Back in June I gave my first impressions of the Galaxy Gear Live that Google gave developers like me at I/O. At the same conference they also announced we'd be getting a Moto 360 later in the year as well. So I patiently waited. And waited...then I waited some more. Well last week the long wait was over, this arrived in the mail:

The first and most stunning feature about this watch is immediately obvious: the box is round, the watch is round, 360 degrees makes a circle...are you getting it yet? Yes, it has a circular screen. In person it looks nothing short of stunning. The aluminium frame and the edge to edge screen are truly impressive to behold. Sitting on my wrist it looks less smart-watch and a lot more just watch. I've been using Android Wear ever since June, so I don't want to review the software again, since it's the same on every watch. I do however want to talk a bit about what makes this watch different, and how it compares to the Gear Live.

The Good Bits

• The hardware design, as mentioned above, is amazing.
• The watch faces are elegant, and you can customise them using the Motorola Connect app, something you can't currently do with the Gear Live.
• The watch is incredibly light, and the band very comfortable. Unlike the Gear Live I sometimes don't even notice it on my wrist.
• The heart monitoring (which I believe it does every 5 minutes by default) seems accurate, and gets a reading far more than the Gear Live could on my wrist. This is probably because it just fits better on me than the Gear Live did.
• The inductive charging cradle is a thing of beauty. I place the watch in it, and it gently levels itself and displays the time and current battery level in the new orientation.

Things I'm Less Than Enamoured With

• The processor is noticeably slower than the one in the Gear Live. I don't give two hoots about tech specs, but the UI is quite often sluggish and unresponsive to immediate touch. The Gear Live didn't have this issue at all.
• The 'ambient' mode is next to useless. On the Gear Live's AMOLED screen, the watch is able to power down most of the display, while still keeping a power saving watch face visible. This means you can get two day battery life, while still having a watch visible at all times. The Moto 360 is capable of the same thing, but the ambient mode is too dim to be even remotely useful. I can barely see it in a dark room, and outside, nothing.
• Even when the ambient mode is on, the watch still tries to be clever and power down the screen when it's not horizontal. I'm sure this seemed like a good idea to conserve battery, but the few times you do manage to catch it off is annoying. The Gear Live doesn't do this, and it's better for it.
• Even at full brightness, the screen is not as good outdoors as the one on the Gear Live.
• The battery life is a decent amount worse than the Gear live. I tend to take my watch off the charger at 7.30am and place it back on before I go to bed, normally around 11.30pm. I tried 3 different setups, one each day. Here's how much battery I had left at the end of each of those days:
  1. Ambient Mode on, auto brightness: 19% (Gear Live: 60%)
  2. Ambient Mode off, auto brightness: 62% (Gear Live: 70%)
  3. Ambient Mode on, max brightness: 5% (Gear Live: 50%)

Those of you in the Apple Camp might have noticed that I haven't even mentioned the little black cutout at the bottom of the screen. I find it ironic that the thing Gruber et al worked themselves into a frenzy about before the watch launched, turns out to be the least interesting flaw you could focus on. Your mileage may vary, but I stopped noticing it after the first day of using it.

Overall I wouldn't have spent my own money on this watch. There are just too many downsides to make it worth the price tag. The software is great, the case is amazing, but the internal hardware needs some serious work. Supposing however that you magically transplanted the screen, battery and processor of the Gear Live into this watch, well then I'd be throwing my money at you. I hope you're listening Motorola.

The latest post on NSHipster sent me into an amazing five minute journey of "OMG I forgot all about this part of the iPhone!":

http://nshipster.com/cmdevicemotion/

Then I slapped myself, remembered that I have an app to ship tomorrow and got back to work. Still, it was a fun five minutes...

My first Apple product was an iPod Mini. I still vividly remember being hooked by the design and functionality of such a tiny, sexy device. My next Apple product was a Powerbook G4. Those two products started a long journey of buying and loving Apple products. iPhoto. iPhone. iPad. iWork. I bought them all, and I loved them all. One phrase always kept me coming back for more: "It just works". After coming from devices that always felt buggy and half-finished it really did feel just like that. Everything, well, just worked.

Fast forward to today, 2014. Zoom in to me. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro. In my pocket is the iPhone 6. Three metres away sits a Mac Mini. On the surface, nothing has changed. The problem is, it feels like everything has changed. In short while Apple's hardware continues to impress me, their software has gone downhill at a rapid pace. iPhoto is an unusable mess with the volume of photos I now have. Aperture has been discontinued and is badly lagging behind in terms of both performance and features. iTunes takes forever to launch, and is bloated mess of way too many features and functions. iCloud is still a mess that I wouldn't dream of storing my important data in. iOS 7 crashed so often that I became intimately familiar with the Apple logo that appeared every time it did. iOS 8 fixed the crashing, but introduced thousands of little paper cut like bugs. I used to install updates from Apple the second they came out, now I wait a few days to see if they are actually any good.

If you think this is just my experience, let's take a quick recap of the last few weeks of Apple news:

• iOS 8.0.1 was released, with bugs that prevented iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners from connecting to the cell network, and using Touch ID.
• Users trying to fix iOS bugs, reset the settings on their devices. This had the fun, unexpected consequence of wiping their iCloud documents, and syncing those deletions to all their other devices.
• Apple released HealthKit as part of iOS 8, only to pull it, and any apps that supported it due to bugs.
• Apple 'fixed' HealthKit as part of iOS 8.0.2, but my Twitter timeline is still full of people complaining about bugs. By all accounts, and going by the iOS 8.1 change log released today, it's nowhere near ready for prime time.

On the developer front recently:

• iTunes Connect is still amazingly buggy, and Apple managed to make it more so while developers were submitting their iOS 8 updates. I saw so many automated rejections, upload errors and bugs fill my timeline.
• Xcode still crashes for me, at least once or twice a day.
• Apple bought TestFlight, much to our delight, only to reveal that their answer to 'beta testing' is to let us distribute to 25 people that have administration rights over our apps. Do you want your beta testers to be able to change your app prices, descriptions, screenshots and to be able to pull apps from the store? Yeah me neither. The alternative is to submit your app for app review, before you're allowed to distribute it to beta testers. Really Apple? Did I mention that the review queue is currently 9 days long and growing? Thank Thor that HockeyApp still exists.
• Size classes, Apple's answer to 'how on earth are we going to deal with the new screen sizes' lack even the most basic functionality required to do that. The iPhone 6 Plus has it's own size class, in landscape, but in portrait orientation? Every single iPhone ever made is treated the same way. That's right, you can't lay out a different UI for the 3.5" iPhone in portrait than you can for the 5.5" monstrosity of a 6 Plus. How Apple missed this basic developer requirement is baffling to me.
• Swift, the language we were all amazed by in June, has turned out to be a bag of hurt for anyone that jumped into it headfirst. It's clear that it too wasn't ready for prime time. I would have happily waited another year or two, especially if Apple built some major apps using it first. As it is we're beta testing it for them, even after the 1.0 release.

Tim Cook keeps telling us that 'Only Apple' could do the amazing things it does. I just wish that Apple would slow down their breakneck pace and spend the time required to build stable software that their hardware so desperately needs. The yearly release cycles of OS X, iOS, iPhone & iPad are resulting in too many things seeing the light of day that aren't finished yet. Perhaps the world wouldn't let them, perhaps the expectations are now too high, but I'd kill for Snow iOS 8 and Snow Yosemite next year. I'm fairly confident I'm not alone in that feeling.

The two-factor thing protects your account when you log in — at iCloud.com, for example.

David Pogue, writing about 'Celebgate'

To use a Beard-ism: Nope. Apple's two-step authentication does nothing to prevent unauthorised iCloud.com logins.

In a previous post I covered the widely held myth that is Android screen size fragmentation from a developer perspective. Consider it required reading before you proceed.

Today famed Apple blogger John Gruber, posted his thoughts on what the iPhone 6 could look like when it launches. He suggests that both the rumoured 4.7" and 5.5" models might exist, and takes a guess at their screen resolutions:

- 4.7-inch display: 1334 × 750, 326 PPI @2x

- 5.5-inch display: 2208 × 1242, 461 PPI @3x

John Gruber, Daring Fireball, Conjecture Regarding Larger iPhone Displays

The whole post is worth a read, so off you go. I was interested in taking the same 1x (or 1pt/1dp as it's also known) diagram we drew for Android, and redrawing that for iOS in light of this post. It would look like this:

Remember our Android one looked like this:

</a>This comes from these 4 screen sizes:

• 320x480 @1x iPhone 4
• 320x536 @1x iPhone 5
• 375x667 @1x iPhone 6, 4.7"
• 414x736 @1x iPhone 6, 5.5"

What does this mean in practice? It means iOS developers will now have to do more work than their Android counterparts in order to support the increased variation in iOS screens. The best tools for that exist in iOS 8, which also makes it likely a lot of apps will go iOS 8 only to avoid the manual layout pain. It's not all bad news though, this might actually result in better large screen iOS apps vs their Android counterparts. This is because on the 5.5" iPhone there would be more content being shown, rather than everything just being bigger.

All of the above is based on rumours though, so we all have to wait until September to see what actually happens.