Motorola Isn’t The Real Face Behind New Moto 360 Smartwatches

The original Motorola Moto 360 was launched in 2014 and it was one of the best-looking smartwatches. With a circular display and a typical watch-like form factor, it was an instant hit. Over the course of time, the company launched a different iteration of the Moto 360 smartwatch, however, they failed to garner a respectable user base.

Now we have the latest generation of the Motorola branded smartwatch -- the new Moto 360. Actually, it just has a Motorola name and branding and it is not made by either Motorola or the parent company Lenovo.

Branding Is Just A Myth

Moto 360 branding is now owned by a company named eBuyNow which is an eCommerce website. The company does not disclose this information on its main homepage and one has to go into the privacy policy to learn this fact.

Besides, the new Moto 360 is not available on Motorola's official website and eBuyNow has created a new website for the new smartwatch.

Motorola Is Not Alone

Motorola is not the only brand that has licensed its branding to a third-party. The newly launched Nokia smartphones are from HMD Global, and the Blackberry smartphones are now designed by developed by TCL.

When a brand learns that its products are not selling as they expected and the branding still has some value they usually lease the branding to an interested party for a select time frame.

The New Moto 360 Is Not That Bad

Though it is not a Motorola product by DNA, it still greatly resembles the first generation Moto 360 smartwatch with a 1.2-inch circular display with a resolution of 390 x 390px. The smartwatch is based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset with 1GB RAM and 8GB storage.

The watch runs Google's WearOS and the device is fueled by a 355 mAh battery with support for fast charging. As per the connectivity, the watch supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, and GPS.

Just like most of the smartwatches the new Moto 360 is also water-resistant with up to 3ATM and is also swim resistant with up to 10,000 swim strokes. The watch can be used with an Android or iOS smartphone running on Android 5 Lollipop or iOS 10.0 or newer version.

As per the colors, the new Moto 360 will be available in stainless steel, steel grey, Rose Gold, and Phantom Black. The watch retails for $350 which makes it a bit expensive compared to the contemporaries.