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
Display
Without question, the display is one of the most important aspects of a smartphone. Unlike desktops and laptops, smartphones are primarily interacted with through their displays. Unfortunately, it’s hard to evaluate a display by eye as human vision is strongly dependent upon context. In order to control for this aspect, we turn to SpectraCal’s CalMAN 5 with a custom workflow in order to test smartphone displays. At any rate, let’s get into the data.
In the basics, the new Moto X is a bit on the low side. While AMOLED has traditionally struggled with luminance in situations such as the web browser and light-themed applications, Samsung’s Galaxy S5 and S5 LTE-A Broadband have shown that it’s possible to achieve levels of brightness approaching some of the brightest RGB-stripe LCDs. As the brightness of the Lumia 930 is about equal to the new Moto X, I suspect we're looking at the Galaxy S4/Note 3 generation of panels. This seems to be backed up by pictures of the subpixel layout seen below as the green subpixels seem to be noticeably larger when compared to the Galaxy S5's panel.
Contrast is still incredible, but I can still see the purple smearing effect that comes from unlit to lit pixels. I’m still unable to get a clear answer on why this is, but it’s likely that capacitance somewhere in the system is causing this issue in the form of RC delay. Whether this is a fixable issue is something I’m not aware of yet. The clear solution would be to set black to the lowest possible brightness a lit pixel can be, but this would make for worse contrast.
In grayscale, the new Moto X isn’t the best. We see that the display is just a bit too red, and that most of the luminance is coming from red and green. This makes sense from a power and display lifetime perspective though, as blue tends to have the least efficient emitter material in an AMOLED display. However, this translates to poor grayscale performance. The green tint tends to show itself in certain shades of grayscale as well.
In our saturation sweep, the new Moto X continues to be rather poor in its performance. While on Samsung phones it’s normal to see colors like this on the default display mode, there’s usually a mode that correctly constrains the display to sRGB which is the industry standard for displaying colors. There’s no such mode on the new Moto X, so the display significantly overshoots sRGB. This doesn’t bode well for the ColorChecker, which provides the most thorough look at color accuracy.
As predicted, the new Moto X does poorly in the ColorChecker. There’s really not much that the Moto X can accurately display in sRGB as just by pushing the gamut too far, even if there wasn’t saturation compression for some colors, the large gamut will cause distortion of all colors within the gamut triangle.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear where this lack of attention to color accuracy comes from. In discussions with Andrei it's clearly possible to calibrate the AMOLED panel from the GS4 quite accurately, and there's no real technical limitation for AMOLED to lack good calibration. However, judging by the relatively low peak brightness there are other issues as this could affect Motorola's performance in battery life tests. This seems to suggest that Motorola is unable to access the latest generation of AMOLED panels from Samsung Display.
This would be a rather startling thought, as it means that no matter what Motorola does to improve their implementation of Samsung’s AMOLED displays, they will always be behind the curve. If it becomes clear that Samsung’s AMOLED is the best display from a user-facing standpoint, every other OEM will face significant barriers in competition as they would be unable to access the latest generation AMOLED panels. The real solution here is for other display manufacturers such as LG, JDI, and AUO Optronics to catch up.
At any rate, the display of the new Moto X seems to be relatively poor compared to what we see in the Galaxy S5 LTE-A (and likely the Note 4), along with the iPhone 5s, Nexus 5, and One (M7). While it’s impossible to ignore the power advantage of AMOLED when implementing functions like Moto Display, the relatively low peak brightness and poor color accuracy are concerning.
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Alexvrb - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
Yeah the RAM and the CPU aren't that big of a deal to me, but if you're going to delete the mSD slot then your base model should be 32GB with a 64GB version as the upgrade.gg555 - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
I agree. These days 16 Gb is a joke (which works out to more like 10 or 11 GB, once you account for the space the system takes up). These are multimedia devices. Once you start taking photos and video, downloading music and podcasts, doing some backups with Titanium or whatever, 16 GB really doesn't cut it. I struggle with this all the time on my Nexus 4.gg555 - Wednesday, September 24, 2014 - link
And they always want you to use the cloud as the solution to this problem. Seriously? Obviously they cannot possibly be ignorant about people having data caps on their plans. Not everyone can afford an unlimited plan. Or maybe this is just their way of colluding with the carriers to push people into more expensive plans. Anyway, the could is not a serious solution for a technology that has inherent network bandwidth issues.xaml - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
And security issues, which then reveal underlying issues with privacy, exhibitionism and respect. Not to mention the question of reliable access. And could it even be that data over radio is consuming more power than data over few or costly internal memory, respectively neglected external memory?erikiksaz - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Unlike Amazon, they're actually trying to make money off the hardware, hah. And I'm sure the cooling solutions for something of a tablet-sized form factor is much easier to tackle than on a smartphone.1080p on a 5.2 inch screen still results in a visible difference over 720p. 1440p, not so much.
bigstrudel - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
It's clearly the stock kernel which reduces battery runtimes on ALL nexus devices.julianocas - Thursday, September 18, 2014 - link
peGGi - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
Kudos to Motorola for the impressive engineering that went into the metal-band-as-antenna. I like that about Motorola, that they put time and effort into things that users may not immediately notice, but should definitely improve the everyday quality of the experience of using a phone for its primary use - to make calls. But........ the metal band ruins the design, compared to X Gen 1, sadly. Screen-plate aside, the casing now seems to consist of 3 parts rather than 2. I loved the slopey, curviness of the first gen, and the way that the backplate curved round the sides, and met the front plate in the middle. That unity of design is gone now, and this second gen looks a bit awkward imo. The front and back of the phones don't match that well anymore. There was a lovely overall unity in aesthetic to the first Gen, which has been broken on the 2nd.
I also agree with the commenters that it is too big. Just like the S5, G3, and One M8 are all too big. For my very average sized male hands, the Gen One's ergonomics were perfect.
Sensors at the top on the front, especially on white model, look messy. Could they not all have been put behind one, long translucent black strip, along with the speaker grille, or something like that? Or tidied up a bit better?
I think Motorola would've been better sticking to the compact, ergonomically wonderful design of Gen 1, but with improvements to the internals (camera, SoC, colour accuracy, battery life). They'd have a great performing phone that fits better in the hand than all their rivals, for a lower cost than their rivals.
And then it would make sense to have a 5.5inch-ish size 'phablet' too, big screen, big tricks, etc. They'd be competing just above and just below the S5 and I'd say they'd rip chunks out of the market that way.
It looks like the Gen 1 is gonna go down as a classic, flawed and all as it was.
Harry_Wild - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
I agree with your remark on the Moto X 2014! It much bigger then the Moto X which is great feeling and the right size for me small hands. But I am surprise Motorola went to a much larger size too! Motorola should of made the Moto X 2014 the same size; and they have the Moto G - 5" for anyone wanting a larger model. That would have been perfect decision. I going to the Apple store and looking at the 4.7" iPhone 6!dsouza - Friday, September 19, 2014 - link
@Harry_Wild, the new iPhone 6 (5.44 x 2.64in) is just marginally smaller than the Moto X 2014 (5.54 x 2.85)! So, if you believe that the new Moto X is too big for you, probably the new iPhone 6 will be so!