It’s finally happening. Motorola is making a new Wear OS smartwatch, but it’s not a new Moto 360 – this is the Moto Watch Ultra.
Rewinding the clock, the Moto 360 is perhaps still the most iconic Android smartwatch of all time. It was the poster child for the early days of “Android Wear,” but Motorola threw in the towel after a couple of generations. There was a brief revival of the Moto 360 name in 2020, but even that faded away – and the licensing deal behind it is likely why Motorola isn’t using that name now.
Motorola hasn’t stopped making smartwatches in that time, but they’ve all been based on an RTOS, making them fall into the category of smartwatches that are focused on health tracking and battery life at the expense of more useful notifications and access to a proper app ecosystem. The most recent attempt ended up cloning Wear OS’ design, despite the limitations.
Now, Motorola has a new smartwatch – the Moto Watch Ultra.
The $349 smartwatch offers up a Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1 chipset, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage, all used to power Wear OS 6. We’ll have to wait and see if Motorola has made any customizations to the UI here, but re-entering the Wear OS ecosystem is a pretty big deal. Motorola does note that its Qira AI assistant is on board.
