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Oh, Motorola, you crafty little minx. How did you know that a simple circle could turn a smart watch from a clunky embarrassment into a potential object of desire? I have no other way of explaining my visceral reaction to seeing the Moto360 for the first time. Based on photos and videos, it looks as a watch should.
The Moto360 is almost everything a watch lover could possibly want. Watch nerds like me also love what’s inside a garden-variety mechanical watch: When done right, it’s a perfect interplay of gears, jewels, hands, metal and glass. Open a Swiss-made watch or pocket watch, and you’ll see that a millimeter of space isn't spared. They’re truly things of beauty, and for the best of them, that design excellence usually carries through to their bodies, as well.
See also: The Complete Guide to the Pebble Smartwatch
When digital watches first started to appear in the early 1970s, they were bulky, awkward objects with tiny rectangular screens. Their shapes could best be described as modified hexagons with flat tops and bottoms, and bulgy sides.
The shape of watches continued to evolve over the next 20 years. It seemed the smarter watches got, the squarer -– and sometimes bigger — they became (e.g. calculator watches).
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a square watch; there's a long tradition of lovely mechanical rectangles. In fact, I own a lovely self-winding one. On the other hand, the apex of modern-day watch style is the circle. Walk into any New York City, Fifth Avenue watch emporium, and you will see what I mean. Better yet, watch Daniel Craig play James Bond in Skyfall, and you’ll notice he’s wearing an exquisite, round-faced Omega Seamaster.
The shape and face of a watch evoke style and elegance. If you want to sell smart watches to this audience, your design can be no less stylish.

Motorola’s decision to go round is obviously smart, but it’s also bold. With most small, wearable components — including the screen — designed to fit in square bodies, the company was forced to, as its designers and engineers explain in the Moto360's reveal video, build a brand new set of components. We watch nerds love custom-made stuff.
The company also worked closely with its soon-to-be-ex parent, Google, to develop an Android wearable-device interface called Android Wear that would fit perfectly on the round screen. The result: a touch interface that looks perfectly at home on the round screen.
Yes, in a perfectly round design, you lose some screen real estate, but you also gain the ability to transform the screen into a near-perfect duplicate of a traditional timepiece. Obviously, it’s just a screen, but at a glance, the Moto360 is going to look like an elegant, traditional watch. And if I get bored with that traditional face, I can change it.
Still, the Moto360 is a smart watch, and both Google and Motorola have spoken at length about how it must be glanceable, and wherever possible, driven by voice.

In the videos, I did notice that even when wearers are speaking to their Moto360s, they’re not holding the watch close to their mouths, or to their ears to listen to its response.
Whatever Google and Motorola can do to make the Moto360 and other Android-based smart watches as watch-like as possible is a plus. The moment I raise my Moto360 to my mouth, everyone — especially my watch-nerd friends — will know it’s not a "real watch."
I'd like people to react like they do when they see me wearing one of my mechanical watches: They usually notice the design, offer compliments, and then I take it off so they can get a closer look at the watch's body (and if it’s a skeleton watch, with a clear front and back, the workings inside). Simply put, I want people to see the Moto360 on my wrist, tell me it looks sharp and then surprise them with the fact that it’s a smart watch with all these other features.
In contrast, smart watches from Samsung (Galaxy Gear and Gear 2) and even Pebble (1 and Steel) are still playing catch-up on the wearable-design front. To be fair, the latest updates from each manufacturer offer significant aesthetic improvements, but both are still a bit too bulky or squarish for my tastes.
Of course, looks aren't everything, but when it comes to watches, they’re at least 75% of the equation. As Matthew McConaughey, playing Rust Cohle in True Detective, said, “Time is a flat circle.”
It’s nice to know Motorola got the message.
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