The original Moto X should hold a special place in smartphone history. It wasn’t the most powerful device, and the camera struggled, but it was the first major phone with contextual awareness baked in, giving you a hands-free assistant with voice recognition. We all yell at Alexa from across the room these days, but in 2013 it was magic. Every Moto X was different, too. You could customize it however you liked—deck it out in bright neon colors, backed in football leather, or covered in bamboo—and Motorola would ship it to you from its assembly plant in Texas, not China.
Motorola has gone through a lot of changes since 2013, and is now owned by Lenovo, but DNA from that first Moto X shines through in the Moto X4. It’s still not all that powerful, but is comfortable to hold, now waterproof, and has a suite of useful features unique to Motorola's handsets.
Moto’s days of bamboo and dazzling colors are long gone. Metal and glass are de rigeur on high-end phones, so of course the newest Moto X is covered in both, front-to-back, and comes in any color you want so long as it’s black or silver. Like a Samsung Galaxy phone, the glass on the back tapers in at the edges, making it easier on your palms. The glass also makes it incredibly slippery, fingerprint-prone, and breakable, but no more than any other iPhone-like device out there. My review unit has already picked up minor scratches so I recommend investing in a case, like this one from Spigen.
The brushed metal edges smoothly curve around the phone’s corners with care. Aside from the USB-C port, its curves are only broken up by the pop-out tray (it holds the MicroSD card and SIM) up top, a headphone jack on the bottom, and the three buttons on the right side for volume and power. Onscreen navigation buttons are present, but savvy users can save reclaim screen space by enabling sliding gestures on the iPhone-like fingerprint sensor under the display.
At first glance, I thought the Moto X4’s 5.2-inch screen was 1440p and OLED, but it’s a surprisingly vivid 1,920 x 1,080-pixel LCD screen with extra deep blacks. Powering the display is a mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 processor, 3GB RAM, and 32GB of storage. The storage is enough, but you will want a MicroSD card before long, especially if you tend to keep offline media on your phone.
Depending on which version of the Moto X4 you buy, the apps included will differ. You can buy the $400 Moto X4 with Android One, which is packed solely with Google apps, and gets security and software updates directly from Google. Or, you can buy the new $330 Moto X4 with Amazon Prime, which is a lot more affordable. It may not get updates quite as frequently, but does come with Alexa and other Amazon apps baked in (and Amazon’s famous lockscreen ads). It also comes unlocked, while the Android One version requires you to sign up for Project Fi, Google’s cellular service, to purchase. But wait, there is another! Though all three versions are mostly identical, I reviewed the standard $400 unlocked Moto X4 that you can buy on Motorola.com. It still has Alexa built-in, but doesn’t have lockscreen ads.
Regardless of which version you choose, the core Moto X4 experience won’t change much. As of this writing, the phone still runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat (last year's flavor), but should get the new Android 8 Oreo update at some point. Motorola didn’t lather too many extra features on Android, which gives it a clean look. I didn’t encounter lag too often, but it does crop up every now and then when typing a long email or ordering something on Amazon. Moto added has some nice perks to make up for the occasional lag. It seems like I have to enter a password every 10 minutes, and Moto Key stores them using the fingerprint sensor, no matter where I am in the OS. The X4 can also string together up to four Bluetooth speakers to form a single, Sonos-like sound system for multi-speaker audio.
In just a few days, I’ve grown attached to several Moto Action gestures. By swiping from the center of the screen to the lower corner, for instance, I can shrink the screen for easier one-handed use. Shaking the phone in a chopping motion turns on the flashlight, which helped me find my phone charger in the dark the other night.
The twisting gesture that lets you open the Moto's camera was vital when I saw three turkeys land and walk down the sidewalk and through an intersection, flippantly disregarding traffic laws. I would have never gotten a photo of them without the gesture, but the camera did still leave me yearning for more. I’m glad I have the shot, but it fell short of Instagram-worthy. Those turkeys looked terribly grainy, which made me wish the phone had a second 2x telephoto lens, like the iPhone 8 Plus.
The dual 12-megapixel/8-megapixel rear camera setup gets the job done under most circumstances, but shots sometimes take a second or two to process, and the app is slow compared to many of its peers. The second 8-megapixel camera has a wider lens and enables software-powered background blurring, which didn't work nearly as well as I'd hoped.
To test the Moto X's fauxkeh, I took a closeup of my own hand. The phone wasn’t able to make out the difference between it and the grass below. The end result looked like a Photoshop novice had tried his darnedest to give my picture a DSLR-like look, and failed. The front-facing camera can take 16-megapixel shots, which is a boon for selfies, so at least there's that.
You won’t have to worry about battery life more than normal for a mid-range phone. I was able to kill the Moto X4 in a single day, but it took a lot of effort. I installed apps, played games, captured video and photos, and generally abused the battery from 7 a.m. straight through 11 p.m. Normal use should put you at about a day and a half of life.
There are plenty of Android phones that will outshine the Moto X4, but at $330 with Amazon Prime offers, it’s a sincere step up from the $240 Moto G5 Plus and half the price of the Google Pixel 2 and Samsung Galaxy S8. Sadly, neither of those compelling phones let you shake your phone like a madman to turn on the flashlight.
