UPDATE: Moto 360 teardown reveals lies: battery is smaller than claimed

t’s important for your devices to last you at least one day of use. You don’t want to be carrying around a useless device just because the battery ran out. That’s why there’s so much focus on the battery size in the current crop of Android Wear watches. The Gear Live has a 300 mAh battery, the G Watch a 400 mAh, and the Moto 360 an advertised 320 mAh battery.

iFixit did what they do best and disassembled the Moto 360, showing off every part in all of its round glory. However, one thing doesn’t match up: the battery. Inside the device, they found a 300 mAh battery, 20 mAh smaller than Motorola claims. While 20 mAh doesn’t seem like much, it’s over 6% of the battery gone.

Motorola definitely has some explaining to do, because this kind of deception isn’t exactly pleasant. While most people won’t care, we’ve already heard reports of less than stellar battery life compared to the competition. Hopefully there’s a good explanation for all of this.

Update: Motorola has responded to these allegations. Here is what it had to say:

The typical battery capacity for Moto 360 is 320mAh and the minimum is 300mAh. In the mobile industry, sometimes both the minimum and typical capacity is listed on the battery, with the typical capacity quoted as the official battery size. Both figures are included on the batteries of our Moto X, Moto E and Moto G devices. In the case of smaller devices, we aren’t always able to list both figures. For Moto 360, we only had room for one figure and choose to list the minimal capacity of the battery. We see how this can be confusing and we will look into ways to add the typical capacity as well in the future.

Motorola

While there is plenty of room to list both capacities, and most battery manufacturers don’t list both, we can leave it at that. If Motorola says it’s 320 mAh, we’ll believe them. Put your pitchforks down and let’s just enjoy the beauty of the Moto 360.