Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and this is the Moto X this is Motorola's flagship phone the first it designed in conjunction with Google after being acquired more than a year ago and what's most interesting is that it's not really competing with the other flagship Android devices out there it doesn't have a huge hi-def screen or a crazy fast processor it's going after the iPhone a simple usable friendly phone designed for everybody at the same time though there's no question that the Moto X feels like a premium device it has a different feel from the solid metallic HTC One but even with plastic parts it feels every bit as high-end the buttons are sturdier and click here than most other phones and it has a solidity and heft to it that a device like the GS 4 just doesn't it's not exactly groundbreaking design but it's mature it's comfortable and it's solid of course the real hook to the X's design is that you can customize nearly everything about it most phones today are black and if you're lucky white but the Moto X can be anything you want the front of the phone is either black or white but the back can be any of 18 colors each of which has a different texture and feel to it and there are seven options for the buttons on the side and the accent ring around the camera as well being able to customize the phone probably won't make or break the success of the Moto X but it might make buyers consider it when they would have just passed over a black version on the shelves there are some great combinations and some hideous ones and it's gonna be really interesting to see how Motorola and carriers show those options to customers but I love the idea of being able to treat my phone like my car or my cool Nike hyssops you customize the whole thing through a really simple tool called moto maker which also lets you pick how much storage you want on the phone and even sign into your Google account and pick a wallpaper we couldn't test ourselves and actually buy a phone but the tool is great and it's really nice to be able to have your phone set up and ready to go as soon as you turn it on the front of the phone of course is dominated by a 4.7 inch 720p AMOLED display like all AMOLED screens it's a little oversaturated in contrast II but it's far from the worst screen I've seen there's some slight color banding at times and some seriously over-aggressive dimming but the screen itself is totally usable even though I don't tend to prefer AMOLED screens in general in this case using one enables one of the coolest software features of the Moto X it's called active notifications and it's really great instead of having to turn your phone on unlock it pull down the notification window and open an app the screen just shows you the time in a notification when you have one tap on the screen and it shows you the details it's just so much faster for seeing your email or your Twitter mentions or whatever messages you have I wish you were easier to jump to a specific notification instead of just the most recent one and there's no way to make the little window turn on other than flipping your phone upside down and then back up but I really hope Motorola keeps working on it because it's an awesome feature it's exactly how notifications should work the same is true of the touchless controls feature which is basically just voice activation the actual voice recognition itself is amazingly accurate but it's really weird to set up you have to remember the particular cadence of how you trained your phone with ok Google now or else it just won't hear you sometimes it'll also ask you to choose default apps when you first try to say set an alarm and it's basically useless if you have a passcode on your phone but as long as you don't care about security and don't just trust it to work every time immediately without you looking at it it can be really useful in places the mic and the speaker by the way are both pretty good the phone can hear you and be heard from across the room which makes for solid call quality and speakerphone as well motorola assist on the other hand is pretty much just universally awesome I just turned it on and forgot about it and then was amazed when I was driving and it started telling me out loud that I had incoming calls and text messages it responds to voice commands and made it dead simple to deal with what would have otherwise been a pretty dangerous interaction with my phone assist has other usage scenarios as well like when you're in a meeting or when you're sleeping but it's so useful in the car that I want a moto X just for a while I'm driving otherwise the Moto X is almost a stock Android 4.2.2 fun it comes with some carrier bloatware which is the worst AT&T address-book is awful and so is some of what comes on the verizon model but it's not nearly as bad as on some other phones the phone also prompts you with way too many notifications about your location or Wi-Fi and there's an awkward empty space on the 18 t model whenever you go on Wi-Fi some of the software just feels like lazy oversight but overall having an almost stock phone is great and having it available on all four major carriers is a pretty huge deal it hopefully means faster updates for the Moto X and hopefully means other manufacturers will follow suit as well so Motorola's talked a lot about getting out of the spec war and not caring about being the fastest or most powerful or most core filled smartphone out there but at the same time it's talking a lot about its new 10 megapixel clear pixel sensor which it says uses a fourth clear pixel to let in 75% more light than other smartphones it turns out the camera is really odd sometimes it takes really fantastic pictures especially close up with a nice soft background effect but there's a ton of artifacting and processing noise all over the pictures it looks really terrible sometimes but then sometimes looks really great performance is solid and frankly I'd rather have a noisy picture than a blurry one but overall the Moto X is nowhere near as good as the iPhone 5s camera all around the camera is a lot faster than the iPhone though the quick capture gesture which you activate by turning your wrist like you're using a screwdriver automatically opens the camera from anywhere else on the phone whether it's on or off then tap anywhere on the screen and it takes a picture there are a few more manual controls in settings but it's supposed to be really fast and simple and it is everything else about the phone is kind of the same actually it's really good without being really great performance is solid even with difficult games in HD video but it's not gonna blow your mind or anything it's absolutely enough to use everyday but certainly not bleeding edge and since it's not bleeding edge Motorola told us to expect great battery life that's supposedly the upside to a lower res screen and a slightly lower powered processor and better life is good certainly I got about 15 hours of heavy use out of it and getting a full 24 hours is totally doable under normal circumstances but the Moto X should have been a huge monster of battery life like the RAZR MAXX and it just isn't it's good but not great when I first started using the Moto X I wasn't particularly thrilled with it there just didn't seem to be that many interesting things about the phone but as I started using the assist and touchless control features more and more and seeing that the battery life was solid and the camera was good enough I realized I'm really into this phone for one thing there's really nothing wrong with it even its worst features are just average for a smart phone and its best features are totally unparalleled on the market I wish it had better battery life and a 1080p screen but even despite those things I'm seriously considering buying this phone it's just solid I think I might even get a yellow one we'll see how that goes