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Motoactv (styled MOTOACTV) is a smartwatch sold by

Motorola Mobility Motorola Mobility LLC, marketed as Motorola, is an American consumer electronics manufacturer primarily producing smartphones and other mobile devices running Android OS, Android. It is a subsidiary of the Chinese multinational technology company ...

which contains a number of hardware features and software applications tailored to fitness training. The watch contains apps for monitoring athletic activity using a built-in accelerometer to measure strides and GPS to measure distance. It can also be synced with a Speed/Cadence Bike Sensor or foot pod via

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technology. The watch can communicate with external devices over

Bluetooth 4.0 Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limit ...

such as pulse sensor and Bluetooth stereo headphones for music. In addition, there is a DJ mode that will custom tailor the music dynamically to the workout. It was announced on October 18, 2011, and released to the US market on November 6, 2011. The watch was discontinued by Motorola in 2013. When connected to a phone, the watch will display caller ID, text messages and calendar alerts. Plugins are available for

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

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and Weather. The device reports that it is running Android 2.3.4 which according to Google is the same API as Android 2.3 with some minor patches and bug fixes.

Hardware specifications

* 600 MHz

OMAP3 The OMAP (Open Multimedia Applications Platform) family, developed by Texas Instruments, was a series of image/video processors. They are proprietary system on chips (SoCs) for portable and mobile multimedia applications. OMAP devices generally ...

(3630) ARMv7 CPU supporting ARM extensions thumb, vfp, vfpv3, edsp & neon. * 256MB of RAM and 8GB or 16GB of NAND Flash Memory * 802.11b/g/n *

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

4.0 (low-power mode) *

for connectivity to fitness sensors (heart rate, etc.) * FM Tuner (w/ RDS for station & song identification) *

PowerVR PowerVR is a division of Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) that develops hardware and software for 2D and 3D rendering, and for video encoding, decoding, associated image processing and DirectX, OpenGL ES, OpenVG, and OpenCL accelera ...

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

* 1.6" 220x176

capacitive A capacitor is a device that stores electrical energy in an electric field by virtue of accumulating electric charges on two close surfaces insulated from each other. It is a passive electronic component with two terminals. The effect of a c ...

multitouch LCD display * 5 additional hardware buttons on the side tart, Music, Volume +, Volume -, Standby* 1 additional capacitive button on the front for Back.

Android software

Many apps install and run with the small 220x176 display, though not often very usably. CMW reports Angry Birds runs well. Google Earth performs well but with some UI issues. Google Maps not only runs well and utilizes the built-in GPS, it is very usable on the tiny screen. With the Street View addon installed, Motoactv. GPU impressively handles pseudo 3D Street View transitions at a fluid 60fps.

Usability tweaks

One particular limitation with the Motoactv is the lack of either an on-screen or hardware "Menu" key, which is necessary to access most of the functionality of most Android apps. This can be remedied by remapping one of app-specific buttons at the top. For instance, the 'Music' key can be remapped to Menu simply by mapping key 387 to menu in file /system/usr/keylayout/sholes-keypad.kl. In order to change files in /system, an "adb remount" must be issued.

References

External links

Official Motorola MOTOACTV Product Page

CMW's initial announcement of booter patch
{{Android other Android (operating system) devices Motorola products Smartwatches