Yesterday Motorola held an event in London. Actually that’s not true. They held an Event in London, but also New York, and also Sao Paolo, Brazil, and at these events (they were linked and the presenter switched between all 3 locations and a live stream) Motorola announced 3 products; a new 3rd generation of their most successful phone ever, the Moto G, and then they launched 2 Moto X’s. A Moto X Play and a Moto X Style. Lets Start with the G in our roundup of the Motorola July 28th event.
The new Moto G 2015
The Moto G 2015 is the definition of a generational upgrade. Its design is refined over the 2014 model, the processor is the next generation of the same series (Snapdragon 410 Vs. Snapdragon 400), there is more RAM and a better camera. Full specs on the image.
The Moto G 2015 has some pretty noteworthy upgrades over its predecessor, That camera for instance? Motorola tells us it’s the same sensor from the Nexus 6 (but for price reasons they had to remove OIS) but it adds something that the Nexus 6 didn’t have, a Dual-Tone LED flash. The Dual Dynamic Correlated Colour (CCT) Flash tries to help even out the skin tones in those areas where you absolutely must use a flash, so with this flash setup, everything isn’t so blown out .
Another new feature of the Moto G 2015 is the IPX7 water protection; up to 3 feet for 30 minutes (as long as the rear cover is connected properly). Though not wanting to test it out any time soon, it’s am incredibly cool feature for a device at its price and the water protection doesn’t make the device look ugly either, which is usually a problem for water proof devices. Again, just make sure all those clips are connected (even the sneaky hidden ones near the camera).
Another awesome thing about the new Moto G? Motomaker! If you don’t know what Motomaker is (I’m not sure how you don’t) it’s Motorola’s online service where you can customise your device and it currently operates for the 2014 Moto X, the Moto X Play which is coming soon, the 2015 G and the Moto 360. Once you’re in Motomaker, you can customise the front colour, the rear panel colour, the accent colour, your storage options, custom engraving options and more. It’s Awesome and I’m very happy it’s made its way to the Moto G.
The Moto X Play
The Moto X Play isn’t actually something we knew about. What some are calling the “Midrange Moto X” is actually a rather interesting device. The Moto X Play has a beautiful 5.5″ 1080p IPS LCD Display, an awesome 21MP camera, a dual-tone LED flash and a whopping great 3630 mAh sealed battery. The X Play is very much “a little bit of this and a little bit of that”. It borrows a little bit of the G and a little bit of the X’s style. It’s got a great metal body, but removable, replaceable back colours. It’s got dual grills on the front, but like last years Moto X, only the bottom is a speaker, the top is just an earpiece. It’s got the midrange chip solution from Qualcomm, an Octa-Core Snapdragon 615, and of course, LTE.
The Moto X Play also has Quick Charging. This isn’t your normal, bog standard Qualcomm Quick Charge though. Motorola specifically called out its charging tech inside the Moto X Play and Moto X Style (no Quick Charging for the 2015 G unfortunately). Moto says the battery in the Moto X Play should last you 2 days easily, and that just a half hour on their quick charger nets you over 10 hours of usable time on your device. Motorola also specifically called out Samsung’s Adaptive Fast Charging and just how much better their implementation was. We’d love to try this out for ourselves, so hopefully Moto get in touch once either the X Play or X Style is released.
The Moto X Style
The Big daddy, the flagship. The Moto X Style is the phone that is the proper head of the family, replacing last years Moto X 2014. With a 5.7″ QuadHD (2560×1440) IPS LCD display, the Moto X Style was never going to be a small phone but Motorola has managed to reduce its footprint considerably by shaving off as much bezel as it thinks it can. With a screen to face ratio of 76%, Moto really has packed a lot of pixels in a relatively svelte frame.
The camera is something that Moto has called out once again on this years Moto X, and they promise us it’s really good. Best in class in fact. Although we’ve heard this every year, the preliminary shot’s we’ve seen from people and the independent test done by DXOMark show that it’s really close if not identical in performance to one of the best shooters of this generation, the Galaxy S6. So we are hopeful, just don’t let us down again Moto, please. The front camera has also seen a bit of a substantial upgrade. It’s now a 5MP shooter with a lovely wide-angle lens (for all your group selfie needs) and something slightly less than usual, a front facing flash for those selfies taken in very dark places like clubs and, well clubs.
With a 3000 mAh battery and Quick Charging with Moto’s special sauce, the Moto X Style should have no trouble lasting you through the day. Another thing helping its battery efficiency is the SoC. The Moto X Style uses not the Snapdragon 810, but the Snapdragon 808, essentially the same SoC but with 2 of the higher performance Cortex A57 cores removed, and I for one have no problems with the use of an 808 instead of an 810. Could the issues of the 810 have been blown out of proportion? That is more than likely, but have devices using the 810 had issues? Yes. Have devices (well, device) using the 808 had issues? Perhaps but if there are issues there have been far less instances of them than 810 powered handsets.
The Prices for all three were announced as well today. The Moto G starts at £179, the Moto X Play starts at £279 and will be available next month, and the Moto X Style will be available in September, starting at the low price of £359. All three will be available on Motomaker on the day of release if not very soon afterwards.
UPDATE : This Article was changed as I mistakenly reported the X Play and X Style as having AMOLED panels and instead they have IPS Panels, sorry for the confusion.
