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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cwolf78 - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Some glaring omissions from this review:-Battery Life Talk Time (this has traditionally been a strong point for Motorola - does this continue?)
-Sound Quality (from built speaker and headphone jack)
-Bluetooth compatibility and performance (audio quality and issues connecting to devices)
-Call Quality (speakerphone and earpiece quality)
-Microphone quality (this phone is supposed to have an array of 4 mics.. how well does the noise cancellation work? Can people on the other end hear you clearly?)
Seems like all the aspects of this phone being used as a, well, phone, have been ignored. Usually Motorola is tops in this department. I'd like to know if that continues to be true for this device or if it's just another "Me Too!" device like this review implies.
gg555 - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
Yeah, I'm also disappointed not to see a review of the one of a kind four microphone noise cancellation. In the past, AnandTech is the only site that reviewed noise cancellation. Now no one does.Aqua1ung - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
801? Tsk, tsk, tsk...apertotes - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
10 page review. No mention at all about the lack of microSD. Bye, Anandtech. I've had enough.TheMan876 - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
Lol, what does it matter to you whether it's in the article? It's not there and you already know it's not there. And you know it's very close to Google's AOSP stuff and Google got rid of microSD support forever ago.hansmuff - Wednesday, September 17, 2014 - link
I don't understand this. I thought the 2014 Moto G has Micro-SD and 4.4.4? Is the Moto G not as close to AOSP?TheMan876 - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Well, my face is red. I don't pay attention to low end devices. Had no idea.CanvasExtractor - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
Is the Moto G a low-end device to you?soccerballtux - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
looks like Josh will be headed to Apple soon too. In fact the entire site will be purchased and rebranded to Appletech. Android reviews will continue but every phone with features similar to iPhones (lack of SD card slot, sealed batteries, etc.) will be praisedCanvasExtractor - Wednesday, October 15, 2014 - link
Google's Nexus Initiative is not AOSP... far from it. Unless you consider dropping a stock browser for Google Chrome and a stock SMS app for Google Hangouts to be "open source" in the least... nope. Google is removing open-source options from Nexus.True AOSP is returning SD capability; the backlash Google experienced with the release of KitKat was apparently disastrous enough to reschedule all their crippled functionality on Android Lemon.