Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Moto X Pure (2015) Review!”.
Hey what is up guys, I’m Kim PhD here – and this is the 2015 Moto X, pure addition or Moto X style, depending on where you live. So this is, it is the new Moto X. Of course, it looks very familiar to last year because it shares the same body style of the 2014 phone which you can tell by the build materials, the metal rails, the antenna bands and the unmistakable curves. So what is new? First of all, it’s a little bit bigger again and it gets a new backplate design still with a dimple which is pretty nice for holding it, but a bit more narrow and also still totally customizable in moto maker, and there are also some new back materials. So I went with this rubberized back on the base model and while you can opt to go with like a wood or a leather on the back, if you do stick with this rubber option, you pretty much don’t need any cases or skins with this phone.
It is one of the grippy ax stones out there, which makes it really easy to hold, despite being bigger, there’s also now a combo nano SIM tray and micro SD card slot up top for expandable storage, and you still get the same button placement and the same Ridged power button from before up front are the biggest improvements, though one a quad, HD IPS display and two stereo speakers again so last year. For some reason, the Moto X switched back to speaker only on the top and not at the bottom. So this year we get that stereo upgrade back and they’re right up there as the best sounding speakers in any smartphone, nice and loud and front facing right next to HTC ones. Boom sound alarm clocks are super loud notification, sounds and music get really loud with very little distortion and watching videos and gaming gives you that stereo audio experience again as things move across the display, which is really awesome. You simply can’t do that without stereo speakers. Now the back again on the Moto X is non removable, so you don’t have access to the battery, but you do get turbo charging and again I’m a really big fan of fast charging and smart phones. I’Ve talked about them past. The phone itself already has a pretty decent battery life as I’ll talk about in a second, but the ability to just like plug in for a few minutes at a massive amount of charge is super useful, even if the phone does last pretty much all day now Inside you will find some pretty high-end specs, the Snapdragon 808 chip, the Adreno 418 GPU and three bytes of RAM now.
One thing – that’s really easy to forget about this Moto X, pure, is how much it costs now. Some of it is because of the similarities and build with last year, but this is now technically a sub $ 400, our phone totally off-contract and that’s really impressive. Now, that’s sort of blurring a line between these flagships that are six seven hundred dollars and the more budget phones like the oneplus, 2 or phones even lower price.
But this still is technically the highest end flagship. That Motorola makes so it’s really impressive that they can get all this in such an inexpensive body. This is the best smartphone you can get for under 400 bucks. Now, arguably, the biggest change for this new Moto X is moving from last year’s 1080p LED display to this year’s quad HD IPS LCD display. So this is an interesting choice for a couple reasons on the panel itself. You know viewing angles are pretty good and it’s overall, a pretty nice bright, crispy display. My only technical complaint would be it’s not quite as bright as others in high outdoor lights, so not quite readable, and it doesn’t get quite as dim either in the lowest of low light.
I really do miss the AMOLED display of last year’s Moto X, though they switch to IPS LCD and I’m coming from. You know a Samsung phone, for example, with a super high-end quad HD Super AMOLED display and, of course, this by comparison with a much more expensive phone, doesn’t look quite as good, but again it’s a 400 ollar phone and it’s pretty great for what you’re getting that Being said, an IPS display versus AMOLED, you still have to light all of the pixels when you’re, showing things like your active display notifications, which means at night you’ll, see the entire panel sort of light up a little bit just to show that I haven’t found. It has a major effect on battery, but I still would have liked to have seen an AMOLED display in this new Moto X.
Now the other biggest change here with this phone is the brand new 21 megapixel Sony camera sensor. The camera in the smartphone is also, as Motorola’s claimed, much improved from the last version. It’S definitely now way better than any other Motorola smartphone camera in the past, which is great, but despite being 21 megapixels, it’s not quite measuring up to the super high-end flagship phones that are six seven eight hundred dollars.
This is a prime example of in a camera. More megapixels doesn’t necessarily mean better outdoors. The photos can look really nice from the Moto X, of course, with great sharpness and detail and decent color and dynamic range. I like that. It’S not too aggressive with the sharpening, like you might find from a Samsung camera, but you still get plenty of detail.
There is no optical image stabilization though so, once you get into out so great light or not ideal conditions, the photos break down pretty quickly, and you also become more aware of the limited dynamic range bottom line. Is this isn’t the first phone I would choose? If I was looking to take a lot of great photos or videos, but it’s enough of an improvement that it’s good enough for most people, my biggest complaint about the camera now is actually the software. I’M really not a big fan of the Motorola camera app.
They try to keep it super simple, with the menus sort of tucked away on the left and one giant shutter button with the whole viewfinder, and I guess I’m okay with it now, because I’ve learned it, but I still don’t like tapping the whole viewfinder to take A photo and having to drag around the focus indicator to focus, I think tap to focus is much more intuitive and a shutter button would be really welcome anyway, outside of those things, the camera and the speakers and the display and the new specs. The rest of this phone is very similar to last year’s Moto X, which is actually a really good thing. The software experience is largely the same as last year, which is to say near stock android 5.1, with a few Motorola additions in useful places. You get that Moto app, which is housing most of the Moto magic, and a lot of its functions continue to get updated through the Play Store.
So it gets better over time and you can use moto actions to double chop to turn on the flashlight that one’s new. You can also double twist to open the camera quickly, which means I don’t need a camera shortcut on my homescreen anywhere and you still have infrared sensors to let you wave over the phone to see your notification preview in moto display and there’s more stuff like this. All over the place that can be added as it gets to learn your behavior and I kept noticing overall performance as an ear stock. Android phone throughout this guy is really good.
It’S one of these smoothest, quad, HD phones, I’ve used I’d, say just as smooth as something like galaxy, s6 or note 5 through every day, performance and multitasking. Despite having a gig less of RAM and a different ship battery life was also very solid. It typically made it to the end of the day for me, which is a nice change from some other phones. I’Ve been testing recently but yeah. It approach four hours of screen on time by the end of the day, no problem and if I had a heavy day with like a lot of navigation or a lot of gaming or something I’m usually near a power source. So quick charging pretty consistently save the day.
So, at the end of the day, like I’ve said, the Moto X, pier, is definitely going to give you the best multimedia experience on any smartphone under 400 bucks, and it’s also likely one of the best overall experiences in this budget. It’S near stock Android. So it’s probably going to get updates very quickly and I’d expect marshmallow on this guy, pretty soon, of course, being just south of 400 bucks. It’S often going to be compared to the oneplus 2, also just south, to 400 bucks.
I would give the multimedia experience edge, like I said, to the Moto X peer, better higher resolution display front-facing speakers and a slightly better camera, despite not having optical image stabilization, but if you’re more into the software customization experience. This is going to be your edge here, plus. It has, in my opinion, a little bit better, build quality and you get things like a fingerprint reader and the alert slider on the side. Little bonuses, like the interchangeable back then again, moto maker over here, you can make this point, look exactly the way you want it to either way I’ll leave the link to the oneplus 2 review down below. If you want to check that out – and that’s been it for the Moto X pure, thank you for watching this review, video guys and I’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace. .