Motorola Moto 360 Smartwatch Announced, Runs Android Wear

News James Peckham 17:59, 18 Mar 2014

Motorola has just announced a brand new smartwatch which will run on the Android Wear OS

Motorola has unwrapped the Moto 360 smartwatch.

Google has just announced Android Wear, an operating system designed specifically for wearable devices. LG then announced the G Watch moments after the Android Wear unveiling.

Motorola has now followed that up with another smartwatch running the OS. Android Wear is a modified version of Android designed specifically for wearable devices and should be launching later this year.

Motorola’s Moto 360 (don’t mix it up with a popular games console) is the least smartwatch looking smartwatch we have seen for a long time. It looks quite like a normal watch but Motorola insists it isn’t.

Motorola's Corporate Vice President of Product Management Lior Ron called the Moto 360 "a truly modern timepiece” in a blog post on the company’s website.

He continued, "It's time for a watch that looks and feels great and gives you the information you need, when you need it.”

The smartwatch is designed to make getting notifications from your phone to your eyeballs easy. Notifications will land on the smartwatch for calander appointments, a bunch of social networks and it even acts as a real watch whenever you need it to.

As it’s Android Wear, most interactions will work through voice reconigition technology. When you want a question answered or to do something on the Moto 360 you can say “OK Google” and it’ll launch with a variety of different options.

There’s no confirmation whether the smartwatch will be coming to the UK but we can’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t. It’s confirmed to be coming to the US first and will launch in Summer 2014. It’s likely we’ll see a load more details about the Moto 360 and Android Wear way before then though.

During the Android Wear announcement Google said partners included LG, HTC and Samsung. Motorola was missing from the list but is clearly involved and LG has already announced the G Watch. It'll be exciting to see what both HTC and Samsung have to show us as well.

Here's Google's promotional video for Android Wear.