Motorola responds to Moto 360 battery ‘controversy’

We interrupt your Apple Watch-watching experience to bring you a bit of rumor-busting news from the world of Android Wear… 

In case you haven’t heard, a minor “controversy” has erupted over the size of the battery in Motorola’s new Moto 360 smartwatch. (Heavy emphasis on the quotes around “controversy” there — go ahead and act those out as air quotes, if you’d like, for the full intended effect.)

It all started with a report from the gadget teardown gurus at iFixIt. In the report, the site showed the actual battery from inside the Moto 360 and noted that it’s labeled “300mAh” — a notch down from the 320mAh measurement Motorola lists the watch as having.

That led to a flood of tweets, blogs, reblogs, and more reblogs expressing outrage at the notion that Motorola had “lied” about what type of battery it put into its product.

Sorry to burst the scandal-lovin’ bubble, kiddos, but you can safely file this whole debacle under “The Dangers of Jumping to Conclusions.”

I decided to reach out to Motorola (imagine that!) to point out the report and ask if there was any explanation for the apparent discrepancy. A company spokesperson provided me with the following statement:

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.

Amazing how quickly one piece of unconfirmed information can turn into “fact” on the Internet, isn’t it?

All silliness aside, of course, numbers only mean so much. I’m in the midst of using and getting to know the Moto 360 now and will be sharing some more detailed thoughts on the device — including the hotly discussed topic of its real-world battery life performance — over the coming days.

For now, though, put down your pitchforks and go make yourself a sandwich. Make me one while you’re at it, too, would ya? Extra pickles, no mayo.

We’ll pick back up with the real tech talk tomorrow.

UPDATE: Moto 360 review: An elegant smartwatch with exceptional features