Motorola Moto X Style First Look: Low-Cost Phone with High-End Features

Daniel Howley
·Technology Editor
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Two-year smartphone contracts are the bane of modern existence. To get a decent price on a phone, you have to bind yourself to a carrier for 24 months. Sure, you can buy a phone off-contract—but that costs big bucks.

Motorola, however, is looking to change that formula with its new Moto X Style. (Motorola’s website also calls it the Moto X Pure Edition, which is nice and confusing.)

In terms of features and build-quality, the handset—which I recently got my hands on for a quick first-look—matches up nicely with Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4. But unlike the 6 Plus (which starts at $750 without a contract) or the Note 4 (which starts at $700), the Moto X Style starts at a relatively inexpensive $400.

Here’s what you’ll get for that money.

Looks and display

As with previous iterations of Motorola’s Moto X, the Moto X Style can be customized using the Moto Maker online design tool. That means you can do things like select a back panel made of wood, leather, or rubber. You can also choose the color of the phone’s front and rear panels, as well as its accents.

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But while the previous generation of the Moto X came with a 5.2-inch, 1080p display, the Moto X Style comes with a larger, higher-resolution 5.7-inch QHD screen. In my quick perusal, I found that display to be both colorful and sharp. I’ll have to wait until I get a proper review unit, though, before I can really judge how the Moto X’s screen compares to the iPhone 6 Plus’s 5.5-inch display or the Note 4’s 5.7-inch panel.

Camera

One of the biggest downsides to last year’s Moto X was its camera: It just wasn’t as good as the competition’s. To that end, Motorola has done some serious work on the Moto X Style’s shooter, upping its megapixel count from 13 to 21 and giving it a larger 2.0 aperture lens. Motorola promises that photos from the Moto X Style will not only be sharper, but more colorful as well.

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I fired off a few shots with the Moto X and was immediately impressed with how responsive the camera was compared to last year’s model. Images of a Diet Coke can using both the Moto X Style and Samsung’s Galaxy S6 looked comparable. That’s especially impressive, given that the S6’s camera is one of the best smartphone cameras on the market.

Motorola has also equipped the Moto X Style with a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, with flash—great for taking selfies in a dark club and for making people with fair skin look incredibly pale.

Performance

Despite its low price, the Moto X Style doesn’t skimp on the performance. The handset rocks a powerful quad-core processor and 3GB of RAM, meaning you should be able to run all of the apps and games you can play on other leading smartphones.

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Motorola will offer the Moto X Style with 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB of built-in storage; if that’s not enough, you can always expand that by up to 128GB of storage via the phone’s microSD card slot.

Android at its purest

The problem with most Android smartphones—such as Samsung’s Galaxy S6, HTC’s One M9, an LG’s G4—is that they run modified versions of Google’s operating system. That can mean lots of unwanted apps and themes on your handset.

Motorola, though, sells its Moto X Style (and all of its Motorola phones) with an unaltered version of Android. So it’s Android the way Google originally intended it to be, plain and simple.

Moto G

In addition to the Moto X Style, Motorola also unveiled its new super low-cost Moto G. The phone costs just $180 without a contract.

Like the Moto X Style, you can also customize the Moto G using Motorola’s online Moto Maker tool. Because it’s so much cheaper than the Moto X Style, the Moto G doesn’t have nearly as many flashy features, but that’s not the point of this handset. This is supposed to be a phone that’s responsive and attractive without forcing you to spend a ton of scratch.

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The Moto G comes with a 5-inch, 720p screen that will be plenty clear for watching movies and using apps. The G also gets a 13-megapixel camera, which is a step up from last year’s model and its 8-megapixel sensor.

It will be interesting to see how the Moto X Style compares to the recently announced OnePlus 2, which offers equally impressive features for a similarly low off-contract price.

We’ll have more information on both the Moto X Style and Moto G, including full reviews of them, in the coming days. Stay tuned.

Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley or on Google+.