwatch. The design looks and feels really solid, bringing to mind sleek devices from Motorola's past such as the RAZR.

The Moto 360 feels more natural than other smartwatches I’ve tried on in the past, as the circular design and removable leather strap clearly communicate the concept of “watch” in both look and feel. Given that I’ve not regularly worn a watch in about a decade, it feels as natural on my arm as any other watch I’ve donned over that time period.

Motorola's new smartwatch will pair with any phone running Android 4.3 or better, and it linked up with our test Moto X without any problem at all once we downloaded the Android Wear app from the Google Store. The display lights up when you raise the watch to look at it, and if you tap the face, a Google Now prompt comes up. As the Moto 360 contains a natural language processor and a noise cancellation microphone, voice recognition worked very well, bringing up weather forecasts, driving directions, and the like without erring.

Motorola’s “state of the art” heart rate monitor will give you your pulse on demand, along with a range of heart activity. There’s also a pedometer that tracks your activity throughout the day.

Swiping through the notifications works well. Swipe to the left to make the notification disappear and to the right for more details. For example, if you ask Google Now for the current weather, swiping to the right will give you the four-day forecast for your area. Google Hangout notifications were sent seamlessly to the watch, as well, and could be read by swiping through the screens.

Is this the smartwatch you’ve been waiting for? We’ll have a full Ars-style review on Sunday night with the definitive answer, but based on our brief time with it today, Motorola has definitely taken a step ahead of the competition with the Moto 360.