A Quick Look at the Moto X - Motorola's New Flagship

Since being acquired by Google, there’s been a lot of speculation about what’s coming next from Motorola. Last week they announced their Droid lineup for Verizon, this week they’re ready to talk shop about the much-rumored, very-hyped Moto X. It’s official and we just were handed one at a Motorola event in New York City.

Introduction and Design

The Moto X is a hugely aspirational product for Motorola, nee Google. Before its acquisition, Motorola had worked itself into an odd place in the US market. The handset maker primarily worked for Verizon as an ODM for the Droid lineup, and sold phones internationally in China and Europe. With the Moto X, Google is attempting to re-launch Motorola, a product which it views as the canonical first device under Google guidance.

The hardware itself is definitely not aligned with the industry trend of having larger and larger devices. Motorola says it conducted a large user study to find out what the optimal size for a smartphone was, and feels strongly that it’s found it. The study involved having a large number of users hold different sizes and shapes and give feedback – a primarily data driven approach whose end result is the Moto X profile. That’s topped with a 4.7-inch display and an edge bezel Motorola claims is thinner than all the competition thanks to a new unique glass-plastic fusion. The glass is fused into the plastic at the edge and rounds off nicely.

The rounded back shape of the Moto X is probably its most unique feature. Instead of a spherical or cylindrical back side, the Moto X has a more complicated conical one, which starts thicker at top and tapers to a point at bottom, with a rounded side to side profile. The closest thing is HTC’s rounded designs with the 8X or One, and interestingly enough Motorola also does a similar thing with a 2200 mAh (8.36 Whr) battery whose shape fills the available rounded profile with a two-cell stacked design, with a large thin cell and smaller cell stacked on top like a stair step. The profile is awesome, in photos of the Moto X it doesn’t really come through, you have to actually hold one to feel just how much it sits in the hand. The front side is also free of sharp edges, making it feel great when held against the head.

There’s an indentation on the back for the Motorola logo, but other than that the back surface is one unbroken curved shape. Up top is the 10 MP camera, below that, LED flash, off to the right, speakerphone grille. In the thickest part up top is the earphone jack.

One interesting choice on the Moto X is positioning the volume rocker on the right side, below the power/lock button. On the left side is a nanoSIM tray, making Moto X the first device I’m aware of other than the iPhone 5 to use the 4FF nanoSIM format. At bottom is microUSB.

The back side of the Moto X isn’t user replaceable – the Moto X backside is sealed and the device is fused together. The front and edge is either black or white, but Motorola has a ton of customization options for the back and accent color. There’s a bit more to the customization story than that, and though I had hoped for easy interchangeable back options, what colors your Moto X comes are a function of both how you order and what operator you’re on.

At launch, Motorola will enable users to buy their Moto X and customize using an online tool called Moto Maker which features a step by step customization process for building a phone. Back, front, accent color, and signature are options.

The order then gets shipped off to Motorola where they build to order each phone in Forth Worth, Texas with a 4-day lead time. Now comes the bad news – those customization options are AT&T exclusive and limited to the US at launch. More operators will come later in the year, but initially all the customization options are exclusive to AT&T, other operators get black or white.

The default black and white colors for every wireless operator is in fact a composite material, the other colors are polymer. The last of the hardware story is wood. Motorola is going to make four wood back options available – teak, bamboo, rosewood, and ebony, but not at launch. Motorola is still finalizing its wood. That might sound funny, but from an RF perspective wood does have some interesting challenges – wood looks like a polymer since it essentially is, however it has to be dried and sealed properly so water won’t severely attenuate cellular RF and all the other radios on the back. I’m told Motorola is still testing and certifying its wood options. The upside is that each wood back will be different, with unique grain and finish. Wood seems to be trendy in design circles right now, and I’m excited about it, I just wish it was available at launch instead of some undetermined time afterwards. It does look great though.

We’ll talk a lot more about the hardware and feel in our full review. For now the takeaway is that Moto X is an incredibly pocketable device with some great in-hand presence. I wished for more after-purchase customization, however Motorola needs to seal the device to accommodate that unique stacked battery structure.

Motorola will make the Moto X available at the end of August in the USA on all 5 major wireless network operators with the 16 GB storage option available for $199 on two year contract. AT&T gets an exclusive on the 32 GB option for $249. That’s not quite the price point that I was hoping for given the tier you’d expect with the specs, but I suppose USA-based assembly might have something to do with it. I couldn’t get any word on noncommit/out of contract pricing, but it’ll probably be around the $500 mark typical given the subsidy. Motorola will have a version of the Moto X on Google Play network unlocked as well, at some future date, and a developer edition on Motorola as well for what I would suspect is a bootloader unlock (Motorola has sold developer editions of their phones before this way).