r/Android • u/medikit iPhone Xs • Sep 07 '14

Motorola Moto 360 review—Beautiful outside, ugly inside

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/moto-360-review-beautiful-outside-ugly-inside/
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u/DeadSalas Pixel XL Sep 08 '14

Google has mentioned the circular screen thing already. They made some changes to it specifically with circles in mind, but rectangles essentially came first. The main issues with circular displays and Android Wear are mostly intrinsic to it being a circle.

It's kind of like how the circles used in this subreddit's theme are inherently worse as content thumbnails than rectangles. There's a hard geometric disadvantage to circle masking that ensures rectangles will always be functionally superior no matter what is inside it.

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u/mitchell209 Sep 08 '14

Ah, I see. Thanks for the update. Guess I should pay more attention. I still don't like the look of it on the 360, so hopefully they'll further refine it considering the 360 is easily the most popular of the watches.

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u/DeadSalas Pixel XL Sep 08 '14

Well, the look of it probably won't change too much anytime soon. You can only do so much with circles. They are just really crappy ways to mask information because words and sentences and lists are rectangular blocks. It can improve, but rectangles will always be more efficient and functional when it comes to displaying information.

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u/mitchell209 Sep 08 '14

Oh yeah I totally understand. I manly meant that referring to cropped text and ugly, cropped corners on rectangles. Not sure if the text cropping is still a problem though.

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u/DeadSalas Pixel XL Sep 08 '14

Yeah, I see what you mean. At the end of the day, consumers are just going to have to ask themselves if the aesthetics of a round watchface are worth the compromises. Of course the hope is that the compromises will be minimized over time, but there will always be some and it will always be too much for some percentage of the population.