Motorola teases, then unteases, the new Moto 360

By David Nield August 15, 2015

Moto 360 hands on — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Technology firms seem a lot more trigger happy than they used to be, with executives and PR departments alike often publishing previews of products before they really should. The latest example comes courtesy of the Motorola Twitter account, which posted a glimpse of the new wearable before yanking it from view again.

At first glance it looked like a normal Moto 360 promo, which might explain the root cause of the mistake, but the wearable shown in the short clip is definitely not the original smartwatch. The button has moved up to the 2 o’clock position (rather than 3 o’clock) and it appears that there’s a simpler system for swapping out bands. Unfortunately, the unsightly “flat tire” that houses the GPU is still in evidence.

We can’t link to the now-deleted tweet and its accompanying video but you can find copies of it all over the Web if you want to take a peek. It’s a computer rendering rather than a video of an actual device, so this may not be the final version of the second-generation Moto 360.

In other rumors swirling around Motorola’s upgraded smartwatch products, there could be two different sizes in the pipeline (as with the Apple Watch). A telecommunications operator in Brazil has posted placeholders for both the “360S” and the “360L” — one small edition and one large edition perhaps, to fit any size of wrist comfortably?

We won’t know for sure until the official unveiling, which shouldn’t be too far off now (the original Moto 360 appeared in September 2014). What’s certain is that Motorola and Android Wear as a whole could use a big seller to boost the market, with even Apple having a hard time persuading consumers that they really want smartwatches on their wrists.

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Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

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