On the day Android Wear for iOS was released I went out to my local Best Buy and purchased a Moto 360 smartwatch. Previously I had used a standard Pebble smartwatch; the screen on that watch stops working sometimes, the screen is scratched, and the watchband is broken. I decided it was time to upgrade to a new watch but I thought that the Apple Watch was too expensive. The $150 Moto 360 seemed like a perfect price. So, how was the Moto 360 on iPhone?

Unfortunately, right as I unboxed the Moto 360 I started having problems. Android Wear for iOS supports any watch that’s running the latest version of Android, but my new Moto 360 is running an old version. How am I supposed to update it without an Android phone? Luckily, I found that I could install Android, for free, on my computer through Parallels; a virtual machine software I use to run Windows on my Mac. I installed it once but realized the Android iso I used did not have access to the Play Store. I downloaded another iso and luckily this one did. I downloaded the Android Wear app on my virtual machine, paired my watch with the built in Bluetooth on my computer and was able to update the watch after a few hours. That’s one thing Google, why can’t I force my watch to update but instead have to wait around until it decides to update? Ugh. Finally, after updating the watch I was able to reset it and pair it with my iPhone. It’s been smooth sailing from there on!

The Moto 360 definitely is an upgrade from the Pebble. It looks beautiful, has good build quality, and has more features than the Pebble does. Although, it’s missing a few key features that I would like.

The first main feature that I would like it to have is 3rd party apps. I would not use many apps but I like having the option of increasing the functionality of my watch in the future. People have said that this feature has been excluded because of Apple’s strict guidelines. This is not wrong because the Pebble had an app store. Why can’t Google make one?

The second and last feature I would like is a way to ping my iPhone. This is a feature that I had on my Pebble that I really liked and used rather often. Once again, Pebble did it so Google can do it too.

Now that I have gone over everything bad about the Moto 360, let’s talk about what it does well. Like I said before, it’s beautiful and well designed with both it’s software and hardware. The screen on the Moto 360 is clear but has a bit of distortion around the edges of the glass. It’s also a little difficult to read in bright sunlight.

Android Wear does a good job at giving a good user experience on a watch. It’s easy to navigate and very straight forward. Almost all of your functionality is in the form of cards on the watch face. There you can control your music, see how stocks are doing, read notifications, interact with some notifications, see the weather, and look at your fitness information. If you slide to the left on your watch face you will see all of your apps and Google Now. I think this is the biggest downside to Android Wear; it’s Android. Like usual you’ll have your bloatware apps from Motorola that do EXACTLY the same thing as Google’s apps. One other problem I noticed was that the Weather App shows the temperature in celsius and I can’t find any way to change it. Besides that, Google Now adds a lot of functionality that my pervious smartwatch did not have.

Overall, I think that the Moto 360 is a lot better than the Pebble if you can get it updated. If don’t have any Android devices like me, I would not suggest purchasing this watch simply because of how difficult it was to update. If you do have a way to update it I think this is the best smartwatch, for the price, available now.

Thanks for reading!