I have been living with the Moto X (2014) as my primary phone for about a week now. The tl;dr is that this phone is great, and I consider it the best phone of the year (I don’t think there are any surprise devices left). This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive review; rather, it’s a bit of rambling about the best and worst aspects of the device.
Right away I have to say I love how much you can customize the Moto X. Android has always been extremely customizable from the software side, but the hardware customizations of the Moto X allow you to make a device that’s truly yours. I broke my normal preference and went with a white front. I picked the walnut back, a shoutout to the woodworking I’ve been doing this year, and put it together with a bronze trim.
Motorola does a great job with minimal software and helpful features. Unlike Samsung, which seems to have the approach of throwing every half-baked feature any intern ever thought of in their phones, Motorola has gone the route of doing just a few things and doing them well. These special features are the types of things that make someone stick with a brand when it’s time to upgrade.
Their take on notifications is awesome. They marry custom software and hardware so that the screen pulsates when you receive notifications, coming alive when your hand passes over the screen (they use IR to detect movement near the screen with low power hardware sensors). It works perfectly. Every. Single. Time. You can drag the notification bubbles to get a quick view and then either dismiss them (which just dismisses them from this custom view, so you can still deal with that unimportant IM when you later unlock the device), open to the notification, or just unlock the device.
Speaking of hardware, the Moto X has a single front-facing speaker that works well when watching videos. Sure, stereo speakers would be nice but just having one good speaker that’s actually aimed toward the listener is a huge improvement over the stupidity of devices where you have to cup the device just right in order to get the sound to come to your ears. Dear other OEMs, no one wants speakers that fire downward; quit doing dumb things.
Another thing that OEMs love to do that’s stupid is to design a thin phone that has a camera lens sticking out to take the brunt of all impact. The one thing you don’t want to scratch on the back of the device and they make it ask for damage. Fortunately, the camera in the Moto X doesn’t protrude from the back like an awkward growth that a doctor should inspect. The overall quality of the camera is good but not fantastic. It’s an improvement over the Nexus 5, but it won’t beat out any recent flagship phones. The lack of OIS means higher ISO levels, which means more noise. It’s also not as good at focusing as other flagships (though, again, better than the Nexus 5… but that’s a pretty low bar).
I almost never use flash on camera phones, because the LEDs result in harsh light up close and very fast dropoff, but Motorola took a different approach with this device that’s worth a brief mention. The ring flash is an interesting idea to avoid harsh shadows, but it does put the LEDs right against the lens, which means red eye is much more likely. Software corrections for red eye are pretty good now, but any time I need to take photos in poor light, I grab my Canon 6D with proper flash if at all possible.
The size and shape of the device is where good and bad come together. The appearance is fantastic. The design isn’t a bland rounded rectangle like most phones and the sides taper to a mere 4mm, giving the device a smoothly rounded shape that feels small for its size. Unfortunately, that means it slips around if you try to use it on a flat surface like a desk or table. This also isn’t a small phone. The screen is 5.2 inches, which may put it on the smaller side for the latest Android phones, but it’s at the edge of one-hand use for me. I’ve owned all the Nexus devices, so I have been adjusting to bigger and bigger phones year after year; still, I would have been happy with the same dimensions as the Nexus 5 (given the thin bezels, they could probably fit a 5″ screen in roughly the same space). Any larger than this and you might as well embrace the largeness and go for six inches. Something like 5.5″ would just make it too big for casual one-handed use but not big enough to get the real advantages of a larger screen, so I’m left wondering what’s in store for the third edition of the device next year.
The AMOLED display is good and mine is calibrated well; the days of egregious colors with AMOLEDs are well behind us, though whites are not as clean as modern LCDs. Worth noting is that this display does not have a terrific range of brightness. It is too bright in low light and not bright enough in intense light. For most use it will be fine, but it’s not going to cooperate in the sun. Polarized lenses will cause the display to disappear when viewed with the device diagonally, but it’s fine in portrait or landscape.
The resolution is good. I think devices of this size should stick with 1080p for a while. I noticed a difference from 720p to 1080p, but I see minimal difference with higher resolutions such as on the G3 (though that might be different for a 6″ device). Plus, many videos are at 1080p, which means you get optimal performance and visuals, and staying at 1080p gives GPUs a chance to improve without having more pixels cut into those improvements, giving better battery life and frame rates.
Battery life has been good for me. I’m getting through a full day of 16 hours on battery with five hours of screen on time, so it’s an improvement from the Nexus 5. That should get even better with Android 5.0, but I’d really like to get to the point where smartphones are easily lasting days. A few reviews online have suggested poor or mediocre battery life, as well as some tweets, but I haven’t seen anyone figure out what the difference is that causes that. I haven’t had a single bad day of battery life, and I haven’t done anything to tweak the settings to improve battery life.
Overall, the device is fantastic. It isn’t better than every device out there in each individual way, but it is better in summary and in execution. Plus, there are a lot of nice little surprises (like the Motorola Spotlight Player) that make the experience of owning this device enjoyable.