Motorola has finally confirmed this week’s worst-kept secret – the Moto X is launching in the UK, France and Germany next month.
The Moto X was first announced and released in the US all the way back in August 2013. Since then we’ve seen the release of the company’s Moto G budget phone over in the UK, but this is our first chance to try out the higher-spec device.
There are a fair few differences between the X and G to justify the latter’s £380 SIM free price tag (some £145 more than an 8GB Moto G). First and foremost is the phone’s elaborate X8 Mobile Computing System. It’s an octo-core system that includes a Snapdragon S4 Pro processor with a quad-core Adreno 320 GPU and dual-core 1.7GHz dual-core Krait CPU.
The final two cores have very specific jobs. One is a natural language processor that helps to pick out and identify your voice so that the phone adapts and reacts to you. Motorola even told us that the system would adapt if you had a cold, though we’re not willing to go to the lengths to test this out. It can recognise English, French, Spanish and German.
The other is a contextual processor which queues up actions and reacts based on what you’ve used the phone for in the past. Say you ask the phone where the What Mobile offices are. You can simply then ask “How do I get there?” instead of “How do I get to the What Mobile offices?” The phone is remembering past actions stacking on top of them with the new questions and commands. We were told that users could use the voice recognition to find their lost phone. Simply say “Okay Google Now, find my phone” and the handset will start beeping. Neat.
Outside of the technical doo-hickery, the Moto X also boasts a far superior camera to the G, running at 10-megapixels as opposed to the G’s 5-megapixel camera. We weren’t able to share snaps from the devices available at the event, but we took our G along for a side-by-side comparison and were surprised by just how improved the camera was, capturing much higher details and richer colours.
It also boasts some unique features, including a shake to camera motion that sends the handset straight to you camera app after two twists of your wrist. Active Display, a sleep mode feature, displays the time and other notifications on the screen by simply moving it, so there’s no need to keep pressing power buttons and unlocking to check for updates.
Other than that, think of this as the Moto G’s faster, slicker big brother. It will come packed with Android 4.4, meaning it will still be beating most other handsets to the punch with the latest version of the OS. It’s launching on February 1st at £380 SIM free and starting from £25 per month. It’s available at Phones 4u, Carphone Warehouse, O2, Amazon and Techdata. The standard model is black, although Phones 4u has an exclusive white model available for the first three months.
Look for our full Moto X review in the near future.
