The "pioneer" of Android smartwatches is back, and it may kick off a brand - new era.

As early as the beginning of November 2015, nearly 10 years ago, our team at 3eLife got our hands on the first "genuine" smartwatch in our review career - the Chinese version of the MOTO 360 (2nd generation).

At that time, the entire smartwatch industry had not yet caught the widespread attention of the public. Those who have read our previous related content may still remember that Google recruited a group of mobile phone manufacturers who had no idea how to design watches to join the initial "Google Wear" ecosystem. As a result, many products with ugly designs and simply "a screen on the wrist" were created. Coupled with Apple's Apple Watch playing the "fashion" card at that time, the "Google Wear" watches, which looked as crude as children's electronic watches in comparison, were naturally quickly abandoned by the market.

However, even against the backdrop of the generally poor performance of "Google Wear" products at that time, the MOTO 360 left a deep impression on users who were trying smartwatches for the first time with its elegant circular watch body design. In our memory, there was even a trend in the smartwatch industry at that time, where "round watches" were highly regarded, and many were vying to achieve a "100% perfectly round dial" (since the MOTO 360's dial was not a perfect circle).

Of course, while the MOTO 360 was good-looking, its drawbacks were also very obvious. As one of the earliest "Google Wear" watches, the MOTO 360 was developed too early. At that time, there was no suitable SoC solution for high-end full-featured smartwatches in the industry. So, the first-generation MOTO 360 used the extremely old Texas Instruments OMAP3630 single-core 1GHz processor, and the second-generation MOTO 360 we tested was equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 platform.

Although we all know that the Snapdragon 400 was indeed the "predecessor" of the first-generation Snapdragon Wear 2100, it was not a dedicated chip for smartwatches. So, there were many problems in power consumption control and system adaptation. Later, it directly led to the MOTO 360 being unable to upgrade to Google's Wear OS 2.x system for a long time, and ultimately "dragged down" MOTO's full-featured smartwatch product line.

In 2019, consumers noticed that the MOTO 360 product line seemed to be licensed to an obscure Canadian company called "eBuyNow". The latter blatantly launched a full-featured smartwatch called "MOTO 360 (2019 Edition)", which indeed largely continued the family design of the MOTO 360. However, it was still plagued by a relatively backward and power-hungry main control solution (Snapdragon Wear 3100), and it didn't even come with high-end and comprehensive health monitoring sensors. As a result, this "third-generation MOTO 360" didn't receive good market feedback, and there were no subsequent products.

But in the summer of 2025, recently we suddenly saw the renderings of what is said to be the latest generation of the MOTO 360 smartwatch, as well as some leaked information about its configuration and features.

Relevant information shows that the new MOTO 360 is no longer an "outsourced product" but is produced by MOTO. It's worth noting that MOTO has actually maintained a smartwatch product line overseas, but they are not called "MOTO 360". Instead, they are called the MOTO Watch series, with number suffixes like "40, 70, 120". Obviously, this means their positioning is lower than that of the "MOTO 360".

According to current leaks, different from the lightweight smartwatch nature of the previous "MOTO Watch" series, the revived MOTO 360 is expected to be paired with a high-performance main control and the Google Wear OS system, maintaining its positioning as a "flagship full-featured smartwatch".

Although the currently exposed product images look more like 3D models rather than real photos, from the buttons and the shape of the bottom sensors, it can be seen that the new MOTO 360 smartwatch probably has more than just heart rate and blood oxygen sensors. It may also have ECG electrocardiogram or bioelectrical impedance body fat measurement functions. In other words, it seems to have learned from the weak health monitoring functions of the previous generations of the MOTO 360 and made targeted improvements.

But, will it be that simple?

Looking at the entire product lines of MOTO and Lenovo, it's not hard to find that they still launch some lightweight smartwatches in both overseas and domestic markets. Compared with most of their peers, although the battery life of MOTO/Lenovo's lightweight smartwatches is not extremely long, their prices are very affordable.

This means that different from those manufacturers that only have lightweight smartwatches or only full-featured smartwatches, if MOTO wants to revive the "MOTO 360", it must first convince consumers that the new MOTO 360 outperforms their previous lightweight smartwatches in all aspects, even in terms of battery life. At the same time, although it is positioned as a high-end product, it must still have outstanding "cost-effectiveness". Only in this way can it maintain the same style as other products and prevent consumers from being confused.

Is it possible for a full-featured smartwatch to be powerful in function, have long battery life, and be cost-effective?

Actually, it is possible, and there is almost only one way. The reason why MOTO wants to revive the flagship full-featured MOTO 360 before the end of 2025 is that they want to seize the first-mover advantage of a new high-performance and energy-efficient smartwatch main control chip. And this new smartwatch main control chip is, of course, Qualcomm's Snapdragon W5 Gen2.

According to current relevant leaks, the Snapdragon W5 Gen2 has changed its manufacturing process. Different from the previous generation's Samsung 4nm process, the new Qualcomm flagship smart wearable main control chip is manufactured by TSMC. Considering factors such as power consumption control and "matching" with competitors, it is highly likely to refer to TSMC's second-generation 3nm process. However, if Qualcomm wants to test the advanced process with a smartwatch SoC like Samsung did, there is also a possibility of using the 2nm process directly.

Although the previous Snapdragon W5 Gen1 made great progress in the manufacturing process, it didn't significantly upgrade its architecture.

In terms of the specific architecture, the Snapdragon W5 Gen2 is said to be equipped with one Cortex-A78 big core and four Cortex-A55 small cores, and it will use LPDDR5X memory. Obviously, this will give it much higher performance and energy efficiency than the previous generations of SoCs that used the old Cortex-A53 architecture. At the same time, it will probably integrate Qualcomm's latest self-developed GPU architecture, which is the most basic version of the Adreno 800 series.

To be honest, for our team at 3eLife, the most curious part of the Snapdragon W5 Gen2 is not its CPU or GPU, but the specifications of the co-processor integrated in it for the continuous monitoring algorithms of health sensors.

Previously, on the Snapdragon W5+ Gen1, Qualcomm paired it with a co-processor based on the Cortex-M55 architecture using a 22nm process. However, judging from the actual performance of the products that were equipped with it, many manufacturers chose to "ignore" this co-processor solution and paired it with co-processors from other brands to manage related functions. This obviously increased the technical threshold for terminal manufacturers to use the Qualcomm platform.

Therefore, in addition to the obvious progress in the manufacturing process and the architecture upgrade, whether this co-processor is powerful enough and energy-efficient enough may be the key for Qualcomm to "conquer" more terminal manufacturers.

The first-generation MOTO 360 smartwatch still has a purchase page on the Lenovo official website.

Of course, even if we don't consider the technical details of the co-processor for now, since Samsung's Exynos W series of smartwatch main control chips are hardly sold externally, the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Gen2 can basically be considered as a major upgrade for the entire "Android full-featured smartwatch" camp once it is released. From MOTO's possible move to "revive" the MOTO 360 after many years, it seems that Qualcomm's new flagship smart wearable main control chip has already "excited" some manufacturers.

So what does this mean? Simply put, we can expect that some new full-featured smartwatches starting from the end of this year may be able to achieve a typical daily battery life of a week or even longer while fully guaranteeing software extensibility and the complexity of health monitoring algorithms, thus largely filling the long-criticized battery life gap of "full-featured smartwatches".

In addition, our team at 3eLife also hopes that these newer and more powerful smart wearable chip solutions can make the smartwatch industry as "transparent" as the mobile phone industry and create a healthy "chip competition", so that every penny consumers spend on smartwatches can be more tangibly reflected in performance and experience.

This article is from the WeChat official account "3eLife" (ID: IT - 3eLife), author: 3eLife Editor. Republished by 36Kr with permission.