A different kind of smartphone
It’s difficult and perhaps dangerous to make a big deal
out of a smartphone these days. Can one phone change an industry? Save a
company? Create a market? Perhaps that was true in the days just
following the original iPhone, but times have most certainly changed.
Smartphones are the norm now. No longer a novelty. Not a luxury. Just
what everyone has, in some iterative, similar, necessary form.
The Moto X,
a new phone from the Google-owned Motorola is supposed to be a big
deal. A new way of thinking about a smartphone. When it becomes
available on all four major US carriers at the end of August or early
September, for roughly $199 with a two-year contract, this device will
be one of the first modern, mass-market consumer electronics to be
assembled (though not exactly “made”) in the USA. It’s the first
smartphone that you can customize and have hand-built in a variety of
configurations and colors. And it’s the first smartphone that is
supposed to represent what the new Google-Motorola union is capable of.
But that’s all — mostly —
unimportant unless the phone is any good. It can match your outfit,
sure, but do you actually want it in the pocket of your jeans?
Locally crafted
The Moto X is a good-looking
phone; it’s a good-feeling phone too. As far as raw materials and build
quality go, it ranks among the best smartphones I’ve tested. The device
is a solid — if somewhat anonymous — slab of space-age plastics,
soft-touch surfaces, and crystal clear Corning glass. Unlike the iPhone or HTC One,
there’s no metal here, but I didn’t exactly miss it, and in some ways
the lack of dent-able material makes it seem more rugged. To be fair, I
dropped the device on concrete and nicked a small bit of plastic out of
one of the corners — but everything else seems fine.
Good-looking, and good-feeling
The Moto X is terrific to hold
and use, too. It’s a meaty device, thin enough to compete with its
contemporaries, yet dense. Fully packed. The size is just about perfect
for my hands, and I was able to reach across the 4.7-inch display to the
upper-left corner with little difficulty. The curved back feels right
on. The button placement is not only sensible, but the buttons seem
built to last: clicky, punctual, tough.
So, surprise — or maybe not.
The Moto X is fantastic from a purely hardware-facing perspective. It’s a
beautifully made phone, with the unique advantage of being highly
cosmetically customizable.
Made in America
One of the most intriguing
aspects of the Moto X is that Motorola is taking great pains to see that
the devices are hand-assembled at a plant in Fort Worth, Texas, as
opposed to in an overseas shop such as Foxconn. (Apple is making a
similar move with its yet-to-be-released Mac Pro.) Presumably, that adds
cost and difficulty for Motorola, but as company SVP Rick Osterloh
tells The Verge, "It’s just the right thing to do." Personally I
can’t quite figure out if this is a political move aimed at scoring
points with consumers, dinging competitors, or holding some kind of
higher ground as a US economy-focused company, but it’s an exciting move
nonetheless. Hopefully it’s more than just a novelty.
Hopefully 'Made in America' is more than just a political move
The phones aren’t wholly made
in the States, but even an assembly line of smartphones simply being
pieced together in America is notable. Motorola seems to have its heart
in the right place, and if the phone is any kind of success, it could be
incentive for other manufacturers to consider the US workforce. Of
course, that’s still a big "if."
Build-a-phone
I would tell you that the
device comes in one of two colors — black or white — and that’s true on
some carriers. But on AT&T at first and others soon after, it will
come in many more thanks to hardware customization options Motorola is
offering for the phone. You’re able to select among the many available
combinations using an online tool called Moto Maker, and your order is
sent to an assembly line in Texas where the phone is hand-built and
shipped to you in four days. By allowing you to select the color for
several components of the phone, Motorola gives you up to 252 possible
combinations: more than enough to please even the most demanding
aesthetes.
In that Texas factory, 2,000
or so American workers will be putting together phones based on your
exact specifications. You can choose how much storage you want, 16GB or
32GB. You choose a front face, either black or white, then pick one of
18 backs, with colors like red and yellow, but also teal and plum, and
about four different shades of white. Next, choose an accent color from
seven options — it colors the buttons on the phone, and the ring around
the lens of the camera.
The colors look cool. They look fresh
— of the moment. By comparison, the white and black (and even more
colorful phones like Nokia’s Lumia line) seem drab and predictable. The
monochromatic options look especially behind the times now, like a beige
PC. Come to think of it, even aluminum computers come off as
depressingly retro when you consider Motorola’s proposition. If these
devices are our always-there accessories, shouldn’t we have some say
over how they look? Don’t answer. The answer is yes.
Customization won't make or break the Moto X's appeal
The Moto Maker tool is simple,
clean, and clearly a Google product — it looks vaguely like a Google+
page. Once you pick your phone, you can choose accessories to go with it
(including color-matched headphones from Sol Republic), choose a
wallpaper, and sign in to your Google account. Then as soon as your
phone shows up, it’s already personalized and ready to go. If you don’t
like what you picked, send it back within two weeks and try something
else.
The success of this phone
won’t hinge on a user’s ability to order a made-to-measure version, but
it could compel certain buyers to at least consider the Moto X when they
might have simply passed over a black model on a shelf. The real
question is if Motorola (and by proxy its carrier partners) can message
this properly to users. It needs to be out there in big, bold type. If
consumers don’t know they can get something special, they simply won’t.
The on-screen experience
I know what you’re thinking: a 720p AMOLED display on a high-end Motorola phone? No thanks!
I was thinking the same thing
when I got this device in my hands. And no, it’s not the best display on
a smartphone that I’ve used. But it is far — far — from the
worst. In fact, it’s slightly above average (certainly compared to
Motorola’s past efforts in this area), though not a best-in-class
performer like the HTC One’s Super LCD display. Even next to a Galaxy S4
— a phone with a truly improved AMOLED display — the Moto X screen
seems acceptable. I did notice some slight color banding across the
screen when solid colors (particularly grays) were visible in large
areas, and as with most displays using this technology, colors are
over-saturated, especially reds and oranges.
Not the best screen, but far from the worst
As far as resolution is
concerned, text and graphics look plenty smooth on a 4.7-inch 720p
display, but if you look closely, there’s a hint of pixelation compared
with 1080p devices. I had to study them side by side to make out the
difference, as it’s incredibly slight (keep in mind, the PPI of this
phone is nearly the same as the iPhone 5’s Retina display). I expected
to be bothered by the step backward in pixel density, but it wasn’t an
issue.
I was more annoyed by the fact that, like the Google Play Edition Galaxy S4 and One,
I needed to install a brightness control app called Lux to moderate
dimming on this display. In an attempt to conserve every possible drop
of battery life in these new phones, the system-software brightness
control seems to be over-attenuated to the point of making the screen
unreadable at times.
As with most Motorola phones,
the speakers on the Moto X are excellent. They’re loud enough to use in
the car hands-free (that’s sans Bluetooth), and generally clear for
speakerphone use and even a little YouTube or music playback. I did
notice some mild distortion at higher levels, but overall their
performance puts them in a favorable light, especially compared to the
speakers on Samsung’s latest flagship phone.
Always watching, always listening
The first thing that you
should know about the software on this phone is that it is thankfully,
mercifully, for all intents and purposes "stock" Android. The current
version on the phone is 4.2.2, and it doesn't differ in any major way
from the Galaxy S4 or One Google Play Edition. That's a big deal when
you consider there's never really been a clean Android offering like
this for all of the major US carriers.
But Motorola has added
something to the mix here. The company is intensely focused on how we
interact with our phone when it’s not right in front of us. The company
has come up with a new paradigm called "Touchless Controls," which
allows you to operate the phone in a fashion not wildly dissimilar from
Google Glass.
Essentially, there’s a way to
put your Moto X into an "always listening" mode, which responds to you
speaking the phrase "Okay Google Now." After a short setup where you
train the phone to understand your voice (and your voice alone), you can
spark it to life with that phrase whether it’s awake or asleep. Setup
went very smoothly, though the phone did have issues understanding me
unless I spoke in a very similar tone and cadence all three times, and
remembered how I’d said it going forward. Once I figured that out, it
was off to the races.
Don't forget the exact way you said 'Okay Google Now'
It worked quite well for
nearly every task I could think of — making a note, sending a text,
making a phone call, or simply searching Google. As with most voice
recognition, it’s prone to mishearing you (especially in a noisy
environment), but when at home or work in a quiet setting, it did fine.
But there’s a catch. The
touchless controls are rendered nearly useless if you have any kind of
security lock on your phone. You can still use it to make calls, but
everything else requires that you unlock your phone, which requires that
you pick it up and interact with it… meaning you just defeated the
whole idea of "touchless controls." If the voice recognition was as good
and as personalized as Motorola would like it to be, this wouldn’t be
an issue. But it’s an issue right now, and a bit of a bummer if you care
at all about your phone’s security (and let’s face it, you should).
Active Notifications
Another major addition to
Android with the Moto X is a set of features Motorola calls "Active
Notifications." It’s essentially a lockscreen replacement that alerts
you to incoming messages, emails, or just about anything else with an
icon and clock flashing in the center of the screen. Because the display
of the Moto X is AMOLED, it can light only the portion of the screen it
needs for these notifications, which make them low power (and low
annoyance in darker rooms).
Tap on a notification to see a
preview of its contents, and swipe upward to unlock the phone directly
into that application. If several notifications come in, it will collect
them as icons and let you preview the most recent one.
Active Notifications are exactly what notifications should be
It took a little while to get
used to how this concept works, but once I "got" the expected behavior,
it was wildly useful. I like to know when I get an email so I have a
notification sound every time one comes in — but they’re not all of
equal value. Being able to preview the information before unlocking the
phone has definitely saved me time.
Still, Motorola can take this
further. Right now, there’s no way to cycle through your notifications,
so you can only take action on the most recent one. Having some gestural
way to flip through your separate notifications — or at least types of
notifications — would be really handy. But even in its present state
it’s a welcome change from having to unlock the device and pull down the
notification shade just to see who’s pinging.
Motorola Assist / Driving
The Moto X’s most intriguing
and maybe revelatory features reside in an application simply labeled
"Assist." WIthin the app a suite of settings allow you to customize your
phone for various scenarios — sort of like Apple’s "Do Not Disturb" on
steroids. In a car.
Assist does add a feature
almost identical to "Do Not Disturb," which silences your phone for all
but the most important callers at certain hours. It’s not unlike
Motorola’s old Smart Actions app, which also let you set up macros to
open Rdio when you plugged in your headphones, or turn on Bluetooth when
you got home. Assist does fewer things better. It lets you quiet your
phone when you have meetings scheduled (using your calendar as a guide),
and one other option which took me by surprise — and kind of took my
breath away.
Motorola Assist is enough by itself to make me want a Moto X
Assist senses when you’ve
begun driving in your car, and immediately switches into an almost
conversational, hands-free experience. I took a trip and forgot all
about the feature, only to be shocked and pleasantly surprised when my
phone told me I had an incoming message from my wife. Then the phone
read me the message, as if I was having a conversation with an assistant
— or, you know, Siri. More impressively, a moment later a call came
through, and the phone asked if I’d like to answer. Of course I would,
you beautiful machine. All of this would have been incredibly
distracting and dangerous if I had to look at my phone, but here it was,
painless.
That was the moment with the
Moto X when I started to seriously consider the phone. I’m not sure what
impressed me more: the ease of this function, or the fact that I didn’t
have to think about where I was and what mode I was in.
Point, and shoot
I don’t understand the Moto X
camera. It’s great, but it’s also terrible. The 10-megapixel rear camera
is capable of snapping gorgeous pictures with fantastic bokeh. Thanks
to a "clear pixel" that Motorola says lets in 75 percent more light,
it’s good in dark situations too. Very good. Yet somehow the Moto X’s
post-processing is so aggressive and so ubiquitous that it ruins as many
shots as it saves. There’s terrible artifacting and noise even in
well-lit photos — like you cranked the JPEG settings way down. I’ll take
a noisy photo over a blurry photo any day, which is basically the same
decision Motorola made here, but sometimes the phone goes overboard
trying to improve your photos. Way overboard.
Motorola keeps getting the
user interface right, though. Apparently the company found that most
people never dig into the camera settings, so the app basically removes
all of them. Just tap anywhere on the screen, and it automatically
exposes, focuses, and shoots. It’s a bit annoying sometimes, because
there’s no way to focus before you actually take the picture. I got a
lot of bad shots this way, especially when I took a picture of someone
with a bright background. But I got a lot of good, fast shots this way
too. Shots I would have missed otherwise.
TOO OFTEN, THE CAMERA IS HIT, THEN MISS
Getting to the camera app is
fast, too. The company has added a gesture to pop open your camera,
which actually proved to be faster and more useful than just about any
other "quick" camera option I’ve tested. Just twist the phone three
times — right, right, right, sort of like shaking a drink — and no
matter what you’re doing, or even if the screen is off, it jumps
straight to the camera. It’s not a perfect gesture, and it’s not always
easy to do right, but even when I had to do it a couple of times it was
faster than turning the phone on, unlocking it, and finding the camera
app icon.
Redefining mid-range
Motorola made the Moto X with
mid-range specs, and isn’t at all ashamed of it. It shouldn’t be: the
phone is fast and smooth. It’s more than sufficient for everyday use. I
played games, watched movies, made calls; everything worked better than
fine. The Epic Citadel demo ran at a near-constant 60 FPS with
the highest graphics settings on. It’s not as fast as the GS4, but I
only noticed the difference when I looked at them side by side. For now,
our phone hardware is clearly more capable than it needs to be;
mid-range seems to be just fine in this case.
Mid-range is also supposed to
help with battery life. Motorola could have built a monster of longevity
like the RAZR Maxx — and it should have — but it didn’t. It definitely
gets a full day of use: I used it heavily for 15 hours before it died,
and if you use it like most people use their phones, you won’t need to
charge it during the day. It lasted for 7 hours, 14 minutes on the Verge
Battery Test, which loads popular websites and high-res images with
brightness at 65 percent; that’s a very good score, far better than the
HTC One and the GS4, but well below class leaders like the Maxx or the
Galaxy Note II.
Wrap-up
Motorola Moto X
Good Stuff
- Attractive, customizable design
- Assist, Touchless Control, and Notifications are great additions to Android
- Essentially a pure Android device for all four carriers
- Solid battery life
Bad Stuff
- AMOLED display has some problems
- Camera processing can produce excessive artifacting
- Some carrier bloatware
It's not a perfect phone, but it's pretty damn good
I’m
going to level with you: I was pretty underwhelmed by the Moto X based
on what I heard and saw at the company’s product announcement. Even my
first few hours with the phone left me scratching my head, wondering why
I would want this device when wonderful, higher-end, stock devices like
the One and S4 Google Play Editions were available. And frankly, I was
wondering why anyone would want the device considering the
relatively strong options out there if you’re in the market for a $199
Android phone right now.
But once I used the phone
heavily, I started to come around to the Moto X in a way I hadn’t
expected. The additions to the software that Motorola has made are
legitimately useful and really quite impressive. They add to the
experience of Android without removing what is most vital in Google’s
software, unlike the competition, which seems intent on obscuring what’s
already a sophisticated and beautiful operating system. If Motorola
ends up producing a Google Play Edition of this phone that retains the
customizable hardware and software additions like Assist and Active
Notifications — this could be as good an option as the S4 or One.
And the phone is nice. I mean,
really nice to use. It’s a reminder that the way something is built can
be as important as what it’s made of.
Combined with the ability to
get a truly unique, customized device that’s as compelling as anything
I’ve recently tested — one assembled in America — it begins to look like
an awfully good option.
The Moto X is not a perfect
phone, but neither is any other phone on the market right now. What it
is, however, is a pretty damn good phone — and one I can recommend.
But good luck trying to pick a color.
The Breakdown
More
times than not, the Verge score is based on the average of the
subscores below. However, since this is a non-weighted average, we
reserve the right to tweak the overall score if we feel it doesn't
reflect our overall assessment and price of the product. Read more about
how we test and rate products.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- Design 9
- Display 6
- Camera(s) 6
- Reception / call quality 9
- Performance 8
- Software 9
- Battery life 8
- Ecosystem 8
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