The New Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen) Review
by Joshua Ho on September 17, 2014 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola
- Android
- Mobile
CPU and General Performance
By now, the choice of SoC has become a major focus in every smartphone. While it may not be clear how to use more compute with every generation, it’s generally accepted that stronger CPU and GPU performance is better, especially if it means that there is a power advantage in race to sleep tasks. In the case of the new Moto X we see a Snapdragon 801 SoC with CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz and a GPU clocked at 578 MHz. At this point, there's really not too much to talk about in this SoC as we've reviewed multiple devices with the same exact part.
Currently, our test suite relies upon a combination of browser and gaming benchmarks to get a good idea of total performance. However, it’s important to note that the Android results are only comparable to other Android phones as the stock browser will have specific optimizations that aren’t found in Chrome. We’ll start with the browser benchmarks first.
In the browser benchmarks, we see that the new Moto X falls right where we expect it to for the Snapdragon 801. It's plenty fast, and I don't expect any differences in CPU performance between Snapdragon 801 and 805 devices. This is unlikely to be a point of differentiation until Snapdragon 810 and beyond come into play. We'll take a look at Basemark OS II next, which is a general system performance benchmark.
Here, we once again see that there's not much different in terms of performance. We'll turn to the gaming benchmarks next to get a good idea of what to expect from the GPU.
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Dirty_Punk - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
one thing that I can't understand, is why on Anandtech Iphone has such good battery life when ALL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD can demonstrate that iPhone battery life sucks... in all tests iPhone 5/5s are very near to LG G2 (at worst a 30% lower), that in real life have at least the double of the battery of iPhones....oscarnyc - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
while I wouldn't go so far as to say that iPhone battery life 'sucks' I share your surprise at how well it does in AT's laboratory testing vs. real life experience, where, in my experience, it is little better than the current gen Moto X.aman.agx - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
It looks like the benchmarks are targetting select functions while shutting down all other background processes. So they are not reflective of your real life experience. So for example the contextual services on moto x might be eating up much less battery overall than something similar on an iphone. But if you shut down both of those, i phone battery will seem like a giant.melgross - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
That's not true. It doesn't suck. It's not as good as the best devices out there, but it's better than most. I tend to get a full day out of my 5, and I usually use it fairly often.There's a lot of anti Apple prejudice on this site from posters. It's really sad.
spikebike - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
So motorola decided to give consumes the worst of both worlds. Thicker to allow for changing the backplate, but somehow not allowing changing the battery. To make matters worse they epoxied in a poor battery. So the result is a $500 disposable phone, with poor battery life, and you get to throw it away when the $15 battery dies.soccerballtux - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
honestly I feel like this review was pretty harsh. The camera isn't horrible, the AMOLED screen enables extensive black background screen on, the battery life is good enough, the phone has great software...so why so much hate?lostleaf - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Josh, can you comment on whether the display is viewable with polarized sunglasses in both portrait and landscape? Also does this phone have aptx?soccerballtux - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
good call, I've noticed this on my phones lately. What's up with that?Impulses - Monday, September 22, 2014 - link
It's basically a result of how polarization works, grab a cheap camera lens polarizer and play with it a little. I think phones usually prioritize portrait use, which generally makes sense, but sucks for looking at navigation (in landscape) with polarized sunglasses.Alex J. - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Thank you for yet another detailed review and for saving me money and time. As a previous owner of first-gen Moto X it's pretty disappointing to see that new Moto X is barely better in some aspects, and in some it is actually a regression. Most importantly, it still has horrible battery life and mediocre camera. As much as I love "Active Display" I'm afraid I will have to look at other flagships, with better battery life and better cameras.