Moto X Style/Pure Review

Of the three smartphones Motorola has recently launched, the Moto X Style (or Moto X Pure Edition for those in the United States) is the device with the best hardware. It’s the true flagship successor to last year’s Moto X, and with a price tag starting at $399 unlocked and off-contract, Motorola is positioning this device very strongly in a market crowded with high-end handsets.
The Moto X Style isn’t a small device, packing a 5.7-inch 1440p display on the front. Motorola has taken a leaf out of LG’s book in opting for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808 SoC over the hotter and more power consuming Snapdragon 810, alongside 3 GB of RAM and a 3,000 mAh battery. The same Moto features from the previous-gen model also return, including Moto Display and always-on voice commands.

The handset is very similar in size to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5 (...) however, the Style doesn’t feel like a thick phone in your hands due to the curved body; it’s a more ergonomic and easier to hold design than the Note 5.

Motorola has also been putting a lot of effort into their camera offering, which has been a low point of their previous smartphones. The Moto X Style features a big 21-megapixel sensor coupled with an f/2.0 lens, 4K video recording and new camera software, which promises to be a much better shooter than in the 2014 Moto X.
With the aforementioned 5.7-inch display on the front of the Moto X Style, the handset is significantly larger than last year’s 5.2-inch Moto X. Increasing the size of the Moto X is an odd choice, especially considering most consumers currently prefer a handset in the 4.7- to 5.2-inch size range, but Motorola seems to be hoping their less powerful Moto X Play is just as good an option for those wanting a smaller device.

Personally I don’t mind the larger size of the Moto X Style, and the screen real estate it provides. The handset is very similar in size to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5, although the curved body of the Style results in a phone that’s thicker than Samsung’s offering, at just over 11mm at its thickest point. However, the Style doesn’t feel like a particularly thick phone in your hands due to the curved body, and because it’s a more ergonomic and easier to hold design than the Note 5.
The Style is a decent handset from a visual perspective, with a plain, smooth Gorilla Glass 3 panel on the front protecting the display and providing a good amount of ‘swooshability’. The edges are constructed from metal, which gives the device a premium touch and added durability, while the back panel is available in a variety of materials.

The Moto X Style unit we tested came with a black rubberized plastic back panel with a horizontal corrugated pattern, which helps make the phone so easy to grip. It doesn’t really give the handset the same slick premium look as the HTC One M9, Galaxy Note 5 or iPhone 6s Plus, but I still quite like the Style’s overall look and feel with this type of back panel applied.
Several other style and material options are available through the Moto Maker, which gives you the ability to customize the Style before you order the device. The real wood and genuine Saffiano leather options for the back panel make the Style look more unique, and you can choose from many color highlights for the camera surround and front facing speakers, allowing you to produce a truly personalized device.
It should be noted, though, that once you choose a particular option through Moto Maker, you cannot swap out any aspect of the design for a different option (without enormous difficulty). The back panel is not removable, for example, so if you choose the leather option you’ll won’t be able to swap it out for a wood back down the track.


Around the edges of the Moto X Style you’ll find a micro-USB 2.0 port on the bottom, between two polycarbonate strips allowing the wireless radios to ‘breathe’ through the metal rim. On the top is a 3.5mm audio jack and a removable tray containing both a nano-SIM slot and microSD card slot. On the right side are both the power button and volume rocker, the latter of which is slightly too close to the power button for my liking, leading to some accidental presses on occasion.
On the front Motorola has provided the Style with dual front facing speakers, which provide great stereo audio when watching videos, playing games and listening to music. The quality of the speakers aren’t quite as good as I’ve heard from the HTC One line, but I’m glad Motorola has realized the benefit of placing the speakers on the front rather than the sides or back.

The front is mostly dominated by the 5.7-inch IPS TFT LCD with its 2560 x 1440 (1440p) resolution, providing a pixel density of 515 pixels per inch. The screen occupies an impressive 76% of the device’s front profile, which is almost identical to the similar-sized 5.7-inch Galaxy Note 5, thanks to slim bezels to the left and right of the display.
The quality of this display is very good, exhibiting balanced color output that’s neither too oversaturated nor too washed out. This LCD isn’t quite as good as Samsung’s AMOLED that they’ve used in the Galaxy Note 5, but in many ways the Moto X Style’s display holds its own, such as in color temperature and viewing angles.


The choice to go with a 1440p display over 1080p is still contentious even a year after the first 1140p phones were released, as the added pixel density doesn’t make a significant difference while affecting power consumption and performance. The Style’s LCD is undoubtedly crisp, delivering an awesome viewing experience, and at 5.7-inches there are some slight differences in quality between this display and a similar sized 1080p panel that make the extra resolution somewhat worth it.
In terms of brightness, the Moto X Style is relatively easy to view outdoors thanks to a high maximum brightness level, and automatic brightness does a good job of managing luminance indoors. Early 1440p displays suffered in the brightness department compared to their 1080p counterparts, but these issues have been resolved in second generation panels.

And of course, with 5.7-inches of screen real estate, the Moto X Style is an excellent media consumption device, especially thanks to the front facing stereo speakers that make gaming and watching videos great. The device itself isn’t too difficult to hold and operate with its large display, and Motorola has (like Samsung with the Note 5) struck a great balance between phone size and display real estate.
There are going to be some people with small hands who have difficulty using the Moto X Style due to its large size, so for those people it’s probably better opting for something smaller. However I don’t have the hugest hands going around, and I had no problems adapting to the size of the Style after a weeks’ use or thereabouts.

Software

The Moto X Style comes pre-loaded with what’s essentially stock Android 5.1.1, without any bloatware and without any ugly skins. For the vanilla fans out there, this should be welcome news, and of course the lack of bloatware is great on any device. Motorola also has a reasonable track record when it comes to software updates, sometimes delivering new versions of Android to their handsets before Google’s own Nexus devices. With Android 6.0 on the horizon, the Moto X Style should be one of the first handsets to receive the update.
As the software included with the Style is vanilla, you’re not getting a whole ton of new features baked into the operating system. However, Motorola does provide a useful app with the device called Moto that includes some functionality that’s worth setting up and exploring.
One of the most useful features included is called Moto Display, which shows snippets of notifications and the time on the display as soon as you pick up your phone, wave your hand over the display, or remove it from your pocket. As Moto Display activates basically as soon as you touch the device, it gives you all the critical information you need in an instant and at a glance. It’s so clever and useful that it’s the feature you’ll miss most when using a non-Moto device.

The Moto X Style also comes with Motorola’s always-on voice functionality, which allows you to speak a phrase of your choice (I chose “OK Moto X”) to activate voice commands while the screen is off or while you’re in any application. This is by far the best implementation of voice functionality I’ve seen, as it can be activated without touching the phone anywhere in the software, and it just seems to work and work quickly every time.
Motorola’s voice command implementation is slightly different to Google Now in that it can recognize some commands that Now can’t, such as “take a photo” will actually take a photo in the camera app, whereas Google Now will simply open the app. Where Moto Voice isn’t trained to recognize commands, it will simply transfer the request to Google Now, giving you the best of both worlds.
While voice commands are certainly cool, I didn’t use the feature all that often, mostly because it’s often quicker to access apps and write messages by tapping the screen and using the keyboard. There’s times where you might be on public transport and don’t want the whole world knowing what you’re searching or messaging as well, although you can lift the device up to your ear to send messages and hear responses discretely.
Motorola’s also baked in gestures to the Style, two of which are somewhat useful: double chopping the device to turn on the flashlight, and double twisting to open the camera. These aren’t natural gestures or something you’ll use all the time, but with some practice you could make great use of them.
Finally, Moto Assist can automatically adjust your phone’s settings based on triggers. For example, if it’s after 11pm and your phone is plugged in to charge, Assist can mute all notifications to give you a good night’s sleep. If it detects you’re in a meeting or driving, you can set the Style to only display priority notifications. I’d like to see the ability to customize the triggers and actions further, but what Assist provides is a good start.

Hardware Overview and CPU Performance

Inside the Moto X Style we’re looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 SoC, which I covered extensively in my review of the LG G4 and should be your first port of call if you’re interested in further details about this chip.
In short, the Snapdragon 808 features two ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores clocked at 1.82 GHz alongside four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.44 GHz, resulting in a two-cluster, hexa-core configuration. There’s also an Adreno 418 GPU clocked at 600 MHz, and a 64-bit LPDDR3 memory controller providing 14.9 GB/s of bandwidth, connected to 3 GB of RAM in the Moto X Style.

As for connectivity, the Moto X Style packs Category 6 LTE, HSPA+, 2G, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac with MIMO support, Bluetooth 4.1 LE, GPS+GLONASS, and NFC. The LTE and HSPA+ bands in the Moto X Style differ slightly from the bands included with the Moto X Pure Edition, despite both phones being essentially identical, while the Pure Edition also supports United States’ CDMA networks.
For storage we’re looking at 16 GB in the $399 base model, with 32 GB and 64 GB models also available for $50 and $100 extra respectively. Normally 16 GB would be a bit slim on the storage front for a high-end device, but the inclusion of a microSD card slot mitigates this issue somewhat. 16 GB microSD cards are available for as low as $7 on Amazon, and although you won’t get the same performance as internal NAND from a microSD, it’s an extremely cheap way to up the storage to 32 GB.
The Moto X Style also includes two “processors” that Motorola calls the “natural language processor” and “contextual computing processor”. Without taking apart the Moto X Style, it’s unclear whether these are simply part of the Snapdragon 808 or are separate chips, but they will facilitate some of Motorola’s always-on voice and gesture features.

In CPU-heavy benchmarks, the Moto X Style outperformed the LG G4, which also features a Snapdragon 808 SoC, by just over 10 percent. I suspect this is due to better thermal management in the X Style’s design, leading to higher sustained clock speeds, as well as improved software across the board.
The Moto X Style marginally falls behind the other top Android devices out there. The Galaxy Note 5 boasts CPU performance 4% higher than the Style, while the Galaxy S6 is just 2% faster. On the other hand, the Style is faster in CPU-limited scenarios than some of the Snapdragon 810 devices I’ve reviewed, such as the OnePlus 2 (by 16%), the LG G Flex 2 (by 18%) and the HTC One M9 (by 29%).
Compared to the last-generation Moto X (2014), the Moto X Style was 16% faster in CPU-limited benchmarks, and 29% faster overall after factoring in an increase in NAND performance and GPU performance.

Camera

For the past few generations, Motorola has failed to produce a great camera to go along with their typically very solid flagship smartphones. This year the company is promising it will be different, opting for all new hardware and improved firmware that they claim delivers “beautiful, true-to-life images in any light”.


The rear camera in the Moto X Style is a Sony Exmor RS IMX230 1/2.4” 21-megapixel CMOS sensor with 1.12 µm pixels, paired with an f/2.0 28mm lens and a dual-tone dual-LED flash. There’s no optical image stabilization in this camera, but it does capture 5344 x 4008 images in a native 4:3 aspect ratio as well as 4K 16:9 video.
On the front is a 5-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 lens and, surprisingly, a front-facing flash. Considering so many people take selfies these days, having a flash on the front does improve image quality in low light situations, and it wasn’t as blinding to use as I thought it would be. Overall the front camera is actually quite decent regardless of the flash, and it’s well suited to a variety of conditions.



Considering what Motorola has dished up in their past flagships, the Moto X Style’s camera is very, very good. The 21-megapixel sensor captures a lot of detail in a single image, which in turn looks great when downsizing to a 1440p or 1080p display. Motorola hasn’t gone overboard with sharpening filters either, which means a lot of detail is preserved when viewing 100% crops, unlike what you get on the Galaxy Note 5 or Galaxy S6.



The Style’s camera exhibits above average dynamic range and good bokeh, which make wide shots and close ups look great respectively. I was particularly impressed with shots taken on sunny days: great saturation levels make images pop without becoming inaccurate, and metering is basically perfect in every photo I’ve taken in these conditions.
Photos taken in less-than-ideal lighting were a bit of a mixed bag from the Style, and this is where it falls behind the best mobile cameras from LG and Samsung. Some images in these conditions exceeded my expectations, while others looked surprisingly dull and underexposed for the subject at hand. I think a lot of this has to do with metering and could easily be tweaked in the software, which would make it a real challenger to the LG G4’s mobile imagery crown.


The lack of OIS begins to hurt when taking images at night. Most of the photos I took in these conditions were dark, and this is where a longer shutter speed facilitated by image stabilization would have helped. I occasionally took decent low-light images, especially of well-lit city streets, and although there was no noise to speak of, artefacts were visible when viewing 100% crops to due noise reduction filters applied in post.
While the actual photos I took with the Moto X Style exceeded my expectations for a Motorola-produced smartphone, I was hugely disappointed with the camera app. The app is identical to what is included with the third-gen Moto G, and if it’s unacceptable on an entry-level device, it’s basically unforgivable on a flagship.

For starters, the Motorola Camera app is annoying and unintuitive to use, with every feature hidden away in a slide-out rotating panel. On top of that, Motorola has opted for tap-to-capture over tap-to-focus, which makes it hard to frame close-up images correctly, and puts you completely at the mercy of the automatic focus system.
Sure, the Style’s autofocus is quick and there’s zero shutter lag when taking images, but I’d far rather have tap-to-focus control when the autofocus system inevitably gets the focal point wrong from time to time. The alternative, available in the slide-out panel, is a focus ring you can drag around the image preview, which does give you focus and exposure control, but it’s at the expense of convenience and speed.
Simply put, tap-to-focus is better than tap-to-capture, and Motorola should rectify this issue as soon as possible through a camera app update.


There’s also a pretty serious lack of features in the camera app. You do get a decent enough HDR mode (with auto HDR), a panorama mode, slow motion video, and a timer mode, but that’s literally it. Many other flagship cameras have cool features, such as manual modes and burst-shot editors, and I feel the Moto X Style should have these things as well, especially considering the quality of the camera’s hardware.
Of course you could just download a third-party camera app from the Play Store, and I’d definitely recommend you do so. However an OEM shouldn’t rely on other people to develop camera features for them, and with greater access to the hardware, Motorola could have built something far better than what a third-party app could provide.

Battery Life

Inside the Motorola Moto X Style is an 11.55 Wh (3,000 mAh at 3.85 V) non-removable lithium-ion battery, which is fairly typical these days for a 5.7-inch smartphone. Ideally I'd have liked to see a physically larger battery inside this handset considering it isn't the slimmest device going around, but it's acceptable considering the competition.
The Style also disappointed in our new brightness-calibrated PCMark battery benchmark, although it did record a better score than the Galaxy S6. It appears as though the display is fairly power consuming, mostly due to its resolution, so these results are somewhat lower than expected.
On the other hand, standby battery life, which is difficult to benchmark, is excellent from the Moto X Style, which helps to mitigate some of the issues with screen on battery life. While you won't be able to use the device as much as the Note 5 with the screen on, for example, the two devices have similar battery life through regular usage thanks to the better standby battery life of the Style.

Good Hardware for a Great Price

I didn’t really know what to expect when I took the Moto X Style out of its box several weeks ago, but now that I’ve used it as my daily driver, I come away liking Motorola’s latest high-end device more than I thought I would.
The most surprising aspect to the Moto X Style is its camera, where Motorola has really exceeded expectations. The 21-megapixel rear camera produces some great images, and although it’s not as consistent as the superb Galaxy S6 and LG G4 shooters, the Style is more than capable as a camera for the everyday photographer. Throw in 4K video recording and a front-facing flash and the camera becomes a well-rounded package.

Unfortunately, Motorola’s camera app is unforgivably bad, and in need of a major overhaul before it can compete with the best in the business. It’s a real shame, too, because the hardware has proven itself capable only to be let down by software that lacks basic functionality, uses a confusing interface, and is generally annoying to use.

One of the best aspects to the Moto X Style is its price. The 16 GB model is available for just $399 unlocked and off contract, with microSD expansion available to alleviate the strains of limited internal storage.

The Snapdragon 808 that powers the Moto X Style falls behind the Galaxy S6’s Exynos 7420 SoC in terms of performance, but it actually holds its own against the Snapdragon 810 in all but the most intense GPU benchmarks. Performance is simply not an issue on the Style, and the operating system is one of the smoothest and most responsive I’ve used, no doubt thanks to vanilla Android.
Speaking of the software, Motorola has done a great job keeping the OS as bloat free as possible. The only features they’ve included are genuinely useful, such as Moto Display and always-on voice functionality, and the lack of a skin keeps the software feeling cohesive as you move from app to app. Motorola also has a decent track record when it comes to updates, so the Style should be one of the first non-Nexus devices to receive Android 6.0.

I like the design of the Style, especially the metal edges, the great screen-to-body ratio, the front-facing stereo speakers, and the back panel that can be customized through Moto Maker. It doesn’t have the same ultra-premium look and feel as the metal-bodied iPhone 6s, Galaxy S6 or HTC One M9, but for a large 5.7-inch handset it’s very easy to hold and operate.
The 1440p display on the front of the Style is one of the best LCDs I’ve seen, with accurate color reproduction, great brightness and decent viewing angles. It’s not quite as good as the AMOLED display used on the Galaxy Note 5, mostly due to better contrast and more vibrant colors, however it still delivers a lot of screen real estate, which is great for gaming and media consumption.
One of the best aspects to the Moto X Style is its price. The 16 GB model is available for just $399 unlocked and off contract, with microSD expansion available to alleviate the strains of limited internal storage. Customizing the phone with different materials or extra storage will cost a bit extra, but the Style presents excellent value when considering the hardware in this phone.

...one of the big competitors to the Style is the OnePlus 2, available for $330-390 for its 16/64 GB models. The two phones are similar in size, but the Style comes with a larger, better display, a superior camera, essentially identical performance, fewer software issues, expandable storage, NFC, and fast charging

At this price, one of the big competitors to the Style is the OnePlus 2, available for $330-390 for its 16/64 GB models. The two phones are similar in size, but the Style comes with a larger, better display, a superior camera, essentially identical performance, fewer software issues, expandable storage, NFC, and fast charging. In my eyes this makes the Style a clear winner, especially as you don’t need to bother with OnePlus’ annoying invite system.
On the other hand, for just $30 more than the Moto X Style, you can currently purchase an LG G4. The G4’s design isn’t as nice as the Style, and its software skin is worse than pure Android, but for a little extra you get a superior camera and double the internal storage. Both devices present great value for money, so I’ll leave the decision of which one to buy up to you.