Tech

Review: It’s big, but at $400 the Moto X Pure Edition is a safe bet

A flagship that’s cheaper than a Galaxy and easier to buy than a OnePlus Two.

Andrew Cunningham – Sep 24, 2015 8:00 am | 202

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Starting in late 2013 with the original Moto G, Motorola has been carving out a niche for itself as a company that offers good value for the money. It’s competing against companies like ZTE and Huawei and Xiaomi overseas, but especially here in the US it sells some of the best Android phones you can get for under $200. Motorola sells them with relatively clean, sensible loads of Android that are updated predictably, if not always promptly.

This year, the company is taking the same approach with its flagship phone. The new third-generation Moto X (also called the Moto X Pure Edition, or the Moto X Style overseas) ticks all of the important boxes for an Android flagship but starts at $400, a few hundred dollars cheaper than the list prices for flagships from the likes of Samsung and LG. Cheaper than a Galaxy. More readily available than a OnePlus Two. The Moto X Pure Edition could be the best choice out there for people who want a flagship phone at a midrange price.

Look, feel, and screen

Motorola’s review program was actually pretty interesting this time around—the company gave out promo codes and then let us use Moto Maker to customize our own models. I chose a black front with a navy blue back and a nice bright red accent, which colors both the small cutout in the back of the phone and the speaker grills at the top and bottom.

As with the last two models and the third-gen Moto X, the ability to customize the style of the phone takes an otherwise straightforward design and gives it some much-needed personality. It fills a nice niche in the market, somewhere in between the pretty and well-built but sterile Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6 designs and the whole “concrete slab” thing the OnePlus Two has going on.

Like the third-generation Moto G, the standard “soft grip” back of the Moto X now has a slightly ribbed look and feel to it. That plus the rubberized texture Motorola is using for the back of the phone makes it easy to grip. The wood and leather finishes will obviously feel like, well, wood and leather—those finishes will each add $25 to the cost of the phone. I haven’t seen the new Moto X with either of these finishes firsthand, but I liked the leather finish from last year’s Moto X. The wood finish still shouts “mid-1980s Dodge Caravan” to me, but it obviously appeals to some people.

Specs at a glance: Motorola Moto X Pure Edition
Screen	2560×1440 5.7-inch IPS (515 PPI)
OS	Android 5.1.1
CPU	1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 (dual-core Cortex A57 plus quad-core Cortex A53)
RAM	3GB
GPU	Qualcomm Adreno 416
Storage	16GB/32GB/64GB NAND flash, micro SD card up to 128GB
Networking	866Mbps 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.1. GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) UMTS/HSPA+ (850, 900, 1700 (AWS),1900, 2100 MHz) CDMA (800, 850, 1900 MHz) 4G LTE^† (B1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 25, 26, 38, 41)
Ports	Micro USB Type B, headphones
Camera	21MP rear camera, 5MP front camera
Size	6.06″ x 3.00″ x 0.24-0.44″ (153.9 x 76.2 x 6.1-11.06mm)
Weight	6.31oz (179g)
Battery	3,000mAh
Starting price	$399 unlocked

The phone’s SIM tray is a neat touch that’s functionally a bit confusing. It’s a double-sided tray that holds a nano SIM card on one side (the US version only supports one SIM, but there’s a spot where a second one could clearly fit in the international versions) and a microSD card on the other. The odd part is that it means you need to remove your SIM any time you want to take out that SD card and swap it for another one, though, if you’re just using the card as a semi-permanent way to augment the internal storage, it won’t be a problem.

The second Moto X was bigger than the first one, but the third one is pretty firmly in the “phablet” category. Some phone buyers seem to think that bigger is better, and there’s certainly a market for phones this big (it’s smaller than the Nexus 6 by a shade, though that’s the phone it most resembles). But in two years this phone has gone from against-the-grain small and holdable to a standard five inches to Galaxy Note/iPhone 6S Plus huge.

The phone’s curves aren’t as gentle or as gradual as in the third-generation Moto G’s, either. The sides are harder and flatter, and the drop-off where the sides meet the back is harsher, too. The curved back still feels nice, but ultimately you end up noticing the size of the phone and those harsher edges more while you’re holding it.

Motorola does what it can to keep the phone’s size manageable by shaving off as much of the bezel around the screen as it can, particularly the ones to the left and right of the screen. The Moto X has never had thick bezels, but this year’s are even thinner than last year’s.

The screen itself looks excellent, though it’s a somewhat odd choice compared to past Motos X. The 5.7-inch screen is an IPS LCD panel rather than an AMOLED panel, which means that blacks aren’t as black but that whites lack the purple-green shimmer typical of AMOLED displays. Colors are good but less saturated—whether you view this as a pro or a con depends entirely on your preferences. IPS tends to be more accurate while AMOLED’s poppy colors often seem more eye-catching.

The reason past Motos X used AMOLED screens was to support the Moto Display feature. Moto Display uses basic white-on-black icons and text to show you when you’re getting notifications even when your phone is off. Since AMOLED panels only light up the pixels they need, Moto Display never needed to fire up the entire screen to show these notifications, saving energy in the process. Moto Display is still supported on the new Moto X, but it has to power up the whole screen to work, which may have an adverse effect on battery life over time.

The feature still works pretty much the same way. The screen pulses briefly when a new notification comes in, and you can make it come up by nudging the phone or by waving your hand in front of it so the IR sensors can see it. And you can disable it in favor of Google’s native Ambient Display mode, which matches the rest of the OS better but only illuminates the screen when a notification comes in, not when you bump or wave your hand over the phone.

Overall we still like the look and feel of the Moto X. Moto picked a basic design language and has stuck with it for a couple of years now, resulting in a lineup of phones that are all recognizable without being ostentatious, understated without being bland. Our main gripe is that the size has gone up so much, guaranteeing that some first- or even second-generation Moto X users looking to upgrade may find the phone too large for their tastes.

Selling direct to consumers and cutting the price

One big Moto X feature that has nothing to do with the phone: Motorola is eschewing the major US carriers this time around in favor of a direct sales model that puts unlocked, unsubsidized phones right into the hands of consumers.

On the one hand, this model fits the current worldwide smartphone landscape better. The two-year smartphone contract that helped high-end smartphones like the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Note catch on is dying off. They’ve been replaced mostly by installment plans that spread the entire cost of the phone out over several years or allow you to trade in your phone for the latest model at shorter intervals (the downside being that you never actually finish paying off your phone). Or, alternatively, you can buy phones for their full unlocked prices and do whatever you want with them, cellular compatibility permitting.

In short, more people are suddenly going to realize that their “$200” smartphone actually costs $700, and some companies are taking steps to ease that sticker shock independent of the carrier installment plans. Apple is implementing its own installment plan, demonstrating an enviable lack of dependence on the carriers.

Motorola has a “Motorola Credit Account” you can use to pay off the phone, but it is also cutting the unlocked prices of its phones to make them more appealing. Even more than past Motos X, the third-generation model brings the Moto G mindset to flagship phones. The company is offering the Moto X starting at $399, between $200 and $300 cheaper than most flagships (and sometimes even more, if we’re talking about other phones in the “phablet” size class).

On the other hand, Motorola isn’t Apple, and it doesn’t have the brick-and-mortar presence or mindshare to just toss off the carriers with no impact to the bottom line. The carriers didn’t exactly vault previous Motos X to the top of the sales charts, but they’ve got a lot of floor space, and many customers are still going to buy their phones through their carrier rather than bringing their own.

Among smartphone enthusiasts, Motorola’s model is going to do just fine. Buying custom phones directly through Moto Maker is a big part of the Moto X’s appeal anyway, and the phones are available at Best Buy and on Amazon for anyone who wants a quicker, simpler experience. Among regular people, well, we’ll see.

Software

We’ve talked so many times about Motorola’s typical build of Android that it’s really not worth rehashing at length here. The Moto phones stick close to Google’s stock version of Android as found on Nexus devices. The few additions that are here—the Motorola Migrate tool that helps you move from older Android phones, iPhones, and dumbphones; the Moto Connect feature that can pass texts and calls to a Chrome extension on your computer; the Moto Voice touchless controls; the aforementioned Moto Display; and the Moto Assist time- and location-based assistant feature—are mostly additive. The keyboard, app launcher, notification shade, quick settings panel, and Settings app are all Google’s.

There are two happy software-related side effects that come from Motorola’s direct sales model. One is that no Moto X is going to come with any extraneous unremovable, carrier-installed bloatware. The second is that the carriers won’t be able to get in the way of software updates—when Motorola has one ready, you’ll get it. It still probably won’t be as fast as Nexus phones, and we don’t know for how long the company plans to support the phone. But the updates should be more consistent than carrier-locked phones from other OEMs.

One additional thing worth noting: Unlike the most recent Moto G and E, the Moto X actually ships with a 64-bit version of Android. This may or may not actually result in user-visible benefits, but if you’re shipping your phone with a 64-bit chip, you may as well take advantage of it.

Camera

Every year Motorola brags about the Moto X’s camera, and every year we come away just a little disappointed. They’ve never been terrible phone cameras, but they’ve also never been class-leading. This year the company is trying again with a 21MP rear camera sensor from Sony. The “ring flash” on last year’s model is also out in favor of a regular two-tone LED setup, which looks more or less the same as the one included in the third-gen Moto G. The camera can also shoot 4K video, and the front camera has been bumped up to 5MP.

As usual, camera performance is mixed. The 21MP sensor can capture a lot of detail (see photo three), but our outdoors shots had vaguely greenish colors (photos one and two). In scenes with a lot of contrast (photos two and four), objects in darker areas tend to be too dark and lose detail. The auto HDR feature can help with this, but we’d prefer the camera to start with better exposure in the first place. Finally, low-light performance (photo five) is mixed at best. Objects are visible, but there’s a lot of grain and noise, and again details in darker areas of the picture tend to be obscured. The problems are essentially the same ones shared by the 2015 Moto G and the Nexus 6 but with a higher-resolution sensor.

Internals and performance

The Moto X goes with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808 rather than the 810—it’s not Qualcomm’s fastest chip on paper right at this moment, but the 808 is much better behaved than the toasty 810. The chip has also shown up in LG’s G4, among a couple of others.

The rest of the spec sheet is suitably high-end without cutting the corners we complained about in our OnePlus Two review. The phone includes 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM, NFC for use with contactless payment services like Android Pay, a QuickCharge 2.0-compatible fast charging technology called TurboPower, 866Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, and an LTE modem and transceiver setup that works fine with all the major US carriers. You do miss out on wireless charging and a fingerprint sensor, but overall we think Motorola made cuts that don’t feel like compromises.

The Moto X’s 808 combines four “little” 1.4GHz ARM Cortex A53 CPU cores with two “big” 1.8GHz Cortex A57 CPU cores, all of which can be used at once if the situation warrants. The big cores are generally used for high-performance tasks, while the little ones are used for the heavy lifting. In both single- and multi-threaded CPU tests, it proves to be just a little faster than the Snapdragon 801 it replaces. It’s not as fast as the Exynos 7420 in recent Samsung phones, but both CPU and GPU are quick enough to keep the phone’s UI and apps moving smoothly.

The Adreno 416 GPU is also faster than the Adreno 330 in the second-generation Moto X if you look at the Offscreen GFXBench tests, which all render a scene at the same 1080p resolution. When you take the increased screen resolution into account, though, the performance of the Moto X Pure Edition actually falls just a little bit. The Onscreen tests show how these 2560×1440 screens keep eating into performance.

As usual, Motorola formats the phone’s userdata partition using the F2FS filesystem, which helps performance. It’s not as fast as some of Samsung’s phones, which habitually top the Android storage speed charts. But the new Moto X’s storage is fast enough that it shouldn’t suffer from any performance-related bottlenecks, even if you decide to encrypt it.

Battery life

The new Moto X’s battery life isn’t particularly great, though it’s better than a few of its contemporaries and manages to improve on its predecessor. It’s not as good as the 2015 Moto G, either—high-resolution screens and fast chips all take their toll on the battery.

Inexpensive, not cheap

Despite a handful of drawbacks and curious design decisions, the Moto X Pure Edition represents a great value for the money. It has good (if not cutting edge) specs combined with a big, sharp screen, the most recent version of Android without redundant apps or irritating skins, and an array of customization options that competitors don’t offer.

Unfortunately, as usual, the Moto X is one camera short of being a fantastic all-rounder. It’s not bad, and it’s an improvement over both the 2015 Moto G and the 2014 Moto X, but it’s not up to the level of the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, recent Samsung Galaxies, or even the OnePlus Two, to say nothing of the upcoming iPhone 6S.

If you’re shopping for your own unlocked Android phone to bring to a carrier or MVNO and you’re not interested in dealing with OnePlus’ invitation system, the Moto X and G are going to cover most users out there. Enthusiasts, power users, and heavy gamers should probably choose the Moto X over the Moto G, but at half the price the Moto G still manages to provide most of the important features. The Moto X doesn’t offer a different smartphone experience, just a better, faster version of the same experience.

The good

Good specs and great build quality, especially for the price.
At $400, substantially cheaper than other phones in its category.
Moto Maker customization gives the phone some character that competitors don’t have.
Includes NFC and quick charging, unlike the OnePlus Two.
Expandable storage, useful for you Samsung Galaxy S6 and Note 5 haters.
Android without tons of extraneous apps or heavy skins.

The bad

Mediocre camera, again.
Only OK battery life.
Not the fastest flagship out there, though the price helps absorb that blow.
Missing wireless charging and a fingerprint reader, though those were probably the right features to cut to save money.

The ugly

The Moto X got real big, real fast.

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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