Motorola Moto X Style review: So near and yet so far

If I was on the committee that decided the name for Motorola’s new flagship smartphone, the last word on my lips would have been “Style”. Not because the Motorola Moto X Style is an ugly phone – but because it’s a risk. It becomes a rod with which to beat it; an easy headline if the product fails to meet with expectations.  

So it’s a jolly good thing Motorola’s phone design department knows its onions; it has slowly been refining its smartphone design for a few years now, and the culmination is the Moto X Style.

Is this smartphone everything you’d expect it to be? Yes and no. In some ways it’s absolutely gorgeous. The sample Motorola sent me for this review has a white screen surround, framed with curvaceous aluminium with a pale gold finish, while the gently arced white rear panel was finished in a subtly rubberised material that’s beautifully soft to the touch.

It’s far from the thinnest, lightest phone around, measuring 11.3mm at its thickest point and tipping the scales at 179gm, but it is elegant in a way that makes you want to pick it up, hold it and stroke it. The real beauty of the Motorola Moto X Style’s design, however, isn’t that this particular version is a looker; it’s that it’s customisable.

Log on to the Motorola Moto Maker service and you’ll be able to choose between three different frame and screen-surround colour combinations, ten colours of soft-grip plastic, four wood finishes and four types of Saffiano-leather rear panels.

But then Motorola goes and spoils it all by pockmarking the front fascia with a battery of hideous sensors and cameras. Above the screen are five blobs of varying size, shape and positioning; below it are two grey dots. They’re not attractive, and painfully obvious on the white-fronted version; if you want my advice, go for the black Moto X style – it hides most of them neatly away.

Elsewhere, the Moto X Style follows the template set down by the Moto X last year and the gargantuan, Motorola-manufactured Nexus 6. This means the volume and power buttons are located on the right-hand edge, with the latter textured so you can locate it quickly without looking.

As with last year’s model, you can’t remove the backplate and get to the battery beneath, but the Style does have a MicroSD slot for expanding on the 32GB or 64GB of internal storage. It also has Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on the front for scratch and shatter resistance, and the phone has been treated inside and out with a water-resistant coating. This won’t protect it from a prolonged dunking, but it should survive a rain shower.

Motorola Moto X Style review: Display quality

Where the Style starts to deviate from last year’s Moto X is the display. It’s larger at 5.7in compared with the second generation Moto X’s 5.2in screen, and the resolution is higher. As with so many modern flagship phones, you get a 1,440 x 2,560 resolution here, delivering a pixel density of 520ppi. You definitely won’t see any jaggies, but then the same can be said of a 1,080 x 1,920 resolution screen of the same size, so I wouldn’t get too excited about it.

This year, Motorola’s lead phone also sees a change in technology, employing an IPS LCD technology instead of an AMOLED one. The result? Well, the screen doesn’t have the same pop and visual impact as last year, but its vital statistics are still pretty reasonable. The screen reaches a maximum brightness level of 502cd/m2, and delivers a contrast ratio of 1,045:1. Those figures are good, but not quite up to the same level as, say, the iPhone 6s or the Samsung Galaxy S6.

Motorola still implements its ingenious Moto Display feature on the Moto X Style. Via a bank of four front-facing motion sensors, this displays the time and your current unread notifications whenever you wave a hand above or near the display. It’s a great way of checking the time when you wake up in the middle of the night, and that isn’t the end of the phone’s screen-based extras.

There’s also Motorola’s “Attentive Display”, which keeps the screen on when you’re reading, so you don’t have to fiddle with the timeout controls or keep tapping to keep it awake.

Motorola Moto X Style review: Battery life

Hands up if you’re satisfied with the battery life on your current smartphone. Anyone? Didn’t think so. Motorola wants to do something about this, but not by lengthening the time between charges. Instead it’s concentrating on the length of time it takes to charge.

Now this is nothing particularly new; many flagship smartphones offer some kind of fast charging. The difference here is the speed that this phone charges via the bundled TurboPower charger.

This charger is a beast, supplying 15W of juice where most phone chargers usually only go to 10W, and in my testing it charged the X Style in double-quick time. The phone went from  0% to 5% in the time it took to boot, hit 50% 21 minutes later, and reached 100% after 1hr 21mins. That’s quicker even than the Google Nexus 5X with its USB Type-C cable and charger.

As far as battery life itself is concerned, alas that’s less impressive. Inside, the Style has a 3,000mAh battery, which is the same size as the battery in the far slimmer Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+. It’s a little small for a phone this bulky – I was hoping for something a little bigger.

And it look as if it genuinely needs the extra capacity, because the Motorola Moto X Style proved disappointing in tests. It achieved a lowly time of 8hrs 54mins in our new looping video test, with the screen set to 170cd/m2, a time that compares poorly with every single one of its rivals: the LG G4 (11hrs 58mins), the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ (13hrs 23mins), and the Sony Xperia Z5 (11hrs 29mins). Even the Motorola Moto X from last year and Nexus 6 perform better.

Motorola Moto X Style review: Performance

Normally I wouldn’t be too concerned with this. After all, the Motoo X Style will get you through a day of normal use if you don’t game too hard. It’s especially disappointing, here, though because the phone uses Qualcomm’s low-power flagship processor – the Snapdragon 808 – which I’ve seen perform better in other phones.

The 808 comprises a dual-core 1.8GHz CPU, which kicks in during demanding tasks, and a low-power 1.44GHz quad-core unit for the less demanding, everyday stuff like reading, browsing basic websites and so on.

It’s the same chip as in both the Nexus 5X and the LG G4, both of which gain better battery life scores. Still, for most purposes, the Moto X Style feels perfectly speedy in everyday use. The camera app is highly responsive, complex web pages scroll smoothly by, and even when installing apps the phone responds with alacrity.

There’s nothing to complain about from a benchmarks perspective either. Although the Moto X Style can’t keep up with the iPhone 6s or the Samsung Galaxy S6, it scores at around the same level as the Nexus 5X and it’s in front of the LG G4.

Motorola Moto X Style: Cameras

How about the camera? Is that any better? Happily, yes. The Style has a 21-megapixel rear camera with an aperture of f/2.0. That’s not quite up to the LG G4’s f/1.8 or the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge’s f/1.9, but it’s a match for the Nexus 5X, which I was very impressed with when I tested it recently.

It has phase detect autofocus, a dual-tone flash on the rear and also a single-LED flash to go with the now-obligatory 5-megapixel selfie camera, so low-light selfies don’t have to look grainy. There is only one miss – but it’s a biggie: there’s no optical image stabilisation (OIS).

All-round performance, however, is pretty good. The autofocus works quickly in stills, and doesn’t hunt back and forth before locking on. Image quality is excellent in daylight, with lots of detail capture, balanced colours and not too much processing or noise reduction.

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I’m a particular fan of the sure-footed way in which the camera sets auto-exposure, neither over nor underexposing images. And on those rare occasions it does get things wrong, adjusting the exposure compensation is easy: simply slide your finger around the draggable  focus reticule to darken or lighten the image.

In low light, it’s a slightly less rosy picture. Once again, the exposure tends to be well-judged, and photographs generally look good, but examine them closely and it becomes apparent that detail is lost, smeared and generally smudged out by over-active noise reduction.

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The lack of OIS also leads to a higher incidence of shaky, spoiled shots, and I felt I needed to take two or three photographs of the same scene to ensure one came out sharp.

Video quality is excellent, with smooth digital stabilisation, and it can capture both slow-motion footage at 720p and 4K footage at 30fps. It isn’t perfect, though, with autofocus hunting back and forth as you point the camera at different subjects – odd, since it doesn’t do this in stills mode.

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Motorola Moto X Style review: Software

One of the attractions of the Motorola approach to smartphones in recent years has been its insistence on plain Android, and a welcome lack of unnecessary pre-installed apps. Here, you get Motorola Migrate for moving across your stuff from an old phone to a new one painlessly, a separate Gallery app to supplement Google Photos, and a host of useful extra features via Motorola Assist – and that’s about it.

And while other manufacturers’ added features can be of dubious worth, Motorola’s Assist tweaks are absolute genius. They include the aforementioned Attentive Display and Moto Display, and also a number of other really handy shortcuts: double chop the phone and the torch switches on, even with the phone in standby; a double twist of the wrist launches the camera app; and Moto Voice extends the capabilities of Google’s voice-recognition capabilities nicely, allowing you to place calls, set reminders, check the weather and more without having to first unlock your phone.

The phone I tested wasn’t running Android 6.0 Marshmallow yet, but Motorola is promising to roll out an upgrade whenever it’s ready. No dates have been confirmed as yet, but on previous form I’d say that it will probably arrive before Christmas.

Motorola Moto X Style review: Verdict

As ever with Motorola’s upper-end smartphones, the Moto X Style gets some things bang on, while missing the target elsewhere. The design is great, for instance, but the phone is heavy and thick. The camera is good, but the lack of optical image stabilisation leads to a lot of spoiled shots in tricky light. It charges quickly, but the battery life is lacklustre.

And while it has plenty of attractive features, including front-facing stereo speakers, microSD storage expansion, pure Android and a lack of app bloat, there are notable gaps in its specifications. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I haven’t mentioned a fingerprint reader, wireless charging or an infrared port; that’s because the Moto X Style doesn’t have these features.

The big thing in the favour of the Motorola Moto X Style is its price. SIM-free from the Motorola website, the phone starts at £399 for the 32GB model, which makes it £50 less expensive than the similarly sized Google Nexus 6P, and only £20 more expensive than the 32GB Nexus 5X. This should be enough on its own to push the Moto X Style firmly onto your shortlist; it may not be the best, most complete smartphone around, but it sure is good value.