Motorola’s Senior Vice President of Supply Chain and Operations, Mark Randall, has done an interview with Trusted Reviews, and he’s made his thoughts pretty clear on the state of smartwatches; they’re crap.
Obviously, Randall’s thoughts might not extend to the soon-to-be-released Moto 360, which he believes that the company has completely nailed in terms of designing a watch that actually looks like a watch, and that you’d actually want to wear.
We have come out with what we think is a really beautiful ID. The feedback so far — and we’ve only done a very gentle release into the market — is super positive.
We think the IDs [of other smartwatches] aren’t very sexy. We think people just don’t want to wear a lot of the devices that are out there today.
We’re not sure which of the competition Randall is speaking about when he refers to crappy watches, but we can only imagine that he’s probably referring to more recent releases like the Samsung Gear line, Sony’s Smartwatch 2, or even Pebbles. One thing we probably can be sure of, though, is that his opinions aren’t unique; the current generation of smartwatches are not good looking as watches.
Randall was quick to point out that the current low-cost push that Motorola has made with the Moto G, Moto X and Moto E should not be taken as reflective of Motorola’s overall strategy. Rather, the 360 is likely to be a more expensive proposition:
We don’t feel that because we have launched the Moto G or Moto E we have to price the 360 at a different price point.
Motorola isn’t finished with big announcements this year, either. We heard noises about this yesterday at the Motorola briefing in Sydney, with some off-the-record discussion about successors to the Moto X, but those noises are seemingly backed up by Randall’s interview, where he said:
We will have more announcements throughout the year and we will have further announcements on other product categories.
If you go back two years, we are resetting from the old Motorola. [Moto] X was the first product and we are gradually building out the portfolio and will continue to do so.
We are completely focussed, top to bottom on the whole market.
The Moto 360 is undoubtedly going to be one of the biggest and most anticipated announcements from Motorola, if not from the tech industry as a whole, and we’re very excited to see how the rest of 2014 goes for Motorola.
Previous renders looked much nicer. I’m beginning to think the 360 is going to be too big. It looks bulky and unattractive in the photo here imo. Smaller forearms/wrists will only exacerbate this problem. Hope I’m wrong as I don’t like the square/rectangular offerings from the competitors at all.
Oh my…
That straight top down looks like one of the 1980s extra large Swatch watches.
If it’s thin enough, with the right band and casing finish, the 360 would work as a woman’s watch.
Hunted up the info on what that top down pic reminded me of.
Look for images of the Pop Swatch, which was introduced in 1987.
So keen. Haven’t been this excited about a gadget since the HTC One M7. If Motorola have done it, I have no doubt that the imminent iWatch will also have a round or elliptical face.
They’ve nailed the aesthetics so let’s just hope that the build quality, guts and software match that level.
Never been a Motorola fan but they certainly have my attention now.
This is definitely the best looking ‘smartwatch’ i’ve seen. And if i was ever to get one, then this would it.
“We are completely focussed, top to bottom on the whole market.”
I hope the underlined means a Xoom3 is on the horizon.