However, rendered here in Motorola’s Watch app, everything looks fun and easy! Motorola (and Polar, I guess) uses Apple’s “close your rings” approach, with active minutes, steps, and calories. I particularly like that you can now use Polar’s sleep tracking with a cheaper Android watch. Polar takes into account sleep time, solidity (whether or not your sleep was interrupted), and regeneration to give you a Nightly Recharge Status.

You can still click through and see your ANS, but there’s a lot more context surrounding it. Also, the graphs are prettier. I compared the sleep, heart rate, and stress measurements to my Oura Ring 4, and I found no big discrepancies. The Moto Watch tended to be a little bit more generous in my sleep and activity measurements (7 hours and 21 minutes of sleep instead of 7 hours and 13 minutes, or 3,807 steps as compared to 3,209), but that’s usual for lower-end fitness trackers that have fewer and less-sensitive sensors.

On that note, I do have one major hardware gripe. Onboard GPS is meant to make it easier to just run out the door and start your watch. I didn’t find this to be the case. Whatever processor is in the watch (Motorola has conveniently chosen not to reveal this), it’s just really slow to connect to satellites and iffy whenever it does. This isn’t a huge deal when I’m just walking my dog or lifting weights in my living room, but it constantly cuts out when I’m outside and doesn’t have the ability to fill in the blanks, as another, more expensive fitness tracker would do.

It’s just really annoying to constantly get pinged about satellite loss and to have a quarter-mile or a half-mile cut out of your runs. That’s how I know the speaker works—it was constantly telling me it lost satellite connection during activities.

Finally, the screen and buttons are really sensitive. It does give you an option to lock the screen, but even then, I found myself accidentally unlocking it from time to time and turning the recording off when I didn’t mean to.

As I write this, I have seven different smartwatches from different brands sitting on my desk. If you’re looking for a cheap, attractive, and effective Android-compatible smartwatch, I would say that the CMF Watch 3 Pro is your best choice. However, I do think the integration with Polar was well done, and the price point is not that bad. I’m definitely keeping an eye out for what Motorola might have to offer in the future.

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Others Tested

Closer Pets C200 2-Meal Automatic Pet Feeder for $50: This automatic feeder is super simple, which is both its weakness and its strength. It’s essentially two shallow plastic containers with stainless steel inserts (both dishwasher safe) and tamper-resistant lids that are locked and automatically open using an old-school egg-style timer that runs on a AA battery rather than electricity. Although the container has an ice pack to keep the wet food cool, after one night it lost virtually all of its coolness. There’s a lid-link clip attachment, a small piece of plastic that links the lids to ensure they will open at the same time, which is super helpful for owners of two cats like me. I wish the timer were electric so I could program it to the exact time I want it open, rather than guesstimating the timing on the little marks. However, this is a simple solution to help make sure both my cats are given wet food without me having to wake up at the crack of dawn.

Photograph: Molly Higgins

Oneisall Cordless WiFi Automatic Cat Feeder for $50: I had high hopes for this cordless feeder that boasts a rechargeable battery with a 100-day life and an integrated app, but it’s just too unreliable. Through the app, you can program up to 10 daily meals (in 1-12 portions each), monitor pets’ eating habits, and customize meal calls. Unlike other apps, you’re not able to choose portion size, but instead have to multiply the number of servings. The app gave me constant problems, and would often disconnect from the feeder and be unable to reconnect to WiFi. Luckily, I was able to program meals via the screen and buttons, but it would’ve been a whole lot nicer if the app had worked reliably.

Do Not Recommend

Courtesy of Amazon

Catit Pixi Smart 6-Meal Feeder for $117: Like others on this list, the Catit Pixi wet and dry feeder uses ice packs to keep wet food fresh and rotates the meals in six compartments on a set schedule. The schedule can be programmed via the app or changed on the body of the feeder. At this price point, the app shouldn’t be this limited and glitchy. The schedule is available in military time only, and the app is extremely limited—you can only set the meal schedule for the same day, and when I wanted to do only two to three meals a day spread over two days, I had to reschedule the meals for every new day. The feeder didn’t keep it cold enough to spread the meals out and the wet food was not at a safe eating temperature. At this price point, just get the Petlibro Polar wet feeder for a few bucks more.

Catit Pixi Smart Cat Feeder for $114: Kibble is stored in the body of this dry feeder, but it doesn’t have a window to visually check food levels. The calendar to plan meals shows only a week at a time, and although it should repeat daily based on the schedule, I found that some days there would be no schedule despite setting one up. The Pixi also doesn’t tell you how much food was dispensed; it just refers to it as a “portion”—I manually measured and found the portion was less than a tablespoon of kibble. After using it continuously for more than a month, I found it was extremely glitchy and almost never reliably stuck to the programmed schedule, sometimes skipping meals altogether. This feeder is potentially dangerous, and I’d caution pet parents against relying on it.

Closer Pets C500 for $75: This automatic wet and dry feeder can schedule up to four pre-portioned meals (and one meal given manually) that are opened on a timer system using three AA batteries (sold separately). The user presets the four times they want the bowls, which have ice packs underneath, to rotate. The bowls are quite deep and narrow and aren’t super easy for cats to reach, which could cause whisker fatigue. And although there are two relatively large ice packs, when I checked on the feeder after a night’s sleep, the packs weren’t very cold. This may be OK for kibble, but wet food was kept at unsafe temperatures, and my cats couldn’t reach all of the food.

An insurrectionist robot unleashed by a mad inventor in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. HAL 9000 sabotaging a manned mission to Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skynet, the self-aware global defense network that seeks to exterminate humanity throughout the Terminator franchise.

Hollywood has never wanted for audacious depictions of artificial intelligence or the ways in which it could alter the fate of our species. But the rapid integration of AI into the studio system and our now unavoidable interactions with it have severely compromised the genre, not to mention film as a medium.

On the one hand, it’s perfectly understandable that screenwriters and studios would return to the subject of AI in recent years, particularly since it provokes such fierce debate within the industry. (A major cause of the 2023 labor strikes was the threat that AI posed to creative jobs.) Still, the novelty faded fast.

Consider M3GAN, a campy horror flick about an artificially intelligent doll who starts killing people, released just a week after the debut of ChatGPT in 2022: It was a surprise box-office smash. Last year’s sequel? A critical and commercial flop. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning (2023) introduced a rogue AI called The Entity as a final adversary for Ethan Hunt and crew. The resolution of its cliff-hanger ending and blockbuster finale for the spy saga, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (2025), underperformed its predecessor, and neither quite justified their expense.

The latest AI-themed bomb is Mercy, a crime thriller starring Chris Pratt as an LAPD detective strapped into a chair who has 90 minutes to pull enough evidence from security cameras and phone records to convince a stern judge bot (Rebecca Ferguson) that he didn’t kill his wife—or else face instant execution. Despite releasing in January, one reviewer has already declared it “the worst movie of 2026,” and judging by its mediocre ticket sales, many US moviegoers decided as much from the trailer alone. It’s almost as if nobody cared whether a fictional software program might be capable of sparing a life when real health insurance claims are being denied by algorithms already.

For those few who did see it, Mercy fell far short of its dystopian premise, failing to grapple with the ethics of such a surveillance state and its medieval-modern justice system in favor of cheap relativism. Spoiler: Pratt’s character and the AI ultimately team up to stop the real bad guys as the bot begins to show signs of unrobotic emotion and doubt, which manifest as glitches in the program. By the end, Pratt is delivering a true groaner of a we’re-not-so-different speech to the holographic Ferguson. “Human or AI, we all make mistakes,” he says. “And we learn.”

While the naive belief in AI’s progress toward enlightenment feels dated on arrival, you are also reminded of how prophetically cynical something like Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, now almost 40 years old, was in addressing a future of cybernetic fascism. Contrary to that kind of pitch-black, violent satire, the current trend seems to be propagandistic narratives about how AIs are scary at first but secretly good. (See also: Tron: Ares, Disney’s wildly misguided attempt to leverage an old IP for the era of large language models, another cinematic train wreck of 2025.)

In fact, the insistence on some inborn value or honor to artificial intelligence may be the driving force behind the new Time Studios web series On This Day…1776. Conceived as a blow-by-blow account of the year the American colonies declared independence from the British crown, it consists of short YouTube videos generated in part by Google DeepMind (though actual actors supply voiceovers). The project has drawn serious attention and scorn because acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky served as executive producer via his creative studio Primordial Soup, launched last year in a partnership with Google to explore the applications of AI in filmmaking. It probably doesn’t help that Aronofsky and company are valorizing the country’s founders in the same aesthetic that has defined the authoritarian meme culture of Donald Trump’s second term.