Gadgetory

why not take our flagship smartphone and provide the fastest Avenue to consumers at the best price that's the question Motorola put to itself when commissioning the new Moto X style or Moto X pure edition if you're in the US and the company invited us to New York City for a quick look I'm Michael Fisher with pocket now and this is a hands-on with the all new Motorola MOTO X you know what this phone reminds me of the old Palm Pre 3 I know it's a stretch but stick with me if the pre 3 was a scaled up pre 2 which itself wasn't inflated first gen pre and physically that's what the Moto X style is it takes the best elements of its predecessors and scaled them to a larger size same curvaceous in hand feel same reassuring heft more massive than ever at 179 grams same characteristic finger dimple same extensive customizability on that subject we have new options in Motorola's custom moto maker suite including a silicone rubber soft grip backing material Saffiano leather from whore weaned and the traditional wood grain options as well the metal accent on the back calls out the primary camera it's got a 21 megapixel resolution with an F 2.0 aperture and dual tone flash and Motorola also said that it collects more light is faster to focus and capture and produces more accurate colors than its predecessors it's still no optical stabilization or full manual controls here but motorola did add a wide-angle lens and a flash to the 5-megapixel selfie shooter around front thankfully it's pretty unobtrusive software on the camera viewfinder looks much the same which you'll either love or hate I asked Motorola's s VP of Sales why the company opted to go bigger yet again with the formerly petite Moto X his answer more and more people are using their phones to watch movies and browse the web so they decided to include a panel that would make that look good we're talking quad HD resolution here at 5.7 inches just shy of the Nexus 6 screen size now that sounds ridiculous and you'd be forgiven for thinking this thing's got to be a behemoth but actually not so much motorola has gotten the screen to body ratio on this sucker to 76 percent so the result is a phone that's big but it's not as big in the hand as it probably looks on your screen we'll have to see though whether the 3000 milliamp hour battery is enough to power it through a cold day especially given the switch from AMOLED to IPS LCD for the display technology frankly I'm concerned motorola has made big promises in this department before and while the inclusion of turbo charging is nice the lack of any kind of wireless charging is I think a big oversight on software almost nothing has changed we've still got an ear stock build of Android lollipop with the traditional moto suite of enhancements that means you can give your phone commands without touching it it can read your texts aloud to you and you can dictate replies and moto display is back to complete with its IR sensors so you can wave a hand over the phone to see your pending notifications it's all great we love this stuff you find it very useful but Google stole or adapted most of these features for the Nexus 6 so it would have been nice to see Motorola give the new Moto X even more standout capabilities the Moto X pure Edition will come in 16 32 and 64 gig options and you can also opt to add microSD support and Moto maker which is a nice extension of that service powering everything is a Snapdragon 808 processor at 1.8 gigahertz backed up by three gigs of RAM the Moto X pure Edition will go on sale this fall at Motorola combis Viacom and amazon.com and get this it starts at $399 unlocked that's a crazy low price point for this kind of device with these kinds of customizations and it's possibly the biggest indicator yet of how mainstream manufacturers are being forced to adapt to a new reality in the smartphone space whether the Moto X pure Edition will be worth it remains to be seen but given its unique combination of features customizability and price I think it stands a chance of being one of the most significant smartphones of the year when it launches this September for more from Motorola's event in new york city today check out our other videos here on youtube and be sure to visit us in pocketnow.com till next time this has been michael fisher with pocket now captain to phones on twitter thanks for watching we'll see you soon