Gadgetory

by an Intel NOC bare-bones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game items for planetside 2 click now to learn more let me start this off by saying I'm not a hardcore phone guy so that's the perspective you're about to get I spent some time with the Moto X I really liked it here are my thoughts on it but if you want the more hardcore perspective you know what Marcus Brownlee has a video about it and his videos are great go watch that I will do a brief summary of some of the stuff everyone else has already told you however and it starts with its assembled in America which I guess to me as a Canadian isn't quite as immediately relevant but it does represent a very positive trend that we're seeing not just with Motorola in this film but apples even embracing it with the upcoming Mac Pro it has a customizable experience which is partly achieved by that assembly in America so even though mine is a bone stock you know carbon fiber you're looking black back and black buttons you can actually change around quite a few things for over 200 different combinations it does not support SD expansion hello Google influence so there was no getting around that Google's not a big fan of SD expansion and we don't find it on the Moto X which is the first phone that has really got the Google influence on it since the acquisition of Motorola quite some time ago the hardware is it's ok it's nothing really special so there's an s4 Pro class processor featuring to 1.7 gigahertz course and a fairly capable Adreno 320 GPU wireless AC is a standout feature however and it's normally not included with this particular combination it feels plenty fast out of the box but in reality what doesn't these days there's more to it than CPU speed however page 9 of an ant X excellent review of this phone gives a great summary of why fast well-designed storage is important maybe even more so than CPU speed to keeping your device operating in that like new state that we've all become quite used to now let's start with the hands on I love the shape and size I've complained quite a lot if you watch my weekly live stream the LAN show or really anything else about the fact that the HTC One is just a little bit too big for me well the Moto X has the same size screen 4.7 inches but be of the gentle curvature of the back and the fact that the sides of the bezel are much smaller I find it much more comfortable to hold and I can type one-handed on it very very easily so big thumbs up for the ergonomics of the Moto X it does get a little bit toasty on the backside especially when you're doing something like using it as a hot spot but again not worse than something like the HTC one and while the plastic backing might not be better for heat conduction it will make it so that your hand doesn't get quite as sweaty I love the position of the lock button this is another complaint I have about the one that recessed lock button on the top or flush lock button that's kind of hard to reach without slipping the phone out of your hands no this one's really easy to reach very very natural the way that you're normally holding it you can press it with your thumb or if you're left-handed you can press it with your middle finger very very nice however it's a little bit close to the volume rocker which is not as much bigger than the lock button as I would have liked and is difficult to distinguish the two from each other when the device is in your pocket which a lot of the time let's face it it probably is the other economic thing that I'm not really a big fan of is the three-and-a-half millimeter jack in the middle of the top particularly when watching videos or something where I'm holding the phone like this I did found it kind of got in the way whereas one that's a little bit more off to the side is easier to put my hands around them something that comes right out of the middle I found the auto rotate a little bit on the sluggish side which contrasts with the one which I find really really twitchy to the point where it's annoying I think I'd rather have sluggish then you know just like ADHD you know you accidentally tilt the phone a little bit do you want to go this way you want to go that way so that's just an observation not so much a complaint or a positive thing and the battery life didn't light my world on fire it was about like the HTC One with my general usage although if you want scientific analysis of the battery life again head over to that uh non tech review it's very excellent I'll link it in the video description speaking of lighting my world on fire in batteries those are two things you probably don't want together when I plugged the Moto X into a charger it was like magic it reminds me of my iPhone 4 lightning fast charging the HTC One is so slow and the galaxy s4 is better to an extent but the Moto X charges in like you know 70% 65% as much time as the HTC and it was refreshing to be able to grab the device go oh crap I don't have enough battery I'm on my way out the door throw it on a charger for 20 minutes and then have that actually help and have it get you through the next outing on the screen side of things it's a bit of a different approach than well this one again comparing it mostly to the phone that I have the most experience with it has an AMOLED screen and definitely suffers from what I like to call STD or store television display syndrome with oversaturated colors it looks very vibrant to the point where it almost makes your eyes wanna bleed but that is a characteristic of AMOLED screens and a lot of people like it whites do have a definite yellowish cast that was noticeable on both webpages when I'm reading as well as when watching videos but the flipside of that is that blacks are amazingly deep you can hardly see the difference when you have a black screen up between the bezel and the screen which combined with the touch button design makes the front of the phone seem very very seamless overall I think I like the implementation it doesn't take up screen real estate permanently the way that it did with old Android tablets I mean wasn't that infuriating when just the bottom of your screen was always taken up even when you were in full screen video yeah so it doesn't do that it can reorient itself and never really glitched out on me it was a bit disorienting at first when the buttons disappeared and turned into dots that were obviously not labeled at that point but once I memorized the positions of the buttons it became a non-issue very very quickly the screen is 720p so we're getting used to these 1080p smartphones in this kind of a size range like the s4 and the HTC One but remember guys that is still what Apple would call retina class density so I don't have any complaints and it was not very noticeable compared to the HTC One except with very very small text the main AMOLED advantages that this phone did get to enjoy was during gaming and watching videos there's no blur or smearing amyl LED doesn't have the same kind of ghosting effects that you'll get on a lot of LCD displays and it's extremely power efficient so you can see right here this notification right now is only lighting up the pixels that are needed the rest of them are actually turned completely off and that also contributes to those excellent black levels the viewing angle is also awesome even compared to Super LCD 3 which is what's in use over here but there are some disadvantages the main one being that over saturation looks unnatural once you're used to once you're used to better I mean I guess really that is the main one other than that I really do like the screen the touch interface electronics are visible to me at a comfortable viewing distance on plain backgrounds and even during video playback particularly in cartoons where you're gonna have a lot of single color large spaces and you can really pick out that matrix behind it I wish that we were past this Apple's had it right for years and I wish everyone else would get on board the last thing about the screen the backlight flicker weirds me out a little bit so you can really see especially when moving it quickly and when there's only a few pixels lit up on a black background you can really see the flickering of the backlight but it's only really noticeable when you're moving the phone quickly and so it stopped bothering me after about the first day the lowest light setting on auto is not really suitable for nighttime use and this is a little bit ironic to me because usually phone manufacturers in Auto setting are trying to preserve battery as much as possible and crank things down but I found that for nighttime viewing I actually had to manually turn it down even further on the software side this is actually my first experience with pretty much bone stock Android and I this isn't gonna be popular but I don't really know what all the fuss is about most of the annoying stuff about TouchWiz can be worked around and I quite like HTC Sense there's some stuff that I just found easier to do particularly their multitasking interface is in my mind world's better than the stock Android multitasking interface it only shows you nine things at a time but they're it's much quicker to switch between them and I generally only use about nine things at a time so it's absolutely great for me I did find switching from one phone to another extremely easy the Motorola transfer wizard is completely painless and handles the whole thing wirelessly it only takes probably about an hour and a half it took for me to transfer from the HTC One to the Moto X I did find that again so the whole software thing I did find the update manager pretty aggressive I'm again not much of a power user so I just pick up my phone I expect everything to be where I left it really want them changing the functionality around on me that often I don't necessarily you know need to update to the latest software like the minute it gets released and again I know it's not very popular but their update manager just basically says look you have to install this update you can postpone it but you actually have to pick a time when we're gonna remind you again you can't just do it manually at least that's the default setting there's probably some way to change it but I didn't spend enough time with the phone but it would have bothered me alright so now on to the whole always listening thing Google now is great in theory but the functionality is still quite limited you can't adjust the volume or do other things that seem pretty obvious to me like okay Google now please mute my phone and it's gonna be like what and it's been like google it or something also most of that functionality is disabled if you have any kind of a security lock and I do use my phone for work so it's the kind of thing where I really wouldn't I wouldn't consider running a phone without a security lock on it I'm not a huge fan of the stock Google keyboard Swift key has treated me extremely well so that was one of the first things that I installed on it my last comment on the hole okay Google now voice control thing is having voice control that's constantly listening to you is the future that is the thing that really jumped out because it's incredibly cool to just have your phone be somewhere else and this is even beyond being able to use your SmartWatch to answer your call or or whatever other things you want to do being able to just talk at the phone once it can understand you and has more functionality regardless of whether it's woken up or asleep is very very very cool so in summary I guess it's also a phone voice quality was good no complaints there no one on the other end of the line had any complaints and that pretty much wraps it up thank you for checking out my sort of on oh right unboxing okay so here's the box there's like some documentation I'd microUSB cable a wall wart and presumably awesome remover okay my unboxing and review of the Motorola MOTO X let me know if you liked it let me know if you disliked it by hitting those buttons leave a comment and give us your other thoughts I know we don't do phones that much but we're constantly trying to improve and as always don't forget to subscribe