Both of these materials retain the curves around the edge that made the original Moto X so comfortable to hold, even if the phone is much larger than it was before. This aluminum looks and feels great, and it also doubles as the phone's antenna (there are plenty of cutouts separating the pieces of the antenna-the entire mobile industry has learned its lesson from the iPhone 4 and " antennagate"). Advertisementįurther Reading Review: The new Moto G doesn’t change much, but still a steal at $179The new Moto X uses an all-glass front the curves at the edges to meet the all-metal rim around the phone. The screen is bright enough to be usable in sunlight, though IPS panels like the one in the HTC One M8 are still a bit easier to see in these cases. Like all AMOLED displays, it has a tendency to oversaturate colors, and whites are often vaguely greenish, but as a tradeoff you get great contrast along with nice, deep blacks. It's got a big, sharp 5.2-inch 1080p AMOLED display, which is great for reading. The new Moto X throws that approach out the window, to both good and ill effect. We actually appreciated Motorola's approach-between the size and the nicely curved back and edges, it felt better in the hand than any other Android flagship. Its screen spanned a "mere" 4.7 inches when many others moved up to (and past) 5.0 inches. It had a dual-core CPU when most flagships offered four cores. It used a 720p screen where many of its contemporaries had moved to 1080p. Last year's Moto X was consciously restrained compared to other Android flagships at the time. On the other, it saves us from having to call it something silly like "the Moto X M8." Throughout this review, assume "Moto X" refers to the new one unless we make a clear distinction. On the one hand, this might create the potential for some confusion. The box, the phone's About panel, and Motorola's website distinguish between last year's model and this year's with a "2nd generation" label, but otherwise the name is the same. Motorola calls the new Moto X just "Moto X," with no extra numbers or letters attached, and it's the same way for the new Moto G. $99 with two-year contract, $499 unlocked The new Moto X just needs to take everything the old one did well and do it better. The original Moto X was an opportunity for Motorola to reinvent itself. The upshot of all of this is that Motorola is a company you should be paying attention to again, something that hasn't been the case since the turn of the decade or so. Though it's making the biggest waves at the low end of the market, it's still making and selling flagships, too, which leads us to the subject of this review: the new Moto X. Most importantly, Google is selling Motorola to Lenovo, a company that isn't doing so badly in the smartphone market itself (the deal isn't actually scheduled to close until some time next year, but Motorola has already quietly stripped "a Google company" from its branding on everything from its homepage to its phones' boot screens). The division has continued to lose money for Google, but its sales are finally on an uptick, and reviews of each Moto phone have typically been positive. The US-based phone factory that factored so prominently into early Moto X advertising is being shuttered. Things have been no less lively on the business side. The phone has spent most of its time since hovering between $300 and $400, give or take a sale. The original Moto X launched at a $579 unlocked ($199 on-contract) price point that was frankly too much to pay for what it offered, but it dropped to a more suitable $399 by the beginning of the year. Both phones make compromises to hit their sub-$200-unlocked prices, but they largely identify the most important smartphone stuff and give you enough to get by. Still, we wanted to see where Motorola would be in a year, and, about 13 months later, it's safe to say it's been a busy year for the company.įor starters, Motorola has made an aggressive play for the midrange, low-end, and emerging smartphone markets in the form of the Moto G and the Moto E. Dimensions (lxwxh): 3,152 X 1,181 X 1,153 Mm (124.1 X 46.5 X 45.At the end of last year's Moto X review, we concluded that it wasn't a perfect phone.Propulsion System: Axial Flow, Single Stage.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |