Motorola Moto X smartphone not coming to Europe for now
If you live in the States, chances are you won't have a hard time getting your hands on a Motorola Moto X once it is out. That's because the smartphone is bound to launch on every major carrier across the country, and even US Cellular is in the game. Folks in Europe and other places of the world, on the other hand, are in for a disappointment.
It looks like Motorola has no plans of launching the Moto X in Europeor anywhere outside of North America. Yet that's not because Motorola has no interest in the European market, as a company spokesperson clarified. It is just that Motorola has other plans for that part of the globe. Besides, it could be a safety measure ensuring that all demand for the Motorola Moto X in the US will be met. So instead of the Moto X, European markets are most likely going to get that upcoming low-cost version of the device. Nobody knows when that's going to happen, yet an official announcement of the latter smartphone may be months away from now.
This, of course, doesn't mean that the Motorola Moto X will be impossible to find anywhere in Europe. Carriers aren't expected to have it in stock, judging by whatever intelligence we have at the moment, but third-party retailers might have a few SIM-free units in stock. Just don't expect them to offer the Motorola Maker service as an option.
Yes, there will be a Motorola Moto X Google Play Edition
Even though the just-unveiled Motorola Moto X is going to feature a near-stock [backcolor=transparent !important]Android experience, we know that's never going to be enough for the purists out there who just won't settle for anything less than pure Google. That is why we guess so many of you will be happy to learn that there's going to be a Motorola Moto X Google Play Edition.
Details are pretty scarce at the moment, but the information is confirmed that Google is interested in partnering with Motorola in producing a perfectly clean Moto X, powered by an untouched version of the [backcolor=transparent !important]AndroidOS. Unfortunately, we don't know when this device is going to become available, which isn't really a shocker, considering that we still don't know when the regular Moto X itself is going to launch, though chances are this is going to happen sometime near the end of the month.
As you probably know, the regular Moto X will be offered by all major US carriers plus US Cellular, which is quite the exposure, and we can guess that for most people out there, the almost stock nature of the software on board will be good enough. It'd actually be a bit weird for this phone to be followed by a Google Play Edition, having in mind how similar the two handsets are going to be software-wise, but nevertheless, there are some other pros to buying a phone from the Google Play Store, and probably the biggest one is immediate software updates. While the [backcolor=transparent !important]carrier versions of the Moto X won't differ from the GP edition that much in terms of software, updates issued by Google will have to go through the carrier verification process, which may cause significant delays until they finally reach the handsets of end-users. Of course, with a Moto X Google Play Edition, this will never be bothering you, as all [backcolor=transparent !important]Android updates will be pushed to your device as soon as they are ready for distribution.
A look at the Moto X color options: where's orange?
Obviously, one of the big things about the new Motorola Moto X is in the customization options. We have known for quite a while now that the Moto X would at least have customization options for different colors, though there aren't as many color options as we expected, although with the options to mix and match the front, back, and trim, it does add up nicely. But, really, there aren't as many color options as we would have liked for the back plate.
If you take a look at the color pinwheel for the Moto X, you might notice right away (as we did) that the choices of colors is somewhat odd. The colors available all look quite nice, but did the Moto X really need to have 3 different variants of white to choose from when there is no option for orange? That's right, check through all you want, there is no orange.
The eighteen colors available (in the most basic, non-art school terms) are: white (x3), red (x2), pink (x2), purple (x2), foam green, yellow, green (x2), teal, blue (x2), and black (x2). We can understand brown being left out, because there will be options for wood grain, and that will cover the browns. We can even forgive the missing Carolina Blue, because at least there are blue options available. But obviously no one at Motorola ever went to Syracuse University, or else there would definitely be orange in there.
What do you guys think about the color options? Are the colors you want represented? What other colors would you like to see?
Throughout the rumor phase of the Motorola Moto X, the device got the reputation of being a "mid-range" device, or being a phone that uses "last year's hardware", because people would see that the phone was rumored to have a Snapdragon S4 Pro, and simply assume the worst. It's time we all put away that misconception, because the Moto X is not a "mid-range" device, and it isn't using "last year's hardware". The Moto X is a top-tier device that can hang with any flagship on the market right now.
Let's be clear though. I'm not trying to argue that the Moto X has "cutting edge" specs or performance, because that's not the point. There are only a few devices on the market around the world that are using the Snapdragon 800, which is the "cutting edge". The point is that the current "top-of-the-line" smartphones are the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One, which each run the Snapdragon 600. And, on that front, the Moto X can go toe-to-toe with either. Simply because a device isn't "cutting edge" doesn't relegate it to the "mid-tier" status unless we're prepared to drop all current flagships down a notch.
The truth behind the Motorola X8 SoC and display
We have covered Motorola's X8 processor before (twice actually), but it is worth running through it again, because some people have chosen to ignore what the chip is and what it can do, and focus on the misleading label that it has just a "dual-core CPU". Yes, the CPU of the X8 is basically what you might find in the Nexus 4, but that alone tells just a fraction of the story. As Apple has been trying to hammer home for the last couple years: the CPU of a mobile device is nowhere near as important as the GPU. And, in the GPU department, the X8 has the quad-core Adreno 320, which you would find on a Snapdragon 600 (which is the same chip that you'd find in the U.S. variant of the Samsung Galaxy S4, and the HTC One). Sure, the Snapdragon 800 has begun shipping in a few devices around the world, but it has nowhere near the widespread release needed to consider the 600 a "mid-range" SoC just yet.
Then, you can't talk about the X8 without talking about the two companion cores: one for contextual computing, and one for natural language processing. These two cores are designed to offload a fair amount of the ancillary workload from the main CPU, mostly to help with battery life. The "contextual computing core" handles all of the info from the device sensors, as well as anything run while the device is in standby mode; and, the natural language core which does exactly what it sounds like and handles voice commands, dictation, etc.
The result is a chipset that sounds quite a bit like Samsung's much-hyped Exynos Octa with the ARM big.LITTLE design. With big.LITTLE, you have four A15 cores that can do the heavy lifting, and four A7 cores for lighter work. The limitation of the big.LITTLE design is that there is no way to mix-and-match the workload between the core clusters. This means that you either have to have the A15 cores running or the A7s, and you can't have low-priority tasks running on the A7 while doing bigger stuff with the A15s
On the other hand, the X8 is designed for multitasking, because the companion cores are always ready to go in the background. In the commercials for the Moto X, Motorola shows how you can launch Google Now without touching the device with the activation phrase, but the thing is that you can do that at any time, even if you're using the device. So, even if you're doing something on the phone that requires a lot of power, and you say "OK Google Now", that companion core will still be ready and start up when you need it. In this way,the X8 is much more sophisticated than it usually gets credit for.
The other feature of the Moto X that is often pointed to as proof that the device is "mid-range" is the 720p display. I'll just be blunt right now: this is utter B.S. The truth is two-fold here. First, unless you have a 720p device and a 1080p device side-by-side, and you are carefully studying the displays, it is nearly impossible to see the difference between a 720p display and 1080p on a smartphone. The vast majority of users cannot, and will not notice any difference in clarity between 720p and 1080p in normal usage. However, you may notice the difference in performance, because the second truth is that the Adredo 320 in the Moto X will perform better than on the Galaxy S4 or HTC One, because it doesn't have to push as many pixels.
The benchmarks
That's as good a spot as any to switch into the benchmarks side of the story, because I know that benchmarks are really the only thing that some peopel care to understand. And, here's the breakdown: the Moto X beats the Samsung Galaxy S4 in every GPU test, beats the S4 in SunSpider testing and Kraken, and scored just below the S4 in Google's Octane test. The only benchmark where the Moto X scored significantly less than the Galaxy S4 is in Geekbench, which of course is the test that you're least likely to see translate into real world performance differences. The differences in some of the GPU tests are pretty stark, and might be enough to prove that Motorola's decision to choose a less battery-hungry, and less GPU intensive 720p display was a good choice.