Moto 360 Update Delivers More Battery Saving Features

The Moto 360 smartwatch has been available for over a month now, and many owners have been enjoying everything Google’s Android Wear has to offer, even without the best battery life. However, a new update recently arrived to fix many problems for owners and prospective buyers.

Back in September after months of waiting the new Moto 360 smartwatch was finally released for eager buyers. Many initial complaints were regarding stock running out only hours after the release, and those who’ve received their watch weren’t extremely happy about battery life either. Motorola has addressed this once in an update, and did so again today.

Read: Apple Watch vs Moto 360: Key Differences

The Moto 360 is Motorola’s new smartwatch running Android Wear. A mobile-based operating system running Android built by Google strictly for wearable devices like a smartwatch or Google Glass. It’s still new and has a few bugs that need to be addressed, but Google’s promised Android Wear 2.0 running on Android 5.0 Lollipop coming soon. Read on to see what’s new with today’s update.

Android Wear update 4.4.W.1 rolled out late last month to fix a few problems and tweak some settings, but today another update was just confirmed on the official Motorola blog that should have plenty of users and future buyers excited about the Moto 360.

Many potential buyers are still on the fence simply because there isn’t a ton of features for Android Wear yet, and reviews haven’t gave battery life a very good nod. However, our Moto 360 Review we were quite satisfied, and after this latest update things will be even better than before. Even with heavy usage you should be able to make it an entire 8-10 hour work day on a single charge. That’s good enough for me.

Today Android Wear 4.4W.2 started arriving for the Moto 360, and a similar update from LG is reportedly arriving to those with an LG G Watch. According to Motorola it has a lot of changes, many that you’ll want to know about. Most are battery related, but that isn’t all you can expect once you update. Here’s the full changelog.

• Smart Battery Saving – When your battery hits 15%, your Moto 360 will turn off ambient mode, so you don’t have to remember to.
• Timely Time Checks – Moto 360 will synchronize the time with your phone more often to make sure it is up to the minute.
• User Interface Tweaks – We observed with consumers that there are many times where you want to use your Moto 360 as truly a classic watch—a beautiful way to see the time. A new gesture now lets you see the full watch face without permanently dismissing a notification. Just touch the top of a notification and swipe down. You’ll see the notification again when you have another high priority notification.
• Mood Lighting – Moto 360 will adjust to the lighting of the room while charging, so that it isn’t too bright or too dark.
• Readying the wires for Bluetooth – There are a couple of under-the-hood enhancements that will pave the way for connecting Bluetooth headsets to the watch.
• Bug Squashing – As usual, bugs are squashed to enhance the overall user experience.

When your Moto 360 gets low on battery it will automatically turn off ambient mode, if you don’t already have it disabled already, which should squeeze out a few more notifications and usage before you need to recharge. The timely time checks makes sure it will be more on time, but we could see that waking the device more and killing battery, so it’s odd these two are here at the same time.

Thankfully there’s a new tweak that will allow you to completely hide notifications to use the device more of a watch, without Google Now cards being in your way. This is a nice effect and something that should have been included in the initial release.

The rest isn’t too significant, but mood lighting is neat so you won’t have a bright blue round circle glowing in your room at night while charging. It will now dim to adjust screen brightness while charging based on the surroundings. Nothing major, but neat nonetheless.

Read: Moto 360 In Stock Now as Shortages Continue

Then of course we have some bugs that have been fixed and improvements to the overall user experience, but those weren’t detailed in the changelog. It looks like they’ve also added more bluetooth support features so users can pair headsets to the watch in the near future. This could be a sign of a few new Android Wear features coming in version 2.0 when Google debuts it later this year.

Check for updates on your watch, or simply pair it to your smartphone and it should arrive momentarily. Are you noticing better battery life on your Moto 360 after the update? Let us know in the comments below.