The Moto Watch Ultra is a return to Wear OS

Just a few months after getting back into the smartwatch game, Motorola is targeting the premium end of the market with the first Moto Watch Ultra. It comes with some upgrades from the recent Moto Watch — most obviously the jump to Wear OS — but lacks the outdoorsy features that would make it a true rival to Samsung and Apple’s Ultra watches.

While the Moto Watch ran a custom operating system, Motorola has adopted Google’s Wear OS platform for the Ultra model, with a Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1 chip to run it. That gives the Ultra an immediate leg up in terms of access to a wide range of apps, interoperability with the company’s Android phones, and support for NFC payments through Google Wallet. Gemini is supported too, along with Motorola’s own Qira AI assistant.

The downside is battery life. While the Moto Watch boasted an impressive 13 days of runtime, Motorola is only predicting 50 hours of life for the Ultra, and that’s with the always-on display switched off.

At 51g and 12mm thick, the Ultra is a fairly stocky smartwatch, though its 46mm face is actually a little smaller than the normal Moto Watch. Despite that, it actually fits in a larger 1.5-inch OLED display, thanks to a much smaller bezel. The stainless steel body comes in either black or silver, and both ship with a pair of 22mm straps in the box, one silicone and one leather. The silver watch gets green silicone and brown leather, while the black body comes with black, and more black.

The Ultra has an IP68 rating, 5ATM of water-resistance, and Gorilla Glass 3 on the face. Health and fitness tracking is handled through a returning partnership with Polar. It covers heart rate, sleep, stress, SpO2, and recovery, with an AI running coach thrown in too, helped by LTE and dual-band GPS. Still, these aren’t the sort of comprehensive outdoor and extreme sports features you’ll find in the latest Apple Watch Ultra or Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra models, and really this is more in line with those companies’ standard smartwatches.

That’s borne out by the price: The Moto Watch Ultra will cost just $349.99, about half the price of those other Ultras, but a little over double the $149.99 Moto Watch. It’ll be available starting September 10th.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge