Problems are piling up

Review: Motorola Moto Watch - Totally useless

Even getting started with Moto Watch is problematic and then it just gets worse and worse.

Published 2 April 2026 - 10:51 Modified 2 April 2026 - 10:51

I have high expectations for this watch, expectations that I can reveal already now that it turns out it cannot possibly fulfil. There are so many initial problems just to get started with the watch, that we help each other, me and my colleague Elias.

Constant and confusing mistranslations

The problems pile up in an almost comical way. When we start the watch for the first time, the screen displays instructions to download the app “Moto Klocka”. There is also a qr code you can scan to find the app more easily. There are several problems here. Firstly, the app you need to download is not called Moto Klocka, but Moto Watch, and the qr code displayed on the screen does not work. We even test it by trying it on several Android phones with the same disappointing result.

It should be mentioned here that Motorola has previously licensed its name to other watch manufacturers, so there are several Moto Watches that the Motorola we know has nothing to do with. And thus more apps than the right one for just our watch.

When we finally find the right app, it gives a very amateurish impression. It is obviously poorly translated so almost every time the watch is mentioned, we get a new and imaginative, but completely misleading designation. It starts with the phrase “Welcome to Moto Urtavla”, then the watch is called “Your motorcycle watch”.

Motorola's own descriptions at the launch of the watch were what gave me higher expectations. I tested the Moto Watch Fit this summer and it was a cheap watch with stripped-down but still okay features. A slightly more expensive model, also with technology from the established sports watch company Polar, seemed very promising. I thought Motorola had learned its lesson and taken the next step.

GPS that often fails to find position

Among Motorola's descriptions of the watch, we can find dual-frequency GPS so you get the position without having to bring your phone, and these activity and health insights with Polar as the authority. We hardly notice any of this when we test it.

First, it is difficult to even get the watch to find a position. On the watch's screen, I only get the prompt to start the Moto Watch app to update location data and to ensure the phone is connected. Many attempts and long waits in open spaces later, we still haven't gotten any GPS contact. Double-check all permissions. Everything looks right. I start to doubt that the watch even has the GPS the manufacturer claims.

Maybe it's a temporary problem, so I reset the watch to factory settings and start over and go through all the hurdles of the initial settings. Phone and watch are connected and the app signals that the watch is connected with a full battery. Now, after another long wait and on approximately the tenth attempt, the watch shows that it has received a position indication so I can start my first real workout.

Now the watch works acceptably in a few training sessions. I also measure my sleep. The battery lasts about a week or a little less, but depending on how much I train. A night's sleep measurement takes a few percent, a three-hour walk with GPS takes the battery level from 50 percent to 25 percent. An hour's run reduces the battery by about 10 percent.

The watch works with Android, but not with iPhone. The app can also send notifications from the mobile to the watch.

Training is interrupted and disappears

While using the watch, I often receive confusing, difficult-to-interpret system messages. During a run, I notice when I look down at the watch that it shows 2 km even though I have run nearly 7 kilometres. None of the buttons on the screen except the End button respond to touch, so I end the training session and start a new one. Then the watch says, even though it was connected to the phone just before I started the session, that the memory is full and that workouts may therefore disappear from the watch. This is particularly strange because the following days I can see these workouts in the watch, but they are never transferred to the phone's app. However, later workouts sync without problems.

Further problems then when I am about to start my new training session, because then the watch complains that the GPS signal is weak and I have to move to an open area, this despite the fact that I am already in a very open area by the shoreline with completely clear visibility.

The watch also overwhelms me with confusing prompts because time and again the sleeve of my jumper, or something else, touches the watch's rotating button so I can be thrown into functions I haven't asked for. “Do you want to continue with your incomplete tasks?”, “The next time you go into sleep mode, the watch will activate automatically”. Many times, the buttons I can press to confirm are also contradictory, like when the watch says after I've finished a workout, “The workout distance is too short to record, do you want to resume anyway?”. No watch, I just said I wanted to finish...

When I then look in the app at the few workouts that have actually been saved correctly, I find it hard to make any use of even that. I can, for example, see on a map that the positioning for a specific route only started working after I had run around 2-300 metres. Since I want to look in detail at the route for the sake of the test to determine how accurately the GPS then found the position, at first the map doesn't even seem to be zoomable. Normal touchscreen navigation with swiping and pinching doesn't work. Then I find the plus and minus buttons for zoom, but they can only zoom in directly in the middle of the map, not on my route. And in the zoomed-in mode, the app still refuses to let me pan and move the view in the map image.

Polar's contribution almost invisible

With this watch, Motorola has a collaboration with Polar and actually just during the test, I receive an email from Polar saying that my account with them will soon be deleted if I do not confirm that I want to keep it. I have tested several of their watches before. It is clear that Motorola does not use the same extensive reporting and analysis. I see in the Moto Watch app that it says the sleep and activity summaries are created with the help of Polar, but there is no clear quality improvement compared to what I got in Moto Watch Fit last summer, more just another way to display snapshot data. I cannot understand how Polar can consider putting its name and quality stamp on this.

During the weeks I use the watch, I only get it as a training diary and no directly useful trend reports or conclusions about what information the watch has collected. That and the constantly recurring bugs and problems mean that Moto Watch does not live up to even low expectations.

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