Dubbed the ultimate fusion between music and fitness, the Motorola MotoActv is a new smartwatch available from the Hello Moto company designed to have enough allure to appeal to fitness freaks who are not already absorbed in the competitive field of ‘smart’ wear. Smart bands and watches of all varieties have appealed to athletes for years now, thanks to their built-in ability to monitor activity.

Rooting the Motorola MotoActv smartwatch should only enhance what owners can do when going for that Sunday morning jog around the block. Like our smartphones, our smartwatches can run many rooted apps and often its these apps which do require root access that can have the most appeal to run. That added power they have with administrator rights over the internal system means bigger and better things on the horizon. Though I’m not exactly a fitness person myself, I can tell you that one app people might find appealing for the MotoActv is the Viper4Android application. The Vper4Android application is a really popular way to enhance your music listening time — one of the main standout features of the MotoActv.

REQUIREMENTS

• You will need a Windows PC to run the rooting program in this guide that roots the Motorola MotoActv smartwatch.

BEFORE WE BEGIN

• Place the Motorola smartwach on the charger and wait until it reaches full charge before giving this guide a try. The developer states that some people can expect problems if the battery is not charged.

HOW TO ROOT MOTOACTV

1. Download the rooting toolkit for the MotoActv from here.
2. Click on the small triangle that is on the right side of the file sitting above your taskbar.
3. Choose to “show on folder” from the menu.
4. Drag or copy the file over to the desktop of the computer.
5. Right-click the mouse on the file and choose to “extract here” from the menu.
6. Double-lick the mouse on the rooting executable file once it is extracted and the rooting program’s user interface will open on the desktop.
7. Connect the MotoActv smartwatch to the computer with the USB cable you normally use for charging the battery.
8. Wait for the MotoCast to finish installing on your computer before advancing to the next step.
9. Unplug your smartwatch from the computer once the MotoCast is complete.
10. Click on the “Flash boot image and root” button from the user interface of your rooting tool on the computer (from the top left corner).
11. Boot the MotoActv device by holding the Power + Volume Down button to reach fastboot or bootloader mode.
12. Grab the USB cable again and connect the smartwatch to the computer.
13. The rooting toolkit will now proceed to automatically flash the insecure boot image on your device.
14. The rooting toolkit will now continue to root the device.

In conclusion, that’s all you need to root Motorola MotoActv smartwatches using a computer and a toolkit. Now you are ready to learn how to install a custom recovery on the Motorola MotoActv smartwatch so you can install any custom ROMs, custom kernels or just use the NANDroid backup feature.