Motorola’s Moto X Review

It's been a while since Google bought Motorola but it's only now that we finally see the fruits of that cooperation. The company’s new creation - The Motorola Moto X strives to attract the attention. It is beautifully designed with a svelte slab with smooth curves at its edge, purpose-built to fit in the palm of your hand, the Moto X is pleasing to hold.

The Moto X has a 4.7-inch 720 p AMOLED panel with the RGB sub pixel display. The most attractive part of the phone is the camera. It has a 10-megapixel Clear Pixel (RGBC) rear module capable of pulling in 75 percent more light for faster daytime exposure and low-light performance. It's also bolstered by the Quick Capture feature, enabled from sleep by a double twist of the wrist, which allows for a sub-two-second shot-to-shot speed. As for autofocus and exposure, those are handled automatically. It also packs a 2 MP front camera. The rest of the camera app is very simple. You drag up and down to zoom in and out. Settings Options slide out from the left and gallery from the right.

The real star of the show is Motorola’s X 8 chipset, which actually consists of a 1.7 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, Adreno 320 GPUs, 2 GB of RAM and specialized processors meant to handle natural language processing and information from the X’s myriad sensors. It runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly bean and comes with built in storage of 16 or 32 GB with no micro SD card slot which is a bit of a disappointment as Google wants to push cloud services.

The defining feature of the Moto X is its voice commands, the feature lets users control the phone with simple voice commands prefixed with "Okay, Google Now." Utter those, and a Moto X user becomes master of the universe—to the degree that Google, its developers, and the users themselves have digitized it. The interesting bit is that you don't need to touch the phone or take it out of your pocket. If enabled, it always actively listens to the user and follows commands.

One nice feature: the USB charger has two USB ports. That means you can charge two devices at once. The charger doesn't output enough power to charge a phone and a tablet, but you could easily charge two phones or a phone and e-reader.

And the most impressive part of the Moto X package though is how users can customize it using Motorola’s MotoMaker web app. Users can pick from some 16 colored resin back plates, as well as a black or white front facade, and seven accent colors for your volume and sleep buttons.