buy an Intel knock barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game
items for Planet Side 2 click now to learn more let me start this off by
saying I'm not a hardcore phone guy so that's the perspective you're about to
get I spent some time with the Moto X I really liked it here are my thoughts on
it but if you want the more hardcore perspective you know what Marcus brownley has a video about it and his
videos are great go watch that I will do a brief summary of some of the stuff
everyone else has already told you however and it starts with it's
assembled in America which I guess to me
as a Canadian isn't quite as immediately relevant but it does represent a very
positive trend that we're seeing not just with Motorola in this phone but
Apple's even embracing it with the upcoming Mac Pro it has a customizable
experience which is partly achieved by that assembly in America so even though
mine is a bone stock you know Carbon fibery looking black back and black
buttons you can actually change around quite a few things for over 200
different combinations it does not support SD expansion hello Google
influence so there was no getting around that Google's not a big fan of SD
expansion and we don't find it on the Moto X which is the first phone that has
really got the Google influence on it since the acquisition of Motorola quite
some time ago the hardware is it's okay
it's nothing really special so there's an S4 Pro class processor featuring two
1.7 GHz cores and a fairly capable adreno 320 GPU Wireless AC is a stand
out feature however and it's normally not included with this particular
combination it feels plenty fast out of the box but in reality what doesn't
these days there's more to it than CPU speed however page nine of an anc's
excellent review of this phone gives a great Summary of why fast well-designed
storage is important maybe even more so
than CPU speed to keeping your device operating in that like new state that
we've all become quite used to now let's start with the Hands-On I love the shape
and size I complained quite a lot if you watch my weekly live stream the L show
or really anything else about the fact that the HTC1 is just a little bit too
big for me well the Moto X has the same size screen 4.7 in but because of the
gentle curvature of the back and the fact that the sides of the bezel are
much smaller I find it much more comfortable to hold and I can type
one-handed on it very very easily so big thumbs up for the ergonomics of the Moto
X it does get a little bit toasty on the back side especially when you're doing
something like using it as a hot spot but again not worse than something like
the HTC1 and while the plastic backing might not be better for heat conduction
it will make it so that your hand doesn't get quite as sweaty I love the
position of the lock button this is another complaint I have about the one
that recessed lock button on the top or flush lock button that's kind of hard to
reach without slipping the phone out of your hands no this one's really easy to
reach very very natural the way that you're normally holding it you can press
it with your thumb or if you're left-handed you can press it with your middle finger very very nice however
it's a little bit close to the volume rocker which is not as much bigger than
the lock button as I would have liked and is difficult to distinguish the two
from each other when the device is in your pocket which a lot of the time
let's face it it probably is the other ergonomic thing that I'm not really a
big fan of is the 3 and 1/2 mm Jack in the middle of the top particularly when
watching videos or something where I'm holding the phone like this I did found
it kind of got in the way whereas one that's a little bit more off to the side
is easier to put my hands around than something that right out of the middle I
found the auto rotate a little bit on the sluggish side which contrasts with
the one which I find really really Twitchy to the point where it's annoying
I think I'd rather have sluggish than you know just like ADHD you know you
accidentally tilt the phone a little bit and it's like oh do you want to go this way do you want to go that way so that's
just an observation not so much a complaint or a positive thing and the
battery life didn't light my world on fire it was about like the HTC1 with my
general usage although if you want scientific analysis of the battery life
again head over to that on on tech review it's very excellent I'll link it in the video
description speaking of lighting my world on fire and batteries those are
two things you probably don't want together when I plugged the Moto X into
a charger it was like magic it reminds me of my iPhone 4 lightning fast
charging the HTC1 is so slow and the
Galaxy S4 is better to an extent but the Moto X charges in like you know 70% 65%
as much time as the HTC and it was refreshing to be able to grab the device
go oh crap I don't have enough battery I'm on my way out the door throw it on a
charger for 20 minutes and then have that actually help and have it get you
through the next outing on the screen side of things it's a bit of a different
approach than well this one again I'm comparing it mostly to the phone that I
have the most experience with it has an AMOLED screen and definitely suffers
from what I like to call STD or store
television display syndrome with oversaturated colors it looks very
vibrant to the point where it almost makes your eyes want to bleed but that is a characteristic of Ed screens and a
lot of people like it whites do have a definite yellowish cast that was
noticeable on both web pages when I'm reading as well as when watching videos
but the flip side of that is that blacks are amazingly deep you can hardly see
the difference when you have a black screen up between the bezel and the
screen which combined with the Touch button design makes the front of the
phone seem very very seamless overall I
think I like the implementation it doesn't take up screen real estate
permanently the way that it did with old Android tablets I mean wasn't that
infuriating when just the bottom of your screen was always taken up even when you
were in full screen video so it doesn't do that it can reorient itself and never
really glitched out on me it was a bit disorienting at first when the buttons
disappeared and turned into dots that were obviously not labeled at that point
but uh once I memorized the positions of the buttons it became a non-issue very
very quickly the screen is 720p so we're getting used to these these 1080p
smartphones in this kind of a size range like the S4 and the HTC1 but remember
guys that is still what Apple would call retina class density so I don't have any
complaints and it was not very noticeable compared to the HTC1 except
with very very small text the main
AMOLED advantages that this phone did get to enjoy was during gaming and
watching videos there's no blur or smearing Amed doesn't have the same kind
of ghosting effects that you'll get on a lot of LCD displays and it's extremely
power efficient so you can see right here this notification right now is only
lighting up the pixels that are needed the rest of them are actually turned
completely off and that also contributes to those excellent black levels the
viewing angle is also awesome even compared to Super LCD 3 which is what's
in use over here but there are some disadvantages the main one being that
oversaturation looks unnatural once you're used to once you're used to
better I mean I guess really that is the main one other than that I really do
like the screen the touch interface electron are visible to me at a
comfortable viewing distance on Plain backgrounds and even during video
playback particularly in cartoons where you're going to have a lot of um single
color large spaces and you can really pick out that Matrix behind it I wish
that we were past this Apple's had it right for years and I wish everyone else
would get on board um the last thing about the screen the backlight flicker
weirds me out a little bit so you can really see especially when moving it
quickly and when there's only a few pixels lit up on a black background you
can really see the flickering of the backlight but it's only really
noticeable when you're moving the phone quickly and so it stopped bothering me
after about the first day the lowest light setting on auto is not really
suitable for nighttime use and this is a little bit ironic to me because usually
phone manufacturers in Auto setting are trying to preserve battery as much as
possible and crank things down but I found that for nighttime viewing I
actually had to manually turn it down even further on the software side this
is actually my first experience with pretty much bone stock Android and
I this isn't going to be popular but I don't really know what all the fuss is
about most of the Annoying stuff about TouchWiz can be worked around and I
quite like HTC Sense there's some stuff that I just found easier to do
particularly their multitasking interface is in my mind world's better
than the stock Android multitasking interface it only shows you nine things
at a time but they're it's much quicker to switch between them and I generally
only use about nine things at a time so
it's absolutely great for me I did find switching from one phone to another
extremely easy the Motorola transfer wizard is completely painless and
handles the whole thing wirelessly it only takes probably about an hour and a
half it took for me to transfer from the HTC1 to the Moto X um I did find that
again so the whole software thing I did find the update manager pretty
aggressive I'm again not much of a power user so I just pick up my phone I expect
everything to be where I left it and I don't really want them changing the functionality around on me that often I
don't necessarily you know need to update to the latest software like the
minute it gets released and again I know it's not very popular but their update
manager just basically says look you have to install this update you can
postpone it but you actually have to pick a time when we're going to remind you again you can't just do it manually
at least that's the default setting there's probably some way to change it but I didn't spend enough time with the
phone that it would have bothered me all right so now on to the whole always
listening thing Google Now is great in theory but the functionality is still
quite limited you can't adjust the volume or do other things that seem
pretty obvious to me like Okay Google Now please mute my phone and it's going
to be like what it's going to like Google it or something um also most of
that functionality is disabled if you have any kind of a security lock and I
do use my phone for work so it's the kind of thing where I really wouldn't I
wouldn't consider running a phone without a security lock on it I'm not a
huge fan of the stock Google keyboard swift key has treated me extremely well
so that was one of the first things that I installed on it my last comment on the
whole Okay Google Now voice control thing is having voice control that's
constantly listening to you is the future that is the thing that really
jumped out because it's incredibly cool to just have your phone be somewhere
else and this is even Beyond being able to use your smartwatch to answer your
call or or whatever other things you want to do being able to just talk at
the phone once it can understand you and has more functionality regardless of
whether it's woken up or asleep is very very very cool so in summary I guess
it's also a phone voice quality was good no complaints there no one on the other
end of the line had any complaints and that pretty much wraps it up thank you
for checking out my sort of oh right unboxing okay so here's the Box there's
like some documentation a micro USB
cable a wall wart and presumably ah Sim
remover okay my unboxing and review of
the Motorola Moto X let me know if you liked it let me know if you disliked it
by hitting those buttons leave a comment and give us your other thoughts I know
we don't do phones that much but we're constantly trying to improve and as
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