Introduction

While I talked about Motorola’s issues in the launch article for the new Moto X, it’s well worth repeating. Motorola has been through a lot these past few years. Once the iconic symbol of Android with their Droid smartphones, Motorola had lost its way. It wasn’t unusual to see one phone launch after the other, with no real regard for strategy, and no real cohesive message to tie all of their devices together. If anything, there was a point where Motorola had become an ODM for network operators in the US, with no real international presence. After Google acquired it in 2012, we saw the launch of the Moto X in 2013. The amount of hype that I saw online before the announcement of the Moto X was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately, the device that launched didn’t quite fit with the hype. The Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset was decidedly mid-range by the time it launched. The display was good for the time, but AMOLED wasn’t quite the imminent LCD replacement that it is today. The camera was also rather unfortunate at launch. For better or worse, the Moto X was a phone with the right size and shape, but a lot of hardware choices that aged poorly. This leads us to the new Moto X. On the surface, this phone corrects a lot of issues that were present in the original Moto X. The new Moto X brings an SoC that is up to par with its competition, a new camera with a Sony sensor, and an improved AMOLED panel. Of course, I’m not going to spend too much time covering the basic specifications when a table will suffice.

	Motorola Moto X (Gen 1)	Motorola Moto X (Gen 2)
SoC	1.7 GHz Dual Core Snapdragon S4 Pro	2.5 GHz Quad Core Snapdragon 801
RAM/NAND	2 GB, 16/32/64GB NAND	2GB, 16/32GB NAND
Display	4.7” 720p Super AMOLED	5.2” 1080p Super AMOLED
Network	2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x15 IP block UE Category 3 LTE)	2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 IP block UE Category 4 LTE)
Dimensions	129 x 65.3 x 5.7-10.4mm, 139 grams	140.8 x 72.4 x 3.8-9.9 mm, 144 grams
Camera	10MP Rear Facing, 1/2.6" CMOS size (OV10820), 2.1MP FFC	13MP Rear Facing, 1/3.06" CMOS size (Sony IMX135), 2.1MP FFC
Battery	2200 mAh, 3.8V, 8.36 Whr	2300 mAh, 3.8V, 8.74 Whr
OS	Android 4.4.4	Android 4.4.4
Connectivity	802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, MHL, DLNA, NFC	802.11a/b/g/n/ac + BT 4.1, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, MHL, DLNA, NFC
SIM Size	NanoSIM	NanoSIM

As with most reviews, physical impressions are always a good place to start. In terms of look and feel, the new Moto X starts off incredibly well. The metal frame is something that Motorola is especially proud of, as they've managed to enable an external antenna design without causing some of the infamous deathgrip issues. At any rate, it really feels great in the hand, especially because of the varying thickness. The metal frame can be as thin as 3.3mm in the corners, which really feels razor thin. Fortunately, the center is much thicker to provide for better grip. As a result, the phone is secure in the hand and I never really felt like I would drop it. Overall, I really think the feel of the phone is great. While the size is approaching an uncomfortable level, it manages to stay just short of it because the phone is so thin.

However, I’d like to cut this short as I’ve already given most of my initial impressions in the launch piece. While I haven’t been able to get around to writing my experience with Motorola’s tour, Motorola and their PR team have done an incredible job of introducing the product and allowing for plenty of time to get first impressions, photos, and ask all kinds of questions.

Cellular Architecture

Instead, given the amount of information disclosed by Motorola, I wanted to start this review with a discussion about cellular architecture, as it’s one of the few areas where we still seem to be working with black boxes. For those that are unfamiliar with the basics of how current RF architecture is set up, there are a few major components to talk about. We have antennas, antenna switches and duplexers, band filters, power amplifiers, a transceiver (which is made of multiple parts but that’s for another day), and the modem.

So let’s talk about what’s in the new Moto X. While antennas are still an area I’ve been working on learning more about, we can talk about band support on the Moto X. I’ve attached a table below with a full list of supported bands.

Motorola Moto X (2014)
FCC ID	Operator/Region Target	CDMA Bands	GSM	WCDMA	LTE	CA
IHDT56QA1 (XT1095/XT1097)	AT&T/T-Mobile USA	-	850,  900, 1800, 1900	850, 900, AWS, 1900, 2100	2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 17, 29	-
IHDT56QA2 (XT1096)	Verizon	800, 1900	850, 900, 1800, 1900	850, 900, 1900, 2100	2, 3, 4, 7, 13	-
IHDT56QA3 (XT1092)	?	800, 1900	850, 900, 1800, 1900	850, 900, AWS, 1900, 2100	2, 4, 5, 12, 17, 25, 26, 41	-
IHDT56QA4 (XT1093/XT1094)	EU	-	850, 800, 1800, 1900	850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100	1, 3, 7, 8, 20	-

What might be notable is the lack of carrier aggregation on the new Moto X, which suggests that there is only a WTR1625L transceiver inside, with no WFR1620 companion chip to go with it. This is a rather conventional configuration at this point, and I suspect that phones with support for carrier aggregation will have to wait until WTR3925 which should be in most high end phones in 2015. The modem is also common at this point, as the MDM9x25 IP block in Snapdragon 800/801 has been around since the LG G2 which launched a year ago.

Of course, the real story here is the antenna tuner which I also wrote about in the launch piece. While most of the antenna tuner is hidden from view, there is one aspect that seems to be exposed to the OS. This one aspect is Cypress Semiconductor’s CapSense controller. This sounds strange, but I don’t think there’s any other explanation for why this controller is present. While it’s normally used for capacitive buttons such as in the Samsung Galaxy S/Galaxy Note line, there are no capacitive buttons or sliders present on the phone. In addition, none of the gestures/actions seem to rely upon capacitive sensing. This seems to rely upon the IR sensor system instead, so that doesn’t make sense either. The touchscreen is definitely an Atmel solution. This leaves the antenna tuner. While a bit outlandish, it seems that this controller is capable of detecting capacitance directly in addition to determining whether a finger/hand is on the sensor or not. While I’m sure that it’s necessary for Motorola to measure the standing wave ratio/signal reflection in addition to capacitive sensing on the relevant antenna pieces, this could give Motorola’s antenna tuner an advantage in speed as the capacitive sensors could detect the change in capacitance and pre-emptively change the tuning in the antennas instead of waiting for an increase in signal reflection before attempting to retune the antenna.

Moto Voice

One of the highlight features of the previous Moto X was Touchless Control, and Motorola spent a great deal of time trying to empahsize improvements in this feature with at the launch event. For those unfamiliar with Touchless Control in the previous Moto X, I would reference Brian's Moto X review. For those that don't want to read another review, the quick explanation is that Moto Voice acts as a voice command system, similar to Siri but with integration into Google Now and it works purely based on voice instead of long pressing a home button or a swipe gesture on the navigation keys. With the new Moto X, not too much changes, but there are some key features added. First, we see the ability to assign new keywords other than “Ok Google Now”, which is nice. I’m not really sure how this is enabled, as based upon some digging Motorola is still using a TI C55x DSP to enable low power hotword detection.

For the most part, other than this change I don’t really see a major step forward in functionality, although I’m sure that some will see a great deal of benefit from the voice-enabled selfie feature, which automatically opens the camera app with the countdown as seen above. Voice control continues to be an area where I’m unsure that there’s functionality to be had all the time. For the most part, I only seem to use voice control in situations where my hands are unable to manipulate the phone, which basically means when I’m driving or walking. For better or worse though, this is an area where wearables are much more effective. For example, it’s quick and easy to raise my wrist and ask for navigation to an event while driving compared to trying to reach into my pocket and carefully pull out my phone without dropping it under the seat. While explaining how this happens is a long story, the critical point here is that Moto Voice doesn’t really have a killer use case that isn’t done better by something else.

At any rate, the user interface also changes with the new Moto X. We see a great deal more color and a generally friendlier UI compared to the rather dark theme we saw before. Motorola seems to be following Android UI trends in general with this move, although it will affect battery life on AMOLED panels. The setup process is relatively simple, although there’s definitely a need for a quiet room. Even mild amounts of background noise will complicate setup. I also noticed that differing aural environments could alter the responsiveness of Moto Voice, although this could be due to the function turning itself on and off due to a bug in the ROM.

Moto Display

While Moto Voice is a bit limited in usability, Moto Display continues to be a great feature. For those that are unfamiliar with how Active Display worked in the previous Moto X, I would reference Brian's Moto X review again. For those that aren't familiar with Moto Display, this is effectively a low power mode in the Moto X that will display notifications and the time that also acts as a lockscreen. In order to support this low power mode, it isn't actually a part of Android OS and is programmed by a microcontroller so it isn't possible to take a screenshot of Moto Display.

While what we saw in the original Moto X was fantastic, the new Moto X takes things further by adding Moto Actions. While one part of Moto Actions is waving to silence alarms and phone calls, the other aspect allows for proximity to turn on Moto Display. This means that there’s no longer a need to shake the table or wiggle the phone in order to glance at notifications. While the original Moto X had a similar feature, it relied on the proximity sensor and required precise hand placement in order to turn on the display. Instead, with the new Moto X all that is needed is a hand wave or just getting close to the phone. It doesn’t really need to be accurate either, as pretty much any hand wave over the display will cause Moto Display to activate. In practice, handling of the notifications is still mostly similar, although now there’s the ability to display up to three notifications instead of just one.

While Active Display in the original Moto X was good, the new Moto X really turns it into a fantastic feature. It's hard to really explain because on the surface it seems rather mundane but after using Moto Display it's clear just how much time it saves. The glance time is just right to view notifications and the hand wave/approach action is effortless compared to pressing a home button or tapping the display. There's also no doubt that this helps to improve real world battery life as the seconds used to glance at notifications adds up quickly over time, especially because initial unlock will drive the CPUs to max power to ensure responsiveness.

If I’m honest, I’m not really completely sure how this new feature is implemented either. TI’s MSP430 is gone, and the part that seems to take its place is an STM401 sensor processor, which could be the solution used to enable Moto Display and also acts as a sensor hub. I'm not really sure what drove a change, but it's possible that the MSP430 limited feature expansion.

Software

By now, most people are probably familiar with Motorola’s new strategy. Instead of focusing upon differentiating their user interface with a visual redesign and custom applications to replace almost every function, Motorola has stuck with the UI that we see in Nexus devices and any build on Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Instead, Motorola is focusing upon adding value with applications that add functionality and don’t really deviate from the established design language. Motorola claims that this improves performance and also the rate at which they update their phones. While the former is definitely true when comparing to some of the heavier UIs, it’s not necessarily true with all OEM skins. The latter seems to be true all of the time though, as so far with this strategy Motorola has been one of the first to release new Android OS updates.

Of course, we need to go over the value additions that Motorola has made to the software. There are a few key applications that we see in the new Moto X, namely Connect, Motorola Migrate, and Moto Assist. There’s also Spotlight, but that application is more about fun and some interactive stories. The other application that only needs a sentence to explain is the equalizer, which works for both the speaker and headphone jack. In the interest of not wasting everyone’s time, we’ll talk about Connect first. While one aspect of it is to control the Moto 360 and Power Pack Micro, the differentiating aspect is to act as a way to send and receive text messages through the computer. In addition, this application allows for a computer to remotely ring the connected Moto X and also track call logs.

While these features are nothing new and can be found in the form of Airdroid on the Play Store, the difference is the polish that this feature has. The interface is clean and fast, and feels like a native application. It just works, which is surprisingly rare with some of the features that I see on smartphones. It works through WiFi and cellular data, and is tied to a Motorola or Google account, so the initial setup is the only area that takes any amount of time.

Motorola Migrate is decidedly more mundane, and is simply a solid way to transfer data from another smartphone running iOS or Android to the new Moto X. Interestingly enough, it also provides a method for transferring information from the Moto X to another phone. While I don’t really have any need for such an application, it would definitely be great for anyone new to Android as it would be an easy solution.

Moto Assist rounds out the Moto app suite and provides great functionality, although Moto Assist requires high accuracy location to be on all the time to function properly. By using data such as time, calendar events, and location, Moto Assist will change settings on the phone. For example, by default the phone will automatically be silenced and Moto Display will be turned off between 11 PM and 6 AM. If the phone detects that you are driving, it will start playing music over Bluetooth or the headphone jack and read text message aloud. It also will announce the caller ID for incoming calls. The final two profiles are home and meeting, and the former is simply the driving profile without music options and the latter is the sleep profile with auto-reply instead of shutting down Moto Display.

Needless to say, it’s a convenient feature. However, I have to question the wisdom of using GPS data as it would require a great deal of monitoring in order to work reliably, which would hurt battery life. At any rate, these features work as advertised.

Overall, I think Motorola has added some decent software features, but most of their differentiation comes from the integration of software and hardware. While Motorola has set themselves apart from the other OEMs by not skinning Android at all, they face direct comparison to the Google’s Nexus line as the experience is so similar. While stock Android is great in some ways, I also personally feel that it’s a bit user unfriendly as some functionality just doesn’t work as expected. The quick settings drawer is a great example of this, as some buttons will toggle on long press and others will toggle on a short press. The contrast of both dark and light themed applications is irritating as well, although Android L will go a long way to fix all of these complaints.

At any rate, most of these issues are nitpicking. Anyone that actually buys this phone will find a great software experience. While OEM UIs have the potential to add to the Android experience, for the most part the major reskins tend to detract from the experience rather than adding to it. Motorola has done a great job by adding to it, even if they don’t add as much as I’d like. I really do hope that the launch day OTA fixes a lot of the issues I've encountered, as there's noticeable levels of general bugginess.

Battery Life

Unlike most subjects that need significant explanation to justify the rigor of testing, battery life is something that everyone can appreciate. However, for those that are unfamiliar with our testing, we make it a goal to produce a repeatable, realistic test. In order to do this, our web browsing test runs a loop of webpages that ensures all power states with the screen on are properly represented in the test. In order to control for extraneous variables we standardize display brightness to 200 nits with strong signal.

When running the web browsing test on WiFi, we see that the new Moto X manages to regress in battery life from the previous Moto X. This is a bit of an expected result as only the newer process of the SoC and new display technology can offset the decrease in battery size. In the LTE comparison there's a great deal more complexity as the previous Moto X had a less power efficient modem and RF front-end. The new Moto X has the same WiFi chipset as the previous Moto X, which is Qualcomm's WCN3680.

On LTE, the new Moto X is noticeably trailing behind the rest of the competition. Here we see that battery life is just behind the LG G2, but behind all recent Apple iPhones and just about every other Android high-end flagship phone launched in 2014. While the new Moto X has definitely improved over the previous Moto X, it seems that Motorola has used the newer AMOLED panel and lower power SoC to avoid using a significantly larger battery.

However, web browsing is not the only scenario worth testing. As the web browsing test is largely dominated by display power, it’s important that we test scenarios where all the other subsystems are more dominant in the power equation. For this, we turn to Basemark OS II and GFXBench 3.0, which focus more on CPU and GPU power consumption.

Unfortunately, I could not get our GFXBench rundown test to complete despite multiple attempts as it seems that the phone would either reboot or kill the application. Looking at the logs for the rundown test reveals that there’s no real change in FPS from run to run. After some extra investigation, it seems that this build (KXE21.187-43) doesn't do any throttling on GPU, so any workload that can keep the GPU at maximum heat output without dependence on CPU can cause the phone to reach unacceptable temperatures.

At any rate, the Basemark OS II run did complete so we can look at that.

Unfortunately the Basemark OS II test reveals that battery life is poor compared to the competition. Normally, low battery life is compensated for by high performance but the battery score is only above the Sony Xperia Z1s and Huawei Honor 6, and the latter had no power budgeting mechanisms on the SoC to keep battery life at acceptable levels.

Overall, it’s hard to really say much in the way of praise for battery life. While it’s definitely surprising just how much battery life Motorola has achieved given the size of the battery and display, I suspect that Motorola found themselves in an uncomfortable situation as they tried to deliver a bigger display while keeping the phone easy to use with one hand. I suspect that all things considered, Motorola would have been better off if they went for a smaller display and the smaller height and width that would logically follow. It’s also not that the battery life is bad in an absolute sense, but it isn’t as good as its peers. Motorola is likely tracking closely to their estimated 24 hours of “mixed usage”. The use of Moto Display will also go a long way to reduce the time with the AP and display on.

Before I conclude this section, I just wanted to note that Android L alone won’t improve battery life on these tests. Android RunTime (ART) won’t help with battery life as these applications are native code. Job Scheduler is also irrelevant to our tests, as it will only improve battery life in situations where multiple applications are running in the background. We make every effort to ensure that no background tasks occur during these battery life tests and auto-sync is disabled as well in order to make sure that the only task running is the one under test. We have already run the data early in the summer on the Nexus 5 with Android L developer preview and our data does not show any significant difference in battery life. However, in real world usage where background applications and data syncing are active, one can expect greater battery life with Android L but only in the range of 10-15%.

Charge Time

While battery life from full charge to no charge is critical, in many situations the reverse is also important. For example, if one only has an hour before a flight, the rate at which the battery charges is just as important as the rate at which it discharges in use. In order to test this, the phone is connected to the included charger and the time from the battery begins charging to the time the charger stops drawing significant power is measured, as charging LEDs can often be an inaccurate method of determining charge time.

Motorola ends up on the high side here, which is somewhat expected due to the relatively small battery. I'm surprised that this is possible with a 5V, 1.15A charger though.

Display

Without question, the display is one of the most important aspects of a smartphone. Unlike desktops and laptops, smartphones are primarily interacted with through their displays. Unfortunately, it’s hard to evaluate a display by eye as human vision is strongly dependent upon context. In order to control for this aspect, we turn to SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 with a custom workflow in order to test smartphone displays. At any rate, let’s get into the data.

In the basics, the new Moto X is a bit on the low side. While AMOLED has traditionally struggled with luminance in situations such as the web browser and light-themed applications, Samsung’s Galaxy S5 and S5 LTE-A Broadband have shown that it’s possible to achieve levels of brightness approaching some of the brightest RGB-stripe LCDs. As the brightness of the Lumia 930 is about equal to the new Moto X, I suspect we're looking at the Galaxy S4/Note 3 generation of panels. This seems to be backed up by pictures of the subpixel layout seen below as the green subpixels seem to be noticeably larger when compared to the Galaxy S5's panel.

Contrast is still incredible, but I can still see the purple smearing effect that comes from unlit to lit pixels. I’m still unable to get a clear answer on why this is, but it’s likely that capacitance somewhere in the system is causing this issue in the form of RC delay. Whether this is a fixable issue is something I’m not aware of yet. The clear solution would be to set black to the lowest possible brightness a lit pixel can be, but this would make for worse contrast.

In grayscale, the new Moto X isn’t the best. We see that the display is just a bit too red, and that most of the luminance is coming from red and green. This makes sense from a power and display lifetime perspective though, as blue tends to have the least efficient emitter material in an AMOLED display. However, this translates to poor grayscale performance. The green tint tends to show itself in certain shades of grayscale as well.

In our saturation sweep, the new Moto X continues to be rather poor in its performance. While on Samsung phones it’s normal to see colors like this on the default display mode, there’s usually a mode that correctly constrains the display to sRGB which is the industry standard for displaying colors. There’s no such mode on the new Moto X, so the display significantly overshoots sRGB. This doesn’t bode well for the ColorChecker, which provides the most thorough look at color accuracy.

As predicted, the new Moto X does poorly in the ColorChecker. There’s really not much that the Moto X can accurately display in sRGB as just by pushing the gamut too far, even if there wasn’t saturation compression for some colors, the large gamut will cause distortion of all colors within the gamut triangle.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear where this lack of attention to color accuracy comes from. In discussions with Andrei it's clearly possible to calibrate the AMOLED panel from the GS4 quite accurately, and there's no real technical limitation for AMOLED to lack good calibration. However, judging by the relatively low peak brightness there are other issues as this could affect Motorola's performance in battery life tests. This seems to suggest that Motorola is unable to access the latest generation of AMOLED panels from Samsung Display.

This would be a rather startling thought, as it means that no matter what Motorola does to improve their implementation of Samsung’s AMOLED displays, they will always be behind the curve. If it becomes clear that Samsung’s AMOLED is the best display from a user-facing standpoint, every other OEM will face significant barriers in competition as they would be unable to access the latest generation AMOLED panels. The real solution here is for other display manufacturers such as LG, JDI, and AUO Optronics to catch up.

At any rate, the display of the new Moto X seems to be relatively poor compared to what we see in the Galaxy S5 LTE-A (and likely the Note 4), along with the iPhone 5s, Nexus 5, and One (M7). While it’s impossible to ignore the power advantage of AMOLED when implementing functions like Moto Display, the relatively low peak brightness and poor color accuracy are concerning.

Camera

At this point, there's not much introduction needed for smartphone cameras. While there was a time when people were amazed at the fact that their phone had a camera, today smartphone cameras are one of the primary ways people take photos. In order to analyze camera holistically, we have to look at capture latency, focus/exposure latency, along with user interface and the quality of the final product. While our current test suite isn't quite as good as I'd like it to be, it should be good enough to get an idea of how the Moto X performs relative to the competition.

The new Moto X is actually a major shift in Motorola’s camera strategy. For the longest time, we saw that OmniVision was the main source of design wins in Motorola smartphones. For the most part, these cameras were decent, but I always recalled that Motorola phones didn’t really have the best cameras. With the launch of the first Moto X, things took a drastic turn. While RGBC ClearPixel was academically interesting, looking back it wasn’t really worth the hit to resolution and color accuracy.

This leads us to today. Today, the new Moto X no longer uses an OmniVision camera sensor. Instead, we see a Sony IMX135 in its place. While the spec sheet released by Motorola states that the optics have an F/2.25 aperture, the EXIF data reads out an F/2.33 aperture. At any rate, the focal length is a relatively long 31mm equivalent at 4.235mm. This is almost identical to the previous Moto X, so there’s no real difference in framing here. I’ve put all of this information into a table below to make things easier.

Motorola Moto X Cameras
	Moto X (1st Gen)	Moto X (2nd Gen)
Front Camera	2.1MP	2.1MP
Front Camera - Sensor	S5K5B3G (1.75µm, 1/4.5")	AR0261 (1.4µm, 1/6")
Front Camera - Focal Length	2.92mm	2.16mm
Front Camera - Max Aperture	F/2.4	F/2.275
Rear Camera - Sensor	OV10820 (1.4 µm, 1/2.6")	IMX135 (1.12 µm, 1/3.06")
Rear Camera - Focal Length	4.499mm (30mm eff)	4.235mm (31mm eff)
Rear Camera - Max Aperture	F/2.4	F/2.33

Overall, we can immediately see that Motorola isn't shipping the latest generation camera sensor. I suspect this is partially due to cost reasons and the generational improvement to IMX214 is relatively minor for the most part, as covered in the LG G3 review. One of interesting point is the Aptina front facing camera sensor, as Aptina design wins seem to be relatively rare at this point. In this case, Aptina's AR0262CP would be an interesting experiment as it seems to be identical to the AR0261 but with Aptina's Clarity+ RCBC pixel layout. While this would be risky in terms of engineering, RCBC seems to give the benefits of clear pixels without the drawbacks that come with RGBC, although it's hard to tell whether this is really true without a shipping implementation.

At any rate, before we get into the proper image analysis I wanted to talk a bit about the camera UI because while it’s part of the software, it’s really needs special attention in most cases as even small issues can ruin the experience. In the case of the Moto X, most of the glaring issues aren’t present. Motorola has managed to do what some other OEMs still can’t figure out by properly setting aspect ratio for previews based upon the aspect ratio of the final image. In addition, the extremely simple UI is probably a good thing, as most users will never need more than photo, video, and changing to front or rear camera on a regular basis.

There’s a settings menu that appears after swiping right from the left edge of the viewfinder, and it provides for quick control of the camera, which is nice. In this menu it’s possible to enable a feature to control exposure and focus. However, even with this feature enabled it’s not possible to force an AF run, which is definitely on the frustrating side as the camera will often fail to detect out of focus situations or focus poorly. Overall, while the UI is simple and easy to use I feel that Motorola pushed simplicity a bit too far here. Of course, Google's camera application is available on the Play Store which should help a lot there.

While I'm still working on getting a good test for focus, exposure, and capture latency, I'll note that subjectively the new Moto X feels as fast as the Galaxy S5 and One (M8) to focus and expose, but capture latency seems to be a bit longer, but nothing really worth noting.

Still Photo Analysis

Since cameras are not just judged purely by their UI, we turn to a few standardized test charts and also some test scenes in order to get a good feel for overall still photo quality. To start, we'll look at the ISO resolution chart.

In the new Moto X, it seems that the maximum resolution is relatively similar to the previous Moto X. Aliasing seems to happen around the 1700 line pairs per picture height mark in both cases. In the center target, there's noticeably less aliasing. In general, aliasing seems to be handled better as there are some odd color artifacts in the previous Moto X while the same isn't as significant in the new Moto X. The new Moto X definitely has more noticeable noise at 100% though, as there's noticeable line edge roughness especially as the point of peak resolution is reached.

One of the first scenes we'll start with is a relatively simple outdoor landscape shot. Here, the new Moto X does relatively well. There's a noticeable increase in resolution compared to the previous Moto X, but it's behind Samsung's Galaxy S4 in terms of recovered detail. The parked taxi and speed limit signs are especially helpful here, as the numbers on both are noticeably harder to make out. Additionally, the color in general seems a bit strange as the sky in my area isn't really a pale blue. At some point I definitely want to determine a method at some point for properly testing color accuracy. I also find the output to be oddly processed, with areas that seem to be oil paintings and others that seem to have strong luminance noise. Judging by how this seems to only happen in areas where noise is high contrast, this is likely due to excessive sharpening. At any rate, the new Moto X should be perfectly capable of great photos in daytime.

In this scenario, we turn to a light box test in order to try and get a good idea of how the new Moto X performs in conditions between day and night. When comparing the two Moto Xes, the new Moto X clearly suffers less from color artifacting, as close examination of the textbook in the center of the setup has obvious color shifting throughout the text while no such issue occurs in the new Moto X. Detail also appears to be more obvious on the new Moto X when compared to the previous version, but there's a great deal more luminance noise throughout the photo. Interestingly enough, the Galaxy S5 LTE-A with its Sony IMX240 sensor appears to have the most detail out of the Android phones in this test. For reference, the detail on the bell seems to be greater, and the words "environmental responsibility" on the side of the box are legible on the GS5 LTE-A Broadband, but this doesn't seem to be the case for any other phone in this test. At any rate, the new Moto X continues to lag a bit behind the competition but the differences seem to be small here.

In this extreme low light situation, we see the very limits of resolution and overall photo quality as sensor gain/ISO is pushed as high as it can go. Interestingly enough, the new Moto X beats the previous Moto X in both color accuracy and resolution in this scenario. While newer generally means better, the previous Moto X used a larger sensor and an RGBC pixel layout in order to try and extract maximum low light performance. Just looking at the speed limit sign will show that this didn't help the 2013 Moto X, as the text of the sign is effectively unreadable. Surprisingly, the new Moto X is capable of extracting readable text from the sign, even if it is incredibly noisy and blurry. In addition, in the old Moto X there's a noticeable green tint to the asphalt that shouldn't exist. While it's easy to point to the OEM, I suspect this may actually be a characteristic of OmniVision image sensors as I've had multiple devices with OmniVision camera sensors that exhibit this behavior. Unfortunately, the comparison against current generation devices is not as rosy. Against the LG G3, there's really no competition as OIS allows for longer exposure times and LG seems to do a better job of preserving detail while processing out noise. Not much needs to be said about the best, which include the iPhone 5s, G3, Lumia 1020, and One (M7). For the purpose of comparison, the One (M7) with ST-M's image sensor is a reasonable stand-in for the One (M8), although the light streaking shouldn't happen and is likely due to an unnoticed smudge on the cover lens.

I also wanted to test HDR, as such a function is often necessary when dealing with the low dynamic range of most smartphone cameras. For those unfamiliar with such a feature, this is effectively a way to make it possible to see underexposed and overexposed areas in a photo by combining multiple photos. As a result, such functionality is actually much more important than a checkbox feature. In the case of the new Moto X, Motorola has simply been too aggressive, and as a result there are significant halos around objects and uneven lighting of surfaces that should be evenly lit. If it doesn't seem obvious, I've attached a photo of the same photo taken with HDR off below. Be sure to pay attention to the white space around all of the objects.

The other feature I wanted to talk about is the ring flash, which is supposed to reduce the amount of harsh shadowing that we normally see with LED flash. This is definitely true to some extent, and in general the camera performance seems to be massively improved when compared to the previous Moto X. Of course, this isn't really the only comparison that needs to be made, although only the new Moto X and old Moto X will be directly above and below this text, respectively. It's pretty obvious in this test shot just how big of a difference the ring diffuser can have in reducing shadow effects.

As a result, it's also important to check the gallery above in order to get the full context of what I'm about to say. To put it shortly, I don't really see the benefit that comes from the dual LED flash and ring diffuser. It seems clear to me that while certain LED flash positions will cause harsh shadowing effects, others seem to avoid this issue for the most part.

Unfortunately, this makes LED flash almost unusuable in some other cases. Due to the sheer proximity of the flash to the camera sensor, red-eye effects are quite significant. To illustrate this, I took a portrait of a person with their face centered in the camera. The crop above is from the new Moto X, and the crop below is from the One (M8).

 

While the crop from the M8 is out of focus, it's pretty clear that the red-eye effect is significantly reduced when compared to what we see in the Moto X. Although a ring diffuser seems like a good idea, it comes with some trade-offs that would be difficult to justify.

Video Analysis

The new Moto X doesn't seem to bring too much to the table in terms of video recording at this point, but for those that are unfamiliar with the capabilities of the new Moto X video recording is effectively boiled down  into three modes. This includes 4K, standard 1080p video, and slow motion 1080p video. We'll start with the 1080p video first and then 4K and slow motion.

Here, we see that the EIS is incredibly effective. Motorola has managed to stabilize video to the point where one could actually confuse this level of stabilization with OIS. Ultimately, quality is about in line with what I expect from a 1080p video. However, I see noticeable artifacting which is odd and hopefully this is fixed with the final release. At any rate, the video seems to be encoded at 17 Mbps H.264 high profile, which is good enough until HEVC encode is possible in real time. For real detail 4K video is needed, so let's look at that next.

Unfortunately, it seems that 4K video in this phone incurs a trade-off, likely the result of an ISP limitation rather than any real oversight. While resolution goes up, the loss of EIS means that the resolution gains are really only realized when standing still and holding the camera carefully. In this mode, we see 51 Mbps H.264 high profile, which is not quite four times the bitrate that we see with 1080p. We see similar artifacts from the 1080p mode present in this 4K recording as well.

Finally, slow motion video appears to be 1080p60 played back at 15 FPS for 4x time dilation. I personally would prefer to see 1080p60 instead of slow motion, but this works as well. I also see similar artifacts in this sample video as well, which could be fixed by the latest firmware running on consumer hardware. At any rate, this video seems to be encoded at 8.5 Mbps H.264 high profile, which means that quality should be identical to the 1080p30 mode.

Overall, other than the noticeable odd artifacts every now and then I don't have too much to say regarding video quality, although I'm sure that low light performance will require heavy use of the LED flash.

CPU and General Performance

By now, the choice of SoC has become a major focus in every smartphone. While it may not be clear how to use more compute with every generation, it’s generally accepted that stronger CPU and GPU performance is better, especially if it means that there is a power advantage in race to sleep tasks. In the case of the new Moto X we see a Snapdragon 801 SoC with CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz and a GPU clocked at 578 MHz. At this point, there's really not too much to talk about in this SoC as we've reviewed multiple devices with the same exact part.

Currently, our test suite relies upon a combination of browser and gaming benchmarks to get a good idea of total performance. However, it’s important to note that the Android results are only comparable to other Android phones as the stock browser will have specific optimizations that aren’t found in Chrome. We’ll start with the browser benchmarks first.

In the browser benchmarks, we see that the new Moto X falls right where we expect it to for the Snapdragon 801. It's plenty fast, and I don't expect any differences in CPU performance between Snapdragon 801 and 805 devices. This is unlikely to be a point of differentiation until Snapdragon 810 and beyond come into play. We'll take a look at Basemark OS II next, which is a general system performance benchmark.

Here, we once again see that there's not much different in terms of performance. We'll turn to the gaming benchmarks next to get a good idea of what to expect from the GPU.

GPU Performance

As said in the previous section, we'll look at game-based benchmarks to get a better idea of how the Snapdragon 801's Adreno 330 GPU performs.

Once again, there are really no results that stand out. I suspect that the metal frame helps to prevent thermal throttling in short benchmarks, but in most scenarios this doesn't really play out and there's no real way to establish long term performance as the GFXBench rundown test doesn't complete properly.

NAND Performance

NAND performance has been an ongoing issue since we first illustrated how poor NAND could easily become a massive detriment to user experience. While sequential reads and writes are generally at a good level these days, it’s the random read and write tests that can be incredibly poor, and these are often a good indicator of overall UI performance as something like installing applications can make a device unusable if storage performance isn’t good enough. In order to test this, we turn to Androbench with a few custom settings to best represent performance.

While the new Moto X doesn't quite top the previous Moto X in random write speeds, it's unlikely that the storage solution is worse. I found that the data and system partitions now use ext4, which means that the performance gains we saw with f2fs are gone. I'm not sure why Motorola decided to change back to ext4 given the performance gains that come with f2fs, but possible reasons include unforeseen conditions where f2fs could result in data loss compared to ext4 or difficulties in integrating f2fs support on Android. At any rate, the new Moto X is one of the best performers in this category, which should keep performance high after a year or two of use.

WiFi Performance

For the most part, WiFi performance is generally driven forward due to an increasing need for better battery life and higher speeds. In order to get a closer look at this, we use iperf on UDP mode. In the case of the Moto X, we see that the WiFi solution continues to be the same WCN3680 that is quite popular amongst OEMs as a 1x1 802.11ac solution. In order to get ideal performance, the phones are connected to Asus' RT-AC68U router as the sole client in order to try and eliminate the router as a gating factor.

As one can see, there's a mild performance uplift compared to the previous Moto X. The Samsung Galaxy S5 continues to lead because of its 2x2 MIMO solution, but the new Moto X doesn't give any reason for concern when it comes to WiFi performance.

GNSS

While at this point GNSS reliability is not nearly the issue that it was in early smartphones, there are still some differences to be had. For the most part though, any phone with a Qualcomm modem is utilizing IZat to enable GPS. In the case of the Moto X and Snapdragon 801 phones, this is IZat Gen 8B. Any lock with the cellular radio on is incredibly fast as the initial time and location data from the modem drops time to first lock to about 8 seconds in good conditions. From a cold start without assistance data and on airplane mode, it takes about 30 seconds to get a location fix. The Moto X seems to have a strong GPS antenna, and it's relatively easy to reach 10 foot accuracy if the sky is visible.

Misc.

Unfortunately with these reviews it isn't feasible to cover every aspect in the level of detail that I'd like to, but I still want to mention some of my observations. First, the TFA9890 speaker amp seems to only drive one speaker at a time, and while the lack of stereo speaker functionality is a bit disappointing the speaker gets quite loud, and feels comparable to the M8 in sheer volume. There is a BCM2079x NFC controller in the Moto X, and tap and pay with Google Wallet seems to work. I also see an Atmel touchscreen but I'm unsure what family it falls under as there isn't any public information on the model. The same TPA6165 amplifier is used for the headphone jack as on the previous Moto X, so any improvements will come from the new audio codec in Snapdragon 801 when compared to Snapdragon S4 Pro. In addition, while I don't have a setup to test noise cancellation I wanted to note that Motorola has made their own custom solution for noise cancellation instead of using an Audience or Qualcomm Fluence solution. Finally, if the "STM401 Sensor Processor" is really the STM32F401CC MCU made by ST-Microelectronics, there's potential to integrate similar functionality into Samsung Galaxy S5 as it has a similar IC for sensor hub functionality.

Final Words

The first Moto X was, and still is a great phone. Even if the camera isn’t all that great, the display not all that accurate, and the specs not all that impressive, the ergonomics of it are incredible. Motorola had designed one of the most ergonomic smartphones around last year, with plenty of new and innovative features that actually worked. Even if the camera turned out to be a bad bet, it’s hard to fault Motorola for trying new technologies. While I found Touchless Controls to be a bit limited in use, Active Display was and still is a fantastic feature and an excellent demonstration of how AMOLED can enable features at lower power than LCD can.

The new Moto X builds on this foundation. To start, the new industrial and material design are really one of the best in the industry. While it took a while for the look of the phone to grow on me, the improved in-hand feel was immediately obvious to me. I would argue that it’s about as good as the One (M8), as while the in-hand feel of the M8 is better the Moto X has a cleaner design. In addition, ergonomics on the Moto X are noticeably better. Motorola has also invested a great deal of work into their antenna tuner, and while it isn’t something that I can accurately test I’ve never really experienced significant deathgrip issues. Motorola has really paid a lot of attention to this, as they seem to use a Cypress CapSense chip in ways that I’ve never seen before. All of this work seems to be done with the goal of enabling the material and industrial design that few other OEMs can pull off.

The next piece that really tells the story of the new Moto X is software. While the actual ROM itself seems to have some stability issues such as reboots, app crashes, and other oddness, the functionality is fantastic. While I don’t really think that AOSP UI is the best interface for Android, Motorola’s strategy of pursuing AOSP UI with additional features that blend in with the UI is a distinctive simply because only Google’s Nexus line has the same interface. For those on Verizon that want an AOSP experience, the new Moto X may be the best way to get it. In addition, Motorola seems to be one of the best when it comes to update speed, which is of major interest to enthusiasts. The Android L update promises to dramatically improve user experience from KitKat (Android 4.4), so this is a significant advantage. However, those that are willing to wait can still find other OEMs with a reliable track record for updates.

There’s really more to the software story than just basic UI though, as the new Moto X improves Moto Display, Actions, Assist, and Voice. While I don’t have too many killer use cases for Moto Voice, the custom hotword feature is great to have and I suspect that Motorola will continue to ship the best implementation of voice controls I’ve seen so far. In the case of Moto Assist, while I have battery life concerns with this feature I can definitely see how it’d be convenient to automatically change my phone’s settings depending upon the context I’m in. Moto Actions and Moto Display are definitely the best features of the Moto suite though, as the effortless use of gestures with Moto Actions and the even better Moto Display are both features that make this phone stand out from the increasingly saturated market.

In order to efficiently enable Moto Display, Motorola uses an AMOLED panel that definitely brings a much-needed resolution bump. Unfortunately, as a result of the display’s size the phone is not as easy to use with one hand when compared to the previous Moto X, even if the phone is incredibly thin to improve ergonomics. Some of the basic characteristics make the display slightly trail behind the best LCDs, but some issues with the display seem to stem from a lack of focus. The excessively large gamut, poor grayscale tracking, and generally poor calibration is definitely an issue even if some prefer the saturated, vivid color profile that Motorola has tuned this display for.

The other issue that comes from the design and display of the phone is battery life. While Moto Display and Moto Voice, along with other power saving features should go a long way to improving efficiency, Motorola has only improved battery life in scenarios where LTE is the primary consumer. Battery life has actually decreased over WiFi, and I ran this test multiple times over the course of the past week on multiple networks in order to confirm this.

The camera is another issue. While Motorola has improved their camera dramatically from the original Moto X, the competition has moved on. Unfortunately, the camera disappoints when compared to some of the best in this generation. Overall, the most balanced cameras of this smartphone generation seem to be found in the LG G3, iPhone 5s, and Lumia 930. Even if the Moto X existed in a vacuum, the oddly sharpened yet blurry effect of Motorola’s post-processing settings, and poor low light performance are still issues that need resolution. In addition, while the ring flash is good for most scenarios it falls short in portraits due to the proximity of the flash to the camera sensor. The addition of 4K video is nice to have, but ultimately not worth it as EIS seems to be disabled when in this mode. Almost any kind of recording is more likely to be best served by recording in 1080p mode.

Finally, overall performance is great but the new Moto X doesn’t seem to significantly stand out from the crowd. SoC these days doesn’t seem to be enough to positively differentiate a phone. While the new Moto X does have fast eMMC/NAND, the difference is likely not large enough for average users to notice a difference.

Unfortunately, after all of this we are left in a bit of a tough position. Fundamentally, the new Moto X doesn’t change the market. It simply isn’t the best Android phone on the market. Regrettably, there are too many issues to make this a clearly superior smartphone. The poor camera, battery life, and display when compared to the competition are three issues that need improvement to be competitive.

At best, the new Moto X is equal to its peers. For those that strongly value the concerns I’ve talked about will likely find the new Moto X to fall short of its peers. However, those that strongly value software, design, and software support may find the new Moto X to be right for them. It's also important to consider value, as the new Moto X starts at 100 USD cheaper than the competition.

That’s ultimately a concerning position for Motorola though, as this means that they’re directly competing with the Nexus line of devices. While this wasn’t really true for the previous Moto X by virtue of its compact size, Motorola’s choice to join in the display size wars hurts their differentiation. While it made sense to continue pushing smartphone sizes even larger last year, my experiences with just about every phone this year leads me to conclude that smartphone sizes have gone too far for anyone that found 2013 smartphones to be a good fit in terms of size. In terms of pure hardware, the Moto X is unfortunately caught by the desire to keep up with other smartphones in display size while trying to keep one-handed usability by reducing thickness. This kind of compromise seems to be the theme this year, and Motorola is no exception.