Moto X Review by MI5

[MI5]

The Moto X is a 4G Smartphone with a 4.7” screen weighing in at 130g.

It has a 10mp camera and runs Android 4.2.2 supported by a Qualcomm MSM8960Pro Snapdragon processor, a Dual-core 1.7 GHz Krait CPU and an Adreno 320 GPU. It has 16 or 32Gb of internal memory and 2Gb of RAM.

The firmware is stripped back to bare bones Android (with a few nice Moto additions) and this all makes it a very quick handset to use. The 2200 mAh battery can provide upto 24 days of standby (manufacturer’s data) but in real world usage I was getting around 40 hours between charges.

SIM free price at present is around £400 so competing directly on price with Sony Z1 Compact and Samsung Galaxy S4.

It should also be noted that there is no option for expandable storage (if that is important to you) and from a spec/performance point of view it is closer to the (considerably cheaper) Nexus 5.

As most people skip to the end for the overall summary I’ll cover it now.

Pro’s

Look & Feel

Performance

Stock Android

Cons

Poor Camera

Price.

One of the nice features of this phone is “touchless control”. OK, so it’s nothing new, having been a feature of Google Now for some time, but it just seemed to work better on the Moto X.

Active display is a unique feature that I haven’t come across before, whereby, the screen will light up if you have any notifications but it does it in a low power limited pixel way so as not to consume battery. If you want to see the full notification you can flick the screen up to open the app that has notified you – Neat and fuss free…..

Another neat trick allied to this feature is that every time you pick the phone up the unlock notification appears on screen so you can just swipe and unlock the phone without having to touch the power button. It’s a little thing but it makes the phone pleasant to use.

Motorola Connect is another nice touch that links to your PC’s Chrome browser so you can get notifications and send text messages from your PC.

The final “extra” I found already included was a lost phone feature. Although this is available via apps anyway it was nice to see it fully integrated into the firmware.

I should mention that call quality was acceptable, not Xperia SP exceptional but nonetheless calls were clear in both directions.

As mentioned previously, the camera is nothing special. It’s perfectly adequate for “snaps” but falls way behind the abilities of the Xperia Z1, for example.

I’ve included a couple of snaps taken in the garden and whilst it copes with changing light quite well, using to zoom function results in a very noisy photo. This is despite having a vast array of options and settings to choose from in the camera app.

So the final question’s that everyone asks….

Marks out of 10? I’d say 7 overall.

Would I buy one? Not at all at the price they are selling for currently. Maybe later when they are cheaper as it is a very competent device but for value for money the Nexus 5 would be my choice and for overall satisfaction I’d go for the Z1.

It just leaves me to say a big thank you to the O2 Social Media Team for giving me the opportunity to try the tech and hope that my humble review will be of value to some other members….