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Moto 360's best watch face borrows from James Bond in GoldenEye 007

It won't let your wrist fire a laser beam, but this watch face design will transform your time piece into the classic smartwatch of N64-era James Bond.

Nick Statt Former Staff Reporter / News
Nick Statt was a staff reporter for CNET News covering Microsoft, gaming, and technology you sometimes wear. He previously wrote for ReadWrite, was a news associate at the social-news app Flipboard, and his work has appeared in Popular Science and Newsweek. When not complaining about Bay Area bagel quality, he can be found spending a questionable amount of time contemplating his relationship with video games.
Nick Statt
2 min read

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The Moto 360 sporting the Secret Agent Watchface, a design that borrows from the wrist gadget featured in the N64 Bond classic GoldenEye 007. Phandroid

The Moto 360 has only been out in the wild for less than a week now after gadget reviewers and Android enthusiasts took home units from Motorola's Chicago launch event. Yet that was plenty of time for the folks over at Phandroid to apply one of the best custom smartwatch interfaces to the device's round display: the Secret Agent Watchface.

Taken from the classic Nintendo 64 video game, GoldenEye 007, the design mirrors that of double-0 agent James Bond's in-game gadget that let you read mission files, check your health and body armor, detonate explosives, and employ a bolt-blasting laser. The smartwatch face carries over colored tiles, though instead of monitoring how close you are to termination, the meter will reflect the device's depleting battery life.

Smartwatch software can only improve from its rather rudimentary beginnings. As device and operating system makers like Google hand developers more tools through application programming interfaces (APIs), the smartwatch app marketplace will grow to include more of the fun hacks that the device makers don't think up themselves. Though smartwatches may never be as robust a playground for developers as smartphone have been, clever interface designs and neat tricks that give us the ability to customize and tinker with our smartwatches will only continue to blossom over the coming months.

The Bond watch face, designed by Rmuk Apps, was originally designed with round displays in mind, but hit the Google Play store prior to the release of the Moto 360. Now that Android Wear, Google's wearable-centric mobile operating system, is running on a circular device, we're finally able to see the Secret Agent Watchface on a screen that can accommodate the interface.

Even though it looks appropriate on the Moto 360, the Bond watch face may in fact be better suited to LG's G Watch R. LG announced its very own circular smartwatch, due out later this year, last week at the IFA 2014 show in Berlin.

That device contains a more traditional watch design, with a standard tachymeter measurement ring along the edge of its face, that more closely matches up with the one Bond sports in GoldenEye 007. Check out the in-game version below in all of its 64-bit glory: