Motorola unveils Moto 360 smartwatch – a wearable you'll actually want to wear

This week Motorola jumped on the wearable bandwagon with the Moto 360, its first smartwatch that may have ticked an all important, yet to many others elusive, box when it comes to wearable tech – it looks like something we actually want to wear.

The Moto 360 is one of the first smart, wearable tech products to be announced with Android Wear, Google’s brand new operating system specially geared up for wearable gadgets, fitness trackers and smart watches of all shapes and sizes.

When Android Wear was first announced earlier this week, Google name checked Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG and Asus as its brand partners, but Motorola wasted no time in using the opportunity to shout about the Moto 360.

Motorola announced the new smart watch with a blog post on the Official Motorola Blog on Tuesday. Take a look at the initial shots of the product and you’ll see it isn’t as clunky as other smart watches on the market, but looks pretty much like a regular old watch.

Lior Ron, the CVP of Product Management at Motorola, explains that’s the whole point:

“The wristwatch has been through several evolutions since it first became a popular fashion accessory more than a 100 years ago. From mechanical to electronic movements, analog to digital faces, the wristwatch has been reinvented several times over, but the basic design has endured for a century because of its elegance and usefulness ‘at a glance.’ Our vision for Moto 360 was to celebrate that history as we reimagined the wristwatch for the future.”

In a way he’s right. We’ve all loved the design of the classic wristwatch for years and if it ain’t broke, then why fix it?

That doesn’t mean the Moto 360 operates anything like your grandad’s old watch from back when he was a lad, Motorola’s latest smart watch offering provides you with subtle notifications and alerts from your wrist, GPS technology to guide you to the right spot and a Siri-like voice assistant. There’s been no official word on whether activity tracking apps will be built into the Moto 360, but given the popularity of fitness wearables over the past few years we’d be surprised if it didn’t come with some kind of basic pedometer or even heart rate monitor.

Moto 360 will be available in a variety of styles globally in Summer 2014, starting in the US, but for now let’s just swoon over how great it looks.

If you’re not convinced, then hang in there, Google is also working with a load of other brands from Fossil to Samsung to bring even more wearables to the market running Android Wear.