Latest Moto 360 update seems to bring a ridiculous boost to battery life
There were two major concerns with the Motorola Moto 360 when it first launched. The first was performance — the TI OMAP 3 chipset inside doesn’t seem to be favorable up against the tried and trusted Snapdragon 400 most other Android Wear watches use. The second was battery life — it was downright abysmal, and Chris will tell you that ten times over in his review.
But it seems Motorola has effectively addressed at lease one of those areas. The latest update to the smart watch, firmware KGW42R, is delivering some rather impressive battery life. Many folks at the Android Wear subreddit have reported being able to make it more than 16 to 20 hours on a single charge before the device hits 40-50%.
User RockItGuyDC’s report certainly puts a smile on our face:
I keep responding to these posts, but here’s my best battery life yet. I took it off the charger at 10am today. Used it all day, 2 hours running navigation plus music controls in the car, checking emails and texts a few times an hour, responding to 15 or more texts from the watch, used QR codes on the watch to get into a party. It’s now almost 3am the next day and I’m at 41% battery! Couldn’t ask for more. Don’t need more.
That’s pretty insane for all that he was doing throughout the day. Motorola didn’t formally address what bugs were squashed in this upgrade nor did they tell us to expect better battery life as a result, but whatever change they made seems to have made a rather significant difference.
For what it’s worth, there were sparing reports that the update addresses performance issues, though this reddit thread was focused squarely on battery life. We’ll be giving our own Moto 360 units a good run to see if all these reports are accurate, but with the overwhelming response from the Moto 360 community we’d say there’s nothing to worry about. Now, let’s see if we can’t get this thing’s availability up to par with the rest of the Android Wear gang.