Motorola Moto X Review – Compact all-rounder

Cons

• Hardware will quickly become obsolete
• Screen could have been better
• Camera is disappointing
• Price on the high side

Motorola will soon become part of Lenovo, but has been owned by Google for two years. In the summer of last year, Motorola changed course under the watchful eye of Google and has since launched two smartphones: the cheap Moto G and the slightly more expensive and more luxurious Moto X.

The Moto X distinguishes itself with a few striking features, including an app that recognizes whether you are in the car, for example, a mode that makes it possible to show notifications as soon as you take the phone out of your pocket or pick it up and a way to operate with your voice without having to touch it. All this cost around 385 euros at the time of review.

Features

Motorola tries to sell the Moto X as a smartphone that thinks along with you. Various features are therefore aimed at this. The feature that has proven to be the most useful in practice is Active Screen. The screen switches itself on to a small extent as soon as you pick up the device or take it out of your pocket. Then a few pixels light up that display the time and notifications. With a swipe across the screen it is possible to view those notifications in more detail. The feature works much like an extended version of Glance Screen on Lumia smartphones and is damn useful.

Motorola Assist is an app that performs certain actions automatically when the phone detects something happening. For example, if the phone detects that the user is driving, it will conjure up the car interface on the screen and at night the phone will not make any sound or vibrate. That can all be set yourself and is useful in itself, although you can also find apps in the Play Store that do about the same thing. Anyway, it’s a good addition.

The third feature that stands out is Touchless Control. Touchless Control listens for the command “Ok Google Now” when the phone is off, after which you can have the device execute commands, such as “navigate to home” to navigate home. Touchless Control works remarkably well and recognizes the voice well. .

Design and appearance

The Moto X has a 4.7″ screen, but it’s remarkably small for a phone with such a large screen. It’s about 65mm wide, while many other phones with 4.7″ screens are often around 68mm or 69mm. be wide. It is slightly larger than, say, an iPhone 5c and much smaller than a Galaxy S4. About 72 percent of the front is screen. That, in combination with the oversaturated colors of the screen, means that the phone will have a ‘wow’ effect on many people.

At 10.4mm, the phone is one of the thicker on the market, but you won’t feel it because of the subtle curves and bulges in the design. In fact, due to the curvature and size, it fits perfectly in the hand. The plastic on the back has a pattern, but is in fact a cool surface. It feels somewhat stiff, so it won’t slide off the couch.

Screen and hardware

The Moto X has a 4.7 amoled screen. Instead of a backlight, as with LCDs, the screen has pixels that can light up individually. The resolution is 1280×720 pixels. Unlike previous amoled screens with this resolution, such as those from Samsung, the Moto X’s display has three subpixels per pixel instead of two. The screen is not as sharp as that of recent high-end devices, but with 312 pixels per inch it is close to the iPhone and that is more than enough for many people.

Amoled screens have the advantage that pixels are off where they want to display black. The result is a very high contrast. The brightness of the screen is not as high as with amoled panels of expensive Samsung and Nokia devices, and the screen is therefore less easy to read than that of competitors. It is readable in direct sunlight, but it is not pleasant to work with. The colors are clearly oversaturated. Some will like that, but those who like realistic colors should leave this screen behind. Moreover, there is nothing to adjust. The display of white and gray is more than sufficient.

The phone runs on a Motorola X8 soc, but the eight processor cores that Motorola quotes are only there for marketing. It is a dual-core processor from Qualcomm. The two Krait processor cores run at 1.7GHz and are assisted by an Adreno 320 GPU and 2GB RAM. That is more than enough for the phone to handle all tasks smoothly, although there are faster phones on the market. However, the difference is not great.

Software and cameras

Apart from the features that Motorola has added, the Moto X runs on an almost stock version of Android; it’s very similar to the interface Google uses for its Nexus devices. The Moto X therefore has little unnecessary software on board and that is nice. It is hoped that with this software Motorola will set an example for other manufacturers of how they can put their own stamp on a device without adding a heavy skin.

The camera has a maximum resolution of ten megapixels. The photos vary greatly in quality. Sometimes good pictures come out, at other times green looks almost like yellow or other deviations can be seen. Focusing is also not always good.

Battery life and price

The battery life of the Moto X is fine. In our all-time browsing test, it lasted seven hours, the same length as, say, the LG G2. With constant video playback, the battery lasts almost ten hours, making it one of the best-selling phones on this point.

The Moto X costs 380 euros at the time of writing and although that is not too much for its class, the biggest competition comes from Google itself; the Nexus 5 is available in Google’s own Play Store for 350 euros. Clever features such as Active Screen are missing, but the hardware of the Nexus 5 is more up-to-date. Compared to other competitors, the price is also not particularly competitive; it costs about the same as, say, a Galaxy S4.

Conclusion

It is to be hoped that Lenovo allows Motorola to continue on the path it has taken. The Moto X is a phone with a sleek, compact design and a clean version of Android. Moreover, the features that Motorola adds are really useful. If the price had been a bit lower, this would have been one of the best choices for many people, but even at this price it is a very good smartphone.