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
GPU Performance
As said in the previous section, we'll look at game-based benchmarks to get a better idea of how the Snapdragon 801's Adreno 330 GPU performs.
Once again, there are really no results that stand out. I suspect that the metal frame helps to prevent thermal throttling in short benchmarks, but in most scenarios this doesn't really play out and there's no real way to establish long term performance as the GFXBench rundown test doesn't complete properly.
NAND Performance
NAND performance has been an ongoing issue since we first illustrated how poor NAND could easily become a massive detriment to user experience. While sequential reads and writes are generally at a good level these days, it’s the random read and write tests that can be incredibly poor, and these are often a good indicator of overall UI performance as something like installing applications can make a device unusable if storage performance isn’t good enough. In order to test this, we turn to Androbench with a few custom settings to best represent performance.
While the new Moto X doesn't quite top the previous Moto X in random write speeds, it's unlikely that the storage solution is worse. I found that the data and system partitions now use ext4, which means that the performance gains we saw with f2fs are gone. I'm not sure why Motorola decided to change back to ext4 given the performance gains that come with f2fs, but possible reasons include unforeseen conditions where f2fs could result in data loss compared to ext4 or difficulties in integrating f2fs support on Android. At any rate, the new Moto X is one of the best performers in this category, which should keep performance high after a year or two of use.
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mikelward - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Wow, well spotted.Yet another disappointment.
Gunbuster - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Perhaps there will be a T-Mo specific version? Still that segments it and killls the chances for finding a hot deal.I just wish there was an option to do WiFi calling on non T-Mo branded handsets...
jk1 - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
can't change the battery and poor battery life, no slot for an sd card for media - this phone doesn't even make my list of phones to consider.rocketbuddha - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Yeah. Very disappointing. They seemed to willingly snatched Defeat from the jaws of Victory.No SD card expandability
Piss poor battery
No T-Mo LTE bands
Moto's ideal market would be ideally a no-contract carrier likeT-Mo or any of the MVNOs.
rocketbuddha - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Wierd.Based on the table infor provided FCC-ID =IHDT56QA1, it has support for
WCDMA in AWS [850, 900, AWS, 1900, 2100]
as well as Band 4 LTE. [2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 17, 29]
Those are TMO US bands. So what prevents us from using the phone on TMobile??
greyhulk - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
A little off-topic, but does anyone know what happened to Brian Klug? Does he do anything for Anandtech anymore?notposting - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
He went to Apple.bigboxes - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
It sounds like the commercial, "He went to Jarrod's!" But yes, Brian and Anand went to work for Apple.fokka - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
and they didn't mention it even once, not even in his long and heartfelt goodbye letter did anand say what is what.Xinn3r - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
AFAIK only Anand went to Apple.Brian is continuing Grad study, this is from what I've read on other comments.