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Motorola ‘s Moto Maker, which allows you to customize your Moto X, might be one of the best ideas any earphone manufacturer has come up with since the touch shield. I must have spent a good hour playing around with unlike back colors, build materials, stress colors, frames, and engravings. The Moto X Pure can be customized with a diverseness of silicone backs, along with wood and leather options for an extra cost .
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With dimensions of 6.06 by 3.0 by 0.44 inches ( HWD ) and a weight of 6.31 ounces, the Moto X most surely qualifies as a phablet. Its size puts it on par with the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and the Nexus 6 ( $ 114.98 at Amazon UK ), but it ‘s easier to use one-handed than either of those phones. That ‘s because the soundbox of the Moto X has a easy curve that conforms to your hand. The middle, where the Power and volume buttons are, is slimmer than the top. The unit of measurement I tested has a silicone fictile back that ‘s easy to grip while still being smooth to the touch. The front of the device has a 5.7-inch, 2,560-by-1,440 TFT LCD display, alternatively of the AMOLED expose that was on the Moto X ( 2014 ). Some have argued that this throw defeats the battery-saving aspect of Moto Display—a feature that allows notifications to be shown without turning on the entire screen. An liquid crystal display display must use a backlight, while AMOLED displays can selectively idle individual pixels to both save battery and show true black .
Despite the miss of AMOLED, the modern Quad HD display is still antic, packed with 520 pixels per inch. It looks highly crisp, with good wake angles and excellent color reproduction. The colors are n’t as bright or adenine deep as they are on the Super AMOLED display on the Galaxy S6, but they are more true to life sentence. The display is surely better than the 1080p IPS LCD display of the OnePlus 2. And the screen-to-bezel proportion is just right, despite the dual front-facing speakers on the top and bottomland .
Network Performance and Call Quality
The Moto X comes unlock and is compatible with the major U.S. carriers, including AT & T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. The device has GSM/GPRS/EDGE ( 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz ), UMTS/HSPA+ ( 850, 900, 1700 ( AWS ), 1900, 2100 MHz ), CDMA ( 800, 850, 1900 MHz ), and 4G LTE ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 25, 26, 38, 41 ) bands. I tested the Moto X on AT & T ‘s network in midtown Manhattan and network performance was excellent. Download/upload speeds varied from a low of 7.07 Mbps/7.55 Mbps at the base of PCMag ‘s agency build up, to a eminent of 46.68 Mbps/53.45 Mbps near Madison Square Park. Connected to our Verizon FiOS 5GHz test router, I pulled in 134.80 Mbps/89.34 Mbps. There was no localization I found myself without service .
Call quality on the Moto X was great in all areas of midtown. I made calls from respective locations and found voices to have a rich and natural shade. The earphone gets loudly enough to use in noisy environments, and noise cancellation is excellent, dampening the audio of traffic, conversation, and even construction function. With a nearby air hammer in full moon effect, the noise did n’t come through in a articulation call. At the highest volume levels, it is possible to detect a faint crackle in the background, but that is n’t detectable if the book is retain one or two notches below soap. Thanks to the double front-facing stereo speakers, the speakerphone volume is besides forte enough to hear outdoors without issue. In addition to calls, the speakers handled videos, music, and all other sound recording well, with deep fathom and bass for a call .
Processor and Battery
The Moto X has a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 central processing unit clocked at 1.8GHz with an Adreno 418 GPU and 3GB of RAM. That ‘s nothing to scoff at, though it ‘s not quite arsenic knock-down as the Snapdragon 810 and 4GB of RAM powering the OnePlus 2. The Moto X received an AnTuTu benchmark mark of 49,257—putting it on equality with the LG G4 ( $ 114.98 at Amazon UK ), which besides has a Snapdragon 808. The ZTE Axon Pro, a device with a 2GHz Snapdragon 810 central processing unit and 4GB of RAM, received 49,289—showing that the Moto X can hold its own against heftier hardware .
When playing games like Asphalt 8 and Need for Speed : Most Wanted, the Moto X handles nicely. There ‘s no choppiness, skipped frames, or slowdown to the controls provided you play one crippled at a prison term. mortal Kombat X is unable to run beyond the intro television, a problem that I besides found on the LG G4. A slender slowdown occur when you have many apps open and try to switch between them. Trying to move from a game or the Google now screen to another app results in a noticeable interim. It depends on your usage and how much you have going on at any given time, but the Moto X should be mighty adequate to satisfy most users .
It ‘s worth pointing out that the Moto X tends to run a spot warmly. It does n’t suffer from overheating as we found with the LG G4, but the back averages around 95 degrees Fahrenheit during gambling and when charging. That ‘s not adequate to impact performance, but it ‘s something to be mindful of .
Battery life on the Moto X is only average. The device has a 3,000mAh battery, which seems humble for a 5.7-inch phone with a high-res display. I turned Wi-Fi off and continuously streamed a YouTube video recording over LTE at utmost screen brightness and recorded how long the Moto X lasted. I got 4 hours, 42 minutes, which is an average consequence and a moment less than the 5 hours, 19 minutes on the OnePlus 2, but a draw less than the Galaxy S6, which clocked 6 hours, 33 minutes in the lapp test. On the asset side, Motorola ‘s Turbo Charging engineering allows you to add up to 10 hours of battery life ( distinctly not video streaming ) in fair 15 minutes .
Camera
The Moto X television camera has seen some major improvements since last class ‘s iteration. The 21-megapixel rear detector has a f/2.0 lens and a vamp interface for the camera app. The device allows you to tap anywhere to capture a mental picture, which makes it easier to snap good photos when you ‘re on the act. Burst mode, Auto HDR, and Phase Detect Auto-Focus besides simplify things. You can take pictures very fast now, specially with Quick Capture—a wrench of your wrist twice launches the television camera app .
The pictures I took away and indoors under decently-lit conditions were fantastic. The shots came out crisp and clear up, with no randomness or loss of detail, and great color reproduction. The Moto X is adequate to of shooting 4K video at 30fps and 1080p video at 60fps. In both cases, the video recording comes out clear, with beneficial details, and the autofocus reorients itself promptly in reaction to movement. unfortunately, the television camera even lacks optical prototype stabilization ( OIS ) and struggles in low-light settings. Pictures taken in less-than-ideal light conditions suffer from grain and noise .
The front-facing 5-megapixel television camera besides does well in capturing natural skin tones and coloration for selfies. The fisheye lens and f/2.0 aperture is good for group shots, and there ‘s a front-facing LED blink of an eye .
Software and Conclusions
The Moto X runs almost-stock Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, with zero bloatware ( unless you count Motorola ‘s apps, which are actually very utilitarian ). Because the device is unbarred, there are no carrier apps cluttering things up. Our 32GB review whole came with 24.06GB of free space out of the box. The device besides has a microSD menu time slot and is capable of taking cards up to 128GB. We tested it with our 64GB SanDisk batting order and it worked fine .
All the Google apps like Chrome, Gmail, and Google Play Music are preloaded, as are Motorola apps like Moto Connect, Moto Migrate, and Moto Assist. All of the Motorola apps are gems. Moto Connect lets you add and manage devices like the Moto 360, Moto Surround, and Moto Pulse. Moto Migrate lets you transfer data from your old device to the Moto X. Moto Assist is the app I used most. It helps you set up features like Moto Display, which triggers the display when you wave your bridge player above the telephone. There ‘s besides Moto Actions, like using a chopping motion twice to activate the flashlight. ultimately, Moto Voice lets you set up your own customs launch phrase and decide which tasks you want to perform with part commands. For exemplify, you can ask, “ Do I need an umbrella ? ” and the Moto X will give you the upwind .
All of these features are signally dependable. I never had the television camera fail to launch, or the flashlight not turn on when I performed the right gesture. I was able to use Moto Voice outside, even on a fairly noisy street .
The Moto X and the OnePlus 2 have different areas of persuasiveness, with the Moto X boasting a sharper display, faster charging, expandable memory, better speakers, and Moto Maker design options. The OnePlus 2, interim, has a more mighty Snapdragon 810 central processing unit, better battery life, a USB Type-C port, and a fingerprint scanner .
Both are excellent unbarred phones, and normally it would be a difficult decision weighing the devices against one another. But the OnePlus 2 has one big defect : It however retains the much-criticized invite-only purchase system that has caused release delays and actually prompted the company to issue an apology to customers. Taking into history its many strengths, and the fact that you can actually buy the Moto X Pure Edition, it is n’t hard to name it our Editors ‘ Choice for unlock smartphones .
Read more: Acer Aspire E5-573G Notebook Review
Motorola Moto X Pure Edition (Unlocked)
4.5
Editors ‘ choice
See It
$ 349.99
at Amazon
MSRP $ 399.99
Pros
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Cons
The Bottom Line
The Motorola Moto X Pure Edition is in the same class of unlock, low-cost flagship phones as the OnePlus 2, with one huge advantage : You can actually buy it .
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