Moto X Review

[nosirrah123]

 

 This was originally one of a 3 samples I made trying to get a position at Anandtech, but I didn't get accepted. But hey! I put some work into this, so it deserves to see the light of day! Any suggestions to how I could improve would be greatly appreciated!

 

With more and more people jumping into the smartphone industry because of the open-source nature of android, the android consumer has been trained to look at specs and benchmarks to distinguish between products. Samsung and Apple and all the major smartphone makers are racing to make the newest and fastest quad-core and octa-core processors to wow and amaze consumers. 1440p screens are not to far off either, for reference, a 1440p 5 inch screen has a ppi approaching 600. Then along comes the Moto X, a dual-core with a 720p screen. At first, you might think that all of this means that the Moto X was irrelevant before it came out, but maybe it’s the most relevant phone out right now.

 

Display

 

The most glaring issue that I saw upon first receiving the Moto X was the over-saturation that is associated with a lot of AMOLED screens. Moving over from an iPhone, the exaggeration of oranges, greens, and purples was jarring, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to use the phone without hurting my eyes. Color accuracy however, is something that is heavily reliant off of what you are using at the present moment, and after a mere day of use, I adjusted to the color balance and it seemed just as accurate as my old iPhone 4. While whites are a little yellow, I hardly notice unless I’m actively trying to compare to other screens. I fully expected this to be the biggest issue with the phone, but after a bit of use, now, I hardly notice it at all.

 

The other issue most other people mention is that the screen is merely 720p while competitors feature full 1080p screens. Now I’m not going to argue that you can’t see the difference between 720 and 1080, because I know that’s not true, and you know thats not true. I am however, going to argue that I don’t really care. The fact is, you don’t need 400 ppi. 720p  is still an acceptable resolution on full sized monitors in a pinch, and while the difference between 720 and 1080 is visible, it's negligible to the point of irrelevance. The downgrade isn't without benefits either, with a lower resolution, less battery is used, and games are easier to run. Let’s be honest, while nice, you don’t really desperately need a full HD screen on a 4.7 inch device.

 

When I first got the Moto X, I was amazed at how bright the screen was, especially considering how long the battery lasted, but soon it became an annoyance. I was sick recently, and even on minimum brightness, the phone was blindingly bright in a dark room. Even when I’m not sick, in total darkness, the brightness still hurts my eyes. This should be a fairly simple fix, as giving the user a wider range wouldn’t seem to cause any issue.

 

Finally is the screen size. At 4.7 inches, it’s not one of the HUGE screens that a lot of Android’s are boasting these days, but I find that I can comfortably watch youtube videos, and at the same time not be hindered by a huge device. I am an advocate of big screens, but I think that the Moto X is big enough to get by with.

 

Physical Design

 

The Moto X is a very nicely designed device, and obviously a lot of resources were dedicated to it’s physical shape complimenting it’s image as an Android for the masses. Firstly, it’s ergonomics are excellent. A lot has been said of the curve on the back of the phone, and it's true, in portrait. In landscape however, the phone is awkward to hold because of the difference in thickness between each end. You can't really grip the bottom because it's just too thin, and the difference in weight is off-putting. If you like to use your phone in landscape, I'd consider getting a case just to make sure that it's thick enough to properly grip, and to ensure if you do, that the phone doesn’t break.

 

The screen is made of Corning Gorilla glass, and while I haven’t done any scratch tests, it scratched very easily in the first few days. The case was on, and a light toss into a locker caused a very bothersome scratch on the screen. I don’t have any hard factual evidence, but in my personal experience, the screen scratched extremely easily.

 

The phone is charged through a micro-usb slot , and features no micro-sd slot, probably because the phone was developed while Motorola was owned by Google. The headphone jack is located in the middle, which I haven’t found to have any impact on usage whatsoever. The Sim card slot is located on the left, and the buttons are on the right. I found that occasionally I’d accidentally hit the volume when I meant to hit the power button, and vica versa, but it wasn’t ALL the time.

 

The looks of the phone are very nice, it’s something people will comment on, especially if you use the Moto Maker functionality to choose the coloring of your device. The indentation and Motorola logo on the back is surprisingly tasteful, and the centralized design of the headphone jack, carrier logo, Motorola logo, micro-usb slot, camera, and flash give the phone a cohesive look.

 

A big selling point of the phone is that it is assembled in the USA, and while it is nice, I hardly think it's going to affect someones purchase. As an American, living in America, I really do want manufacturing to move back to America, but I know that other people don't care, or don't know enough to care, otherwise we wouldn't have this issue in the first place. The fact is that this approach has been tried before in nearly every market, and it never works. It can't be proven, but the phone does feel really solid, maybe that's good 'ol 'Merican manufacturing?

 

Performance and the X8 Mobile Computing System

 

The Moto X has a dual-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor running at 1.7 GHz, a quad-core Adreno 320 GPU, and a natural language processor and a contextual computing processor. Together, Motorola is calling this the X8 Mobile Computing System. Motorola’s done something a bit slimy with their advertising though, they promise an eight core phone. While technically this is true (They added up the GPU, CPU, and complimentary cores), it’s still misleading, especially since your products specs aren’t the most dazzling. Motorola defends their choice of components, arguing that phones don’t really need 4+ cores for day-to-day activities, and for the most part, I’d agree. The majority of people have two use cases for their smartphone, gaming and web-browsing, and neither really require an octo-core CPU. In fact, I’d say that anything more than 4 cores is pretty silly at this point, seeing as only servers and over-kill desktops really require that amount of cores. Most benchmarks support this, showing that the Moto X is nearly the same as it’s main competitors the HTC One and Galaxy S4 in normal use-case scenarios.

 

In 3DMark, the Moto X scored nearly exactly the same as the Galaxy S4 (about 100 points above actually), and presumably around the same as the HTC One (which was removed for being a dirty cheater), seeing as they all have the same GPU. If you’re concerned with gaming performance, the Moto X is going to be nearly identical to the S4 and One in most cases, if not better, due to it’s 720p screen. (3D Mark renders this specific test at 1080p, regardless of the actual resolution of the screen)

 

In Vellamo, I threw away the HTML5 results because in the results, there is a disclaimer saying that the web engine in Kit Kat (which I am running) isn’t fully optimized, and that scores would reflect that, which they did. On principle, I don’t want to use benchmarking results from another source, so in this case we’ll only look at Metal, which tests aspects of CPU, RAM, and storage. In metal, The Moto X scored 766, scoring 4th place, between the Galaxy S4’s 1032 and the HTC One’s 763. This is probably due to the S4’s slightly higher clock speed. Remember though, that the S4 is 100$ more.

 

All this goes to show that even without the two extra cores, the Moto X performs almost exactly the same as the other phones in it’s price range, and that lacking those cores really doesn’t have that much impact. Performance-wise the HTC is nearly identical, and the biggest advantage the S4 would have over the Moto X is the higher clock speed, but for the extra 100$ it’s hardly worth it.

 

Moto Maker

 

Moto Maker is an online tool that can be used to customize your Moto X to your liking through choosing from various available colors for the buttons, back, front of the device. Real woo.Motorola has been very vocal that the Moto Maker adds no extra expenses to an online order of the device, so that people aren’t discouraged from using it. I think that Moto Maker, even though I personally didn’t use it, is a brilliant idea from both a consumer and business perspective. For the consumer, for no extra charge, you get to get a customizable phone. From a business perspective, your phones are more noticeable in public, and more likely to garner attention, and you get basically free advertising. Whether or not this helped with sales of the device, I don’t know, but it might have been the thought process behind Moto Maker.

 

In Moto Maker, there are 22 different backings available, 2 fronts, 7 accents (the color of the buttons and camera), an optional custom signature on the back, and 2 different kinds of cases, one with two colors, one with 7. The phone comes in 32 and 16GB varieties, a custom message can be added to the power-on screen, and it can come preloaded with a wallpaper chosen from a selection and already connected to your google account. The phone can also be ordered with two different kinds of discounted Republic of Sol headphones, that also can be customized to your liking.

 

The biggest problem with Moto Maker is that it can’t be done in-store, it must be purchased online, and shipped from Texas. For me, the estimated shipping time was five days, and for an anxious techie like me, my patience ran out while waiting for them to fetch it out of the back room. I don’t think a lot of people will wait the necessary week to get their phone, as the plain black and white models look perfectly fine, and you don’t have to wait.

 

Software and Gimmicks

 

One of the most notable things about the Moto X is that it runs almost stock android. What’s the big fuss about this? Most notably the lack of carrier bloatware, a welcome sight when most phones have a good portion of their storage taken up by useless apps. This is particularly helpful seeing as the phone boasts no SD card slot. I haven’t really noticed anything that fantastic about stock android, in fact, the settings being buried behind a swipe and two taps is a bit annoying, as I got accustomed to changing them quite often in. There also isn’t a percentage indicator for battery, which is occasionally annoying, but not a deal breaker. Also, apps can’t be uninstalled from the home screen. All in all, I haven’t found a reason to be blown away by stock Android.

 

A surprisingly useful feature is that with two twists of your wrist you can quickly open the camera app. I haven’t yet used the actual camera icon to open the camera, because this is so much more convenient. I’m not much of a shutterbug, I barely use my camera at all, but I’ve still been fumbling for my camera to take a picture of a baby or an animal before it moves, and this feature helps those situations a lot. Of course, this isn’t something that should affect your purchase, but it’s still worth noting.

 

The phone also features Active Display, which basically means that whenever the device is out of your pocket and face-up, it will pulse with notification icons. The AMOLED screen means that the pixels that are black are entirely shut off, so barely any energy is being expended to show the time and notifications. Is this useful? maybe, but not for me. I’m not a habitual texter, and neither are my friends, but if you’re constantly receiving texts, this functionality could be very useful.

 

The final notable tidbit about the phone is the fact that Google Now is always listening. I’ve found this to be remarkably functional, yet also remarkably useless. It functions perfectly, even when others try to interject and deliberately confuse the dictation, the phone still filters out any voice except my own, which it understands perfectly. I really thought that I was going to love this functionality, but it’s left me disappointed. I can’t really think of anything that I could use it for, I tried using it to switch music tracks in public, but then realised that everyone around me was looking at me like I was a lunatic. It would have to have much more granular control of individual apps and not pull me out of apps when in use to be useful. As it is, it’s not natural to use, you have to say “Ok Google Now (pause a few seconds for loading) how tall is the Empire State Building?” All in all, I wouldn’t say that this functionality is anything that you should run out and buy a Moto X for.

 

 

Conclusion

 

What the Moto X really is is a historical mark, it’s the mark of when smartphone’s technology exceeded their functionality. For now, there is absolutely no reason to have an octa-core smartphone. We’ll see them not because there’s demand, or because it’ll allow more functionality, we’ll see them just because we can make them. The difference between 300 ppi and 400 ppi isn’t even visible if you don’t have good eyes, so why in the world do we need 600 ppi? It’s highly possible that smartphones have reached the end of their massive jumps in advancement. I’m not claiming that all advancement will end, there are still places smartphones can go, and there might still be a revolutionary jump or two, but there is definitely going to be diminishing returns now. My smartphone doesn’t need to have an octa-core, because I use it to watch youtube videos and play simple games. There are a few things that would need to change for an immensely powerful mobile device to make sense. Firstly, the things I use my mobile device for would need to evolve, I would need to be able to play desktop games, edit video, manipulate images, be able to type efficiently, and multitask. Secondly, it would need a form factor that allows me to do these things without being hindered by the limitations of a touchscreen, yet still be mobile. Finally, batteries would have to progress to a place where using such a device would not mainly consist of travelling from charger to charger. Until these three things happen, advancements in processing power will be progress just for progress’s sake, and that isn’t all that useful.

[helping]

[nosirrah123]

?

[Cacao]

?

Go to the bottom of the page and change your theme to the 'Night theme'. Your text is a pain to read when you're using that theme because of the color you made the font. He's hinting you to change the color. 

[nosirrah123]

fixed it