When Motorola launched new Moto 360 models earlier this year, it also announced the Moto 360 Sport as an Android Wear watch for the more active among us. The Sport will be available for purchase on January 7 (it's already on sale in the UK and France). With a built-in GPS and heart rate monitor, the watch has the hardware chops to compete with dedicated workout devices, and it works with the Moto Body fitness app to track just as much information as the hardcore Fitbits and Garmins of the world.

The $299 Moto 360 Sport is the only Android Wear watch to really sell itself as an advanced activity tracking device in addition to a Google-powered smartwatch, and in many ways it combines the best of both. But it's not as much a general sport watch as it is a dedicated running watch, and since it is powered by Android Wear, you'll have to deal with those limitations as well.

Design: toy-like, but not necessarily immature

The Moto 360 Sport was designed to be the more durable version of the new Moto 360, resulting in a watch you'd see drawn on the wrist of Charlie Brown. It's round, friendly, and simple, with a silver bezel surrounding the 1.37-inch, 360×325-pixel display and a strong silicone band. The display is always on, like most other Android Wear watches, and it has "any light" technology that uses sunlight instead of the watch's backlight to illuminate the display. This makes it easier to read in direct sunlight for those who often jog outside.

The band really seals in the watch's toy-like character: it's slightly thicker than the silicone used on fitness watches like the Fitbit Surge; it's rounded at both ends; and it features a traditional watch closure. It's easy to put on, and the flexible material makes it comfortable at nearly any tightness level, but the silicone attracts a world of dust, hair, fuzz, and everything else floating in the air around you.

The watch case isn't offensively thick, but the display does have the typical "flat tire" issue that the other Moto 360 models have, where the bottom bit of the screen isn't actually screen. At two o'clock on the side lies the "crown" button, which you can press to wake up the display or long-press to reveal the app drawer. Inside the watch is a built-in GPS for running outside without your phone present, and the optical heart rate monitor shines through the back of the watch with its characteristic green glow.

It may look like a toy watch, but it actually takes the best things about a serious fitness tracker and a serious smartwatch and marries them fairly well: the silicone band is comfortable and sweat-resistant, the display is designed to be visible in sunlight, and it's pretty lightweight at 1.9 ounces. The device is IP67 rated, meaning it will withstand dust and can be submerged in up to one meter of water before any harm will come to it. Unlike the regular Moto 360, though, you cannot interchange bands on the Sport. What you buy is what you get, and it comes in black, white, and orange.

One of the better things it takes from Android Wear watches is its setup. You just download the Android Wear app on your smartphone (iPhones work as well) and follow the short instructions to pair the watch via Bluetooth. This timepiece has wireless charging like the new Moto 360, coming with a matte black stand that the watch sits on to charge. Once in its cradle, it automatically starts charging and turns the watch into a dimly lit clock you could use on your bedside table.

Fitness and Android Wear: Better daily tracking, plus running

The Moto 360 Sport is exactly what its name suggests: a fitness-savvy version of Motorola's smartwatch. Its heart rate monitor, built-in GPS, and enhanced durability are the hardware components that make it stand out as a fitness watch, and Moto Body and Moto Body Running are the software parts of the equation. When you first boot it up, Moto Body Running is waiting for you in the app drawer so you can go for a run immediately if you wish. You need to download Moto Body from the Google Play Store before it will show up on the watch.

Moto Body Running is really straightforward. Open the app, choose if you're running indoors or outdoors, and the app will start tracking you automatically after you press the Start arrow icon that pops up. You can also pick if you want to run with a distance, time, or calorie goal, or if you want to just run freely. With outdoor running, the watch will begin searching for your location using its inboard GPS receiver. You don't need your connected smartphone with you at all for this to work, and each time I tried this, I left my Android phone at home. On average the watch took about two minutes to discover my location, which isn't bad considering the number of tall buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan that could get in the way of the GPS signals.

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

The watch performed best outside, since its distance calculations were almost always accurate within .1 miles. During indoor runs on treadmills and ellipticals, the watch was sometimes as much as .5 miles off from the machine-calculated distance. Motorola seems to have anticipated some distance discrepancies, because distance is the only metric you can edit once a run has been saved. As for the heart rate monitor, it's a mixed bag. Sometimes the watch would be on point, measuring my pulse within three BPM of my manual assessment, and other times it would be up to 15 BPM off. I suggest making sure the watch is strapped on tight—as in as tight as you can get it before causing yourself pain—before measuring your heart rate.

The watch has four screens you can scroll through while you run: the main display, which shows the time, distance, and your pace; the heart rate zone screen with your real-time pulse measurement; the laps screen; and the quick controls screen that lets you pause or end the workout. You can swipe to the screen that means the most to you for your training, and the watch will keep it on its display until you change it. Thanks to the ambient light sensor, you can glance down and check your stats at any time. When finished, the watch saves the run locally, and when you sync to the Moto Body app on your smartphone, it will transfer all that information so you can analyze it fully.

Moto Body on the watch provides the Cliff's Notes version of the mobile app. It's essentially a scrollable list of stats, including heart rate, steps, calories, and recorded runs. Tap on any of these to see a pleasant little animation of your total stats for the day, and swipe left from that to see your weekly stats at a glance. You can review almost all of the stats from each recorded run on the watch, including average pace, maximum heart rate, calories burned per minute, and heart rate zone times, but you'll have to open the mobile app to see any GPS maps that go along with outdoor jogs.

The name "Moto 360 Sport" is slightly misleading since the only Motorola companion apps are made just for running: there's no option to track anything other than indoor or outdoor runs with Moto Body or Moto Body Running. The watch can connect to a few other fitness apps, including Fitbit, Under Armour, and Strava—the last app being particularly useful if you're a cyclist. Other devices, like the Fitbit Surge and the Garmin Vivosmart HR or Vivoactive, offer more trackable activities by nature.

The Moto 360 Sport places special focus on heart rate and getting in at least 30 minutes of elevated heart activity each day. On the unique default watch face, there's a bar at the top-left corner that shows you how many minutes of high heart rate activity you've completed, and it's surrounded by similar looking bars that represent step and calorie counts. You can take a heart rate measurement at any time from within Moto Body, but the watch takes your pulse once every five minutes to glean a sense of your average heart rate throughout a regular day as well. Many fitness trackers have added "active time" as a default stat, which is a good supplement to step count when analyzing daily movement. But I appreciate the Moto 360 Sport's heart rate-focused tracking, since exercising to make your heart work harder than it usually does can make it stronger and make you healthier.

As for the Android Wear portion of the watch, it's pretty standard. The Moto 360 is powered by a 1.2GHz Snapdragon CPU, which runs Google's wearable OS smoothly, and it has 512GB of RAM and 4GB of storage so you can save music to the watch. Throughout the day and during workouts, you'll receive all your smartphone's notifications on your wrist as usual. My most-used app was Hangouts, since it's gotten more robust with Android Wear updates. Gestures also come in handy, particularly scrolling on the display by flicking your wrist side to side.

All of the fitness features of the Moto 360 Sport simply build upon the foundations of Android Wear, and there's nothing otherwise revolutionary about the operating system on this model. It is important to note that you can download the Moto Body app from the Google Play Store, but Moto Body Running (the app that actually initiates and tracks runs) is not available for download. Motorola clearly wants fitness-focused users to invest in the Moto 360 Sport rather than just download the necessary program to a different Android Wear watch (since there are others that have heart rate monitors as well as built-in GPS).