Moto 360 teardown reveals old OMAP 3 SoC, small battery inside

Scorpus

Posts: 2,159   +239
Staff member

The folks over at iFixit have performed one of their usual teardowns on the Motorola Moto 360 smartwatch, revealing a whole slew of components. Nothing about the device's construction should come as a huge surprise: everything is compact and layered, sealed tightly to ensure it's IP67 water resistant.

There are, though, a couple of noteworthy things about the Moto 360's internals. One is that the battery inside is listed as having a capacity of 300 mAh, which is smaller than the 320 mAh Motorola reports on their website. As Motorola representative stated through Ars Technica, this is because the printed value on the battery is its minimum capacity, while the officially-listed 320 mAh is its typical capacity.

Another thing, which helps explain why the Moto 360's battery life is so bad, is that it's using an old Texas Instruments OMAP3630 SoC. The chip is identical to that used in Motorola's old MOTOACTV smartwatch from 2011, and was first used in smartphones way back in 2010.

Although the OMAP3630 is powerful enough to run smartwatch apps, it was manufactured using an outdated 45nm process. This fact, combined with how the OMAP 3's architecture is outdated, leads to poor energy efficiency compared to other smartwatch chips on the market. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 400, found in other Android Wear devices, is built using a much newer 28nm process which helps deliver better battery life.

Overall, iFixit rated the repairability of the Moto 360 as 3/10, noting that the watch bands are easily replaceable, but everything else is well sealed and tricky to disassemble.

Permalink to story.

 
The Moto360 now seems like a half hearted joke compared to the Apple Watch. Motorola could have done so well with the 360, but they chose to be cheapskates with it. If they wanna put money before consumer, let 'em earn a hard lesson. And if there is anyone in Motorola that is wise, that person should lobby for all of Motorola's bean counters to bounced out on their rears.
 
The Moto360 now seems like a half hearted joke compared to the Apple Watch. Motorola could have done so well with the 360, but they chose to be cheapskates with it. If they wanna put money before consumer, let 'em earn a hard lesson. And if there is anyone in Motorola that is wise, that person should lobby for all of Motorola's bean counters to bounced out on their rears.
Wow what a crap SOC to use in such a nice smart watch. Oh well yet another dud to avoid. iWatch has nice hardware but is ugly and battery life will be abysmal. So far they all suck.
 
Back