Moto X | Android Mobile | Hands-on Review | Specs and Features

Info

It’s been a long time coming, but today, Moto X, the first phone Motorola co-designed with Google is lauched. With the fresh announcement of the $199.99 Moto X, Motorola, plans to rewrite history and put its rivals on the defensive. It is a sleek and compact handset which features advanced abilities to its users. Backed by its corporate parent Google, the Moto X boasts many of the skills its new Verizon Droids flaunt, plus a few slick extras. Better yet they’re all crammed into a highly customizable design built for maximum comfort. The phone itself is great, but the real point is how customizable it is.

Design

Motorola has taken a long time to choose the right shape, size and button layouts of Moto X. It comes with a 4.7 inch which is extremely comfortable to hold. The body is made of polycarbonate plastic that bleeds right into the Gorilla Glass on the front, and the back of the phone has an arc to it. The Power and Volume buttons are placed on the right side so that they can be easily pressed right alongside the Home, Back, and Recent Apps navigation buttons on the bottom of the Moto X. It’s this attention to detail that makes it a thrill to hold the Moto X. 

There are 18 different backplate colors, seven accent colors (the color of your power, volume, and camera ring), two front plate colors (white or black), two different types of cases, two storage size options, 16 wallpapers, and many other options. You can even put a written message on the back and buy Sol headphones that match your device.

Screen

By contrast the Moto X’s 4.7-inch 720p (1,280 by 720 pixels) OLED screen is quite large. The Moto X’s OLED screen technology produces vivid colors, deep blacks, and wide viewing angles.

Of course a display’s impact isn’t based on just resolution, brightness, and color quality. Case in point: the Moto X’s screen has an extremely thin bezel that lovingly hugs the front edges of the handset. This helps the X’s display appear larger than life and command your attention.

Moto X Software and Interface

The phone runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean rather than latest flavor of Android Jelly Bean (version 4.3). .Motorola has teamed up with Google to add plenty of neat tricks, the most notable of which is contextual computing, which company refers as the Touchless Controls, which utilize Google Now to answer questions for you. What’s different here is that you don’t even have to wake the Moto X from sleep mode to use Google Now. You can yell at it from across the room. It’s now possible to wake your phone up using voice commands. And it recognizes your voice thanks to three microphones, active noise canceling, and a voice profile that you help it create by saying some words for it a few times in a row.

Camera

Equipped with a 10-megapixel “Clear Pixel” RGBC sensor and LED flash, Motorola says its new device can snap pictures with speed. It goes on to tout the Moto X’s ability to grab 75 percent more light than competing smartphone cameras. That should result in lower shutter times and clearer images under dark conditions. The camera app, called Quick Capture, has also been revamped to be cleaner and more efficient. With it, the Moto X will go from pocket to image capture in under 3 seconds. Just grab the phone, turn it twice in your hand horizontally, and the camera launches without pressing a button.