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Motorola used its Mobile World Congress press conference to confirm that it was working on a smartwatch, which would be arriving later this year. Despite the recent announcement that the company had been sold by Google to Lenovo, it seems the company is sticking to its roadmap and will join the likes of Sony and Samsung in the wearable technology market at some point in 2014.
Rick Osterloh, Senior Vice President of Product at Motorola, said the company was looking to “solve some real user problems” with the watch, including battery life but focusing mainly on style. According to Osterloh, “no-one wants to wear” current smart watches, which are “ugly” – a direct shot at Samsung’s Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo smartwatches announced at the show a day earlier.
Motorola has made at least one smartwatch before: the MOTOACTV was launched back in 2011 and was essentially an Android tablet in a watch form factor. It has a 1.6in, 220×176 resolution display and was powered by a 600MHz OMAP3 CPU with 256MB of RAM – it was ahead of its time, perhaps, but sales were slow enough to force the company to make massive price reductions before finally discontinuing it altogether last year.
If you’ve been thinking about picking up a Moto X, but want to be a bit adventurous with your choice of colours or pattern, we’d suggest waiting it out until the customisation service arrives.
