Last year, one of the first wearables to kickstart the smartwatch gold rush – the Moto 360 – was reborn, thanks to a licencing deal between Motorola and Canadian company eBuyNow.
While the $350 smartwatch may not have set the world alight, it appears it was to be the first of many new Moto smartwatches. CE Brands (which is soon to merge with eBuyNow) has published an investor presentation, first spotted by Watch Smarty, which outlines no fewer than three Moto branded smartwatches alongside various non-Moto air purification, security camera and smartlight solutions.
As you can see from the embedded roadmap above, first out of the blocks will be the Moto G Smartwatch in June. This suggests a change of tack from the company — while the Moto 360 was aimed at the high-end smartwatch crowd, the Moto G branding is used on cheap phones that sell between $200 (the Moto G9) and $250 (the Moto G Power). So the Moto G watch could be a competitor to the lower cost Apple Watch SE.
No specs are provided, and while this may mean an older Snapdragon Wear chipset, dated internals are less of an issue for wearables than phones thanks to their reduced functionality. Hopefully. a Moto G branded wearable will prove to be suitably strong competition for the likes of the TicWatch E and Amazfit T Rex on our list of the best cheap smartwatches.
A month later, in July, CE Brands will launch two more wearables: the Moto Watch and Moto One. The former looks like a dead ringer for the Apple Watch with its square face and rounded corners, while the latter looks closer to the Moto 360 in design. Interestingly, on a different page, these watches are given the category of “Fitness Tracking”, which may suggest more sporty functionality than the Moto 360.
As there’s no mention of specs or pricing, your guess is as good as ours as to what the internal differences between the two are, but they look like more premium offerings than the Moto G Smartwatch. That hopefully means they’ll be powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Wear 4100 chipset.
What we do know is that these Motos will be sticking with Google’s Wear OS, or at least, it seems extremely likely. Another page of the presentation mentions that “eBuyNow is one of a handful of active Wear OS Licensees” and that it’s “among the earliest stage companies partnered with Qualcomm for premium wearables.”
Hopefully, an official announcement with specs and pricing will follow this investor presentation in the next couple of months.
