A leaked image of what appears to be Motorola’s next smartwatch, AKA the Moto 360 2, has turned up online, revealing a very similar design to last year’s wearable – bar one key difference.
The image of Motorola’s new watch was posted to Chinese site Weibo, showing off a fully round – yes, FULLY round – watch face. That means no sign of the God-awful cropped “dead zone” along the bottom of the face, which marred the otherwise attractive aesthetics of the original Moto 360.
This leaked render shows that the new watch possesses super-thin bezels too, suggesting that the lack of cropping on the screen hasn’t detrimentally affected the device’s design.
We can also see what appears to be a new mechanism for attaching straps to the casing, with metal clasps shown on the ends of the band and small, slit-like apertures visible on either side of the watch, which the bands will likely ‘click’ into.
Whether the image is legit or not is up for discussion as always, but this leaked watch seems to match the one seen in another recent web post, which showed a bunch of smartwatch faces and straps laid out on protective foam in a briefcase. That image was also posted to Weibo and attributed to Lenovo executive, Yang Yuanqing.
Rumours have so far indicated that the device is in advanced stage of development by Lenovo-owned Motorola, and that the watch is being worked on under the codename ‘Smelt’, which ties in nicely with the codename assigned to the original 360: ‘Minnow’. Hint: they’re both fish.
We’re expecting the device to run a screen resolution of 360×360 and be powered by Android Wear 5.1.
There’s no word yet on when we can expect to see the Moto 360 2 here in the UK, although it should be any time now. With Apple’s Watch scheduled to drop this month we imagine it won’t be long before the other contenders lift the lid on their upgraded offerings.
Leave a Reply