Leo Laporte of the TWIT network has been touting the new Moto X as a phone to wait for. Hold off on that HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, the first Google-directed Android phone is coming out of the Motorola pipeline soon. I’ll be anxious to read full reviews of this phone. But frankly, after the excitement of the new Nexus 7 launch, the specs of the Moto X are a real let down after all the TWIT and general internet hype. 720p on a 4.7″ screen? Not that it is terrible, but at 316 ppi it trails just a tad behind the aging iPhone 5’s 326 ppi and is almost embarrassing in comparison to the S4’s 441 ppi. It isn’t low resolution, but also not exactly bleeding edge.
We’ll have to see how the new X8 architecture performs, but it is a dual core processor compared to the S4’s quad processor. At this point, phone performance is so great in general that I don’t think minor advantages in processing speed will be much of a selling point for Moto X’s competitors. I can’t wait to read reviews of the user experience here. Hopefully, the X8 architecture will result in a significantly better battery life. I haven’t seen any confirmation of that yet.
Another, head scratcher to go with the lower resolution and fewer cores, is the fact that the Moto X is apparently being released with the old Android 4.2.2 instead of the Android 4.3 available on the new Nexus 7. Oh, and the Moto X won’t even be a pure Android experience in its initial release.
Google finally had a chance to control the hardware, OS, and whether to skin a phone and we got the Moto X. For an Android flagship device, we’re left only with the Nexus 7. Like I said, I’ll wait for reviews to tell me about the Moto X experience. Maybe it will be greater than the sum of its specs – sort of like the iPhone and iPads. But right now the Google-Motorola engineering decisions are leading up to one great big yawn.
