I’ve already covered the Moto 360’s fitness tracking and RunKeeper integration in two previous posts, so I thought I’d finish up with my notes on how the 360 performed over the weekend and some final thoughts:

Day 3: Outdoor run with RunKeeper running on my phone, but not actively using the Android Wear app, so the screen would turn off unless I explicitly turned it on. Harder to get to my current stats that way, but better battery life, in-theory. My findings: I was able to start the run without even looking at my phone, just by saying “OK Google, start a run”. Pretty great. I had somewhat better battery life – down to 75% when I got home. Lower than I expected, but not terrible. Probably would’ve been closer to 80% if I hadn’t fiddled with it so much during the first half of the run. So, I’d guess 4-5 hours on a run/ride if the screen is off and you only bring up the RunKeeper stats on-demand. Discovered I can bring up the RunKeeper stats without any hand controls. Lift watch to wake, say “OK Google, start RunKeeper”, see stats. Still need a hand control to manually shut screen off, though.

Day 4: No RunKeeper, stationary bike indoors No step tracking (expected) or heart rate info (strange and disappointing). Hopefully the lack of heart rate info was just a fluke.

Day 5: No RunKeeper, treadmill indoors Step tracking and heart rate info functioned as-expected Battery dropped 6-7% during a one-hour run. I’m beginning to suspect any accelerometer use, like walking/running/cycling, drains the 360’s battery a bit faster than being completely idle. Still far better drain than seen during outdoor runs with RunKeeper, likely due to the lowered brightness of the screen indoors.



Overall, I’d say I’m more impressed with the Moto 360 as a fitness tracker than I expected to be. I thought the pedometer and heart rate sensor would be nothing but gimmicks, but they seem to function quite well. I’m especially impressed that the pedometer on the watch tracked my outdoor bike ride. RunKeeper integration is about what I expected, especially coming from a Pebble, but I think the battery trade-off is worth it for the manual run controls available in Android Wear. I might still dig out my Pebble for, say, a half-marathon, but for my morning workouts, it’s more-than adequate. If RunKeeper can eventually tie into the data from the heart rate sensor, that’d be even better.

Is it enough to leave my FitBit at home? Well…almost. It’s so damn close it’s actually a little painful. If the data from my watch could be made available to other services, like MyFitnessPal, then I’d say yes, definitely. In fact, when my FitBit dies (or, more likely, I lose it), I may not bother to replace it, at least as long as I have the 360. For now, though, there’s simply too much value in FitBit’s data ecosystem to give it up. A fitness device where the data can’t be shared is pretty useless to me, unfortunately.

As with the 360 itself, I have a ton of hope for the near future. Android L should bring Google Fit, which should tie into Android Wear and give me a lot more to do with the data my 360 is already gathering.