Having spent the best part of 2 weeks using the Moto X, here’s a more complete review to add to my first impressions post.
Overall, I’ve been very impressed by the Moto X, and feel this device deserves to be so much more popular than it has been. I feel this may, in part, be due to the specs war that is going on in the Android space as on paper the Moto X seems particularly unimpressive with only a dual core chip running at 1.7Ghz, and this tends to be a focus of some of the reviews you see. Disregarding specs, and going purely on my usage of the phone, I’ve not experienced any of the slowdown I have done when using the Galaxy S4 for example. Part of this may be down to the lower resolution display, which is 720p and not 1080p, but on a 4.7 inch screen I feel this is more than adequate! The display looks pin sharp (and no amount of words do the quality justice, it’s something you need to see with your own eyes to truly appreciate, colour reproduction is amazing), and is clear enough to use as your sat nav device in your car (it successfully saw me to Chessington and back last week using Waze). The phone has slim bezels either side of the screen, and the ‘tear drop’ shape of the device means it fits in your hand very well, as it avoids the ‘flatness’ of some phones that can make them awkward to hold onto.
As far as the version of Android it runs, it’s mostly stock with a few Motorola additions, the test device I had was on 4.4, but I believe 4.4.4 is currently being rolled out in the UK as I type this, and Motorola have already confirmed this will be updated to Android L.
Battery life is pretty decent too, I managed nearly 2 days of average (in my case, which consists of random Twitter, Gmail use, along with Google Play Music streaming and sat nav on my work commute) use. Obviously this will drop under heavy use, but it will see you through a day easily even after streaming video, music and some game playing.
Camera quality is fairly decent, struggles a bit with dark shots, but when there is plenty of natural light I got some fairly decent results. I’ll add some sample photos I took in later post.
Call quality is as good as you’d expect from a Motorola device, and the speaker phone/volume is loud enough that you can use it quite happily as a hands free device when driving (provided it’s securely fastened in an in car holder obviously :smileytongue:).
Really liked the Active Display feature, I imagine this function helps some way with prolonging the battery life of the device. It’s intelligent enough to know not to turn on the display when it’s in your pocket, and when you have an unread notification it kind of ‘pulses’ the display on and off to try and draw your attention to it. Simply picking the phone up will show the unlock icon, or any unread alerts you may have, these can included SMS’s or any of the user definable content such as Facebook, Twitter, Gmail etc. You can turn this off at night, or a set period of time to your liking.
Anyone that uses this phone should check out the ‘Spotlight Stories’ app for a laugh.
Overall, especially at O2’s current refresh price of £192, I would thoroughly recommend this phone to anyone who wants a decent Android device. The combination of relatively stock Android, plus Motorola’s helpful additions such as Active Display, Motorola Assist and Touchless Control make this one of the better Android devices out there currently, and it doesn’t suffer from the bloat that can affect other manufacturers phones (cough, Samsung, cough)!
Once again, thank you to @Toby and the O2 Community Team for letting me be part of this test, and I'm looking forward to trying out some other devices soon!!
