Motorola officially launches the new Moto X

[bbqsauce]

tabs in chrome while listening to music

I truely wonder how many tabs you have opened. I have yet to break the 1.5gb barrier on my nexus 5. Only go over 1gb once in a blue moon. Plus I don't close my apps.

[shiftberry]

Maybe this is going way far back but remember this one?

 

looks great 

[LAwLz]

Things I am disappointed about:

Snapdragon 801 - Why not Snapdragon 805? The 805 is actually quite a lot better. Huge performance (and efficiency) gain on the GPU, and hardware accelerated HEVC decoding. 

2GB of RAM - Not nearly as big of a deal on a phone as on a tablet, but it's still a bit disappointing. Even at 1080 there is a decent performance increase by having 3GB of RAM (more VRAM).

16GB with no expandable storage - No... Just no. We should really move to 32GB as minimum, and not having expandable storage on your flagship device is just not okay.

Small battery - That's just too small. You might say "oh but the Moto X had decent battery life and it had a pretty small battery". Yes that's true, but this battery is just barely bigger than the previous Moto X. I just don't think 0.38Whr will be enough to counter the 0.5" bigger screen.

No OIS - This really should become standard these days...

 

 

Things I like or am interested in:

Front facing speakers - Really good. Not really much more to say.

The new camera flash - Could be cool. Could be nothing special.

500 dollars unlocked - It's okay I guess. The price on smartphones has gotten way too high over the last few years.

[mayu]

I'm currently use the older Moto X which has a 2200mAh battery, but I get at least 11 hours on heavy to moderate use. At the end of the day (around 10 pm) I've never been under 35%.

 

Motorola is all about efficiency. Their X algorithm makes the most use of the battery life by having different CPU cores run specific programs. If they do that again on the new Moto X, in which the X algorithm will only get better, battery life won't be a problem at all.

 

I've become a huge fan of Motorola just because they show that specs and a crap load of features don't mean everything. People had the same exact skeptical ideas of the original X and so far, the Moto X is the best phone I've used on a daily basis.

 

Even in that case considering boost in screen size and resolution, 2300mAh (100mAh + over og) doesn't look good  , they better optimize it even better 

[LAwLz]

Motorola is all about efficiency. Their X algorithm makes the most use of the battery life by having different CPU cores run specific programs. If they do that again on the new Moto X, in which the X algorithm will only get better, battery life won't be a problem at all.

 

I've become a huge fan of Motorola just because they show that specs and a crap load of features don't mean everything. People had the same exact skeptical ideas of the original X and so far, the Moto X is the best phone I've used on a daily basis.

What are you talking about? Specific programs running on specific CPU cores? What good would that do? Are you talking about the more specialized cores that handles things like voice recognition and sensors? Snapdragon chips have had that for quite some time now.

This is the first time I've heard about an "X algorithm". Can you clarify a bit more about what it does?

[Nomelas]

Not quite.

Factor in shipping and import fees, which you won't have to pay with Motorola as they have larger market penetration, and it rapidly goes skyward. $30 for shipping, more for DHL to clear it at the border.

It comes a lot closer to $500. The specs aren't that far off between the two.

While I do understand it's almost $500 CAD for the OnePlus, you also have to realize that the Moto X price is $499 USD as well, and will be a bit higher in Canada. Part of the overall cost to Canadians for the OnePlus includes taxes, something that $499 price tag also isn't including. The total price of the Moto X in Canada will be around $600 to $650 @ 16GB internal storage....

[LAwLz]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It literally has 8 cores, and a lot of them working for specific programs, making it efficient. And no, the Moto X is the first one to use this, that's why it was such a big deal. It had a small battery and supposed only 2 cores for the OS (+ 4 for graphics, +1 dedicated for language processing, +1 for contextual recognition) but it ran for hours and performed very well.

 

Instead of having one multi-core CPU running 24/7 trying to do everything on the phone, the Moto X has 2 for multitasking and the OS itself, another completely for graphics, and essentially two special ones for Google Now (a special feature) and other features such as the notification feature w/ AMOLED display. If any other smartphone tried to do all this (like MKBHD said himself at 5:15 of the video) it would burn through the battery life...but the X8 system balances the battery life.

It's mostly marketing. It actually has more than 8 cores but I guess even Motorola thought that X11 would have sounded ridiculous.

For comparison, I will use Motorola logic to count the cores in the Snapdragon 801.

 

4 CPU cores.

8 GPU cores (I *think*).

3 DSP cores.

2 cores in the ISP.

1 sensor core

So the Snapdragon 801 could be called an X18 because it has 18 "cores".

 

The thing is, the extra cores don't help with battery life for general stuff. It just helps save battery for the things like voice command which is always on. Besides, the new Moto X seems to be using (I haven't had it confirmed) a standard Snapdragon 801. No extra chips added (because Snapdragon now has everything Motorola had to add in their custom chip before).

The notification preview is possible because of the SAMOLED screen, not the X8 chip. The same could be done on any smartphone with a SAMOLED screen (like the Galaxy S series, Galaxy note series, some Nokia phones, the HTC One S, and so on).

 

Even if the screen is more efficient (newer generation of SAMOLED), the CPU/GPU are more efficient etc, it's still higher resolution and a lot bigger, while keeping the battery pretty much the same. Bigger screen = higher power usage.

Don't be disappointed if it has lower battery life than the old Moto X, that's all I am saying.

 

The Moto X didn't exactly have class leading battery life either. It was pretty mediocre if you took the smaller and lower resolution display into consideration.

[LAwLz]

Like I said, I'll give Motorola the benefit of the doubt. Low specs or not, their phones have been great the last year or so.

 

And no no no, no where did I state or post that they had extra physical chips.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2422513,00.asp

 

It's basically a way to use the cores more efficiently, and it works.

Well the "extra chips" I was referring to is the contextual core and the voice recognition core.

 

Think of it this way, those cores don't give you longer battery life. What they do is let you use some features without losing battery life. For things like checking email, playing games, browsing the web, watching videos etc the phone will still use the same amount of battery regardless of it having those extra 2 cores.

 

 

Oh well. Neither of us know how the battery life will be, but I find it hard to believe that increasing the resolution that much, and increasing the screen size by 0.5" won't have a big negative effect on the battery life. Even with voodoo magic it will be hard to keep the screen-on time the same. It might get better standby time though.

The reviews will be interesting.

[razor767]

Spec wise, it looks pretty good. 

[Askew]

AMOLED awww yiss this is good news indeed and will be my next phone.