Hey Geeks, The Moto X, It isn't for you

Ooooh look at the pretty colours.

This. Is the Moto X

This, also, is not for you, tech blogger,spec whore or gadget connoisseur (hey that rhymed).

What im trying to get at is that although this phone was hyped to be the be-all and end-all of smartphones, in reality, it wasnt, and in my opinion, that's a good thing, but more on that later. what im here to talk about today is why this phone isn't for the internet paparazzi.

A couple of days ago i read people claiming that the Moto X would be "Android's iPhone" , and to some extent, i agree, but i dont agree on the part that this is going to be the phone to launch motorola into stratospheric popularity (again) , i agree on the part that this is the first true Android phone to favour optimization over pure specs, now, i posted a little while ago that optimization is better than raw horsepower and the Moto X was the main part about that post back then, but that was back before the specs were official, and now we know what they are , this means even more,at least i do. lets get the "boring stuff" out of the way right now, the specs, and now i say boring stuff, because most people wont care about the (majority of the) Specs, and that's who Motorola and Google are aiming this device at.

• 4.7" 720p RGB (not RGB stripe,but not Pentile) S-AMOLED screen,edge to edge
• Motorola X8 mobile computing system, Dual Snapdragon S4 Pro, Krait 300 CPUs clocked at 1.7Ghz, Quad Adreno 320 GPU's, a Natural Language Processor and a contextual computing Core
• 2GB RAM
• 16/32GB on board storage, no SD slot
• NanoSIM (third device after iPhone 5 and Asus PadFone Infinity)
• 10MP ClearPixel RGBC camera,native 16:9
• 504 customisation options (exclusive to AT&T for a while)
• Wifi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual-band 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz
• GSM,LTE and CDMA Rev.A
• Bluetooth 4.0 LE and EDR
• 2200mAh sealed Lithium Ion "stacked" battery
• 24 hours Mixed usage

Now that we have the boring stuff out of the way, forget it, because for the rest of this post you arent you, you are a normal consumer, who doesnt care what specs this phone has, you dont know your Gigahertz from your Hertz rental car service.

And now that we've got that bit straight, that's how Motorola is targeting this device, they arent  marketing this as the Device that'll cure your insomnia, your girlfriends cold or your best mates amnesia, they are going to market this as the phone for everyone, and you know what phone "everyone" wants, it's the iPhone, and i hate to say it, because i really do not like iPhones, i really dont, i would much rather have a Blackberry Z10 or a HP Pre 3 instead of an iPhone, but you know what working in a phone shop has taught me (apart form people are incredibly clumsy and tell stupid lies to the insurance firms) it's that 70% of the populace where i live now and about 60% where i used to live, want an iPhone, and as we all know, the iPhone has never been a spec demon, i mean, it only just got 1GB of RAM , where as android devices had them at the tail end of 2010 and throughout 2011. so why do people want the iPhone when it doesnt have a trillion cores with a 96 gigapixel camera? 

it's because the Experience negates the need for ridiculous specs.

Dont believe me?  alright, let's move to Windows Phone then, next to me on my desk, is the Lumia 720, a device with a Dual-Core Snapdragon S4 Plus clocked at 1Ghz, an Adreno 305 GPU, and 512mb of RAM, now compared to my Nexus 4, you'd think this would run like a dog no? well, you'd be wrong, the Nexus 4, with 2 more cores with a newer architeture and 70% higher clockspeed, with quadruple the RAM, is near identical to the Lumia 720,and slower than the 720 in some tasks, and why? becuase the software is crazy optimised to rip each bit power out of each core without much wastage, that's also why, In my experience, Windows Phones have much superior battery life to their Android counterparts.

So now we've established that "normal users" dont want the newest architecture with the more cores clocked the highest, and the highest resolution screen on a device not much larger than a TV remote, and that they "just want it to work" we can get somewhere.

Jim Wicks, the SVP of Product Design at Motorola said "We could go in and put a higher resolution screen,but it would just suck power and nobody would notice the difference" and he's got a good point there, most people, if they had the oportunity to have 2 displays next to each other, One with 720p and one with 1080p at the same size, wouldnt really notice a difference, they might notice the 1080p is slighlty shraper, but when you get in thoe densities its really neglible, especially if you dont have them next to each other, like i said before, working in shop i do get to see all of these phones, and even i, without them being next to each other, cannot really see a difference between 1080p and 720p

Now Lets move on to the Motorola X8 Mobile Computing system, or the X8 as i shall be calling it for the rest of this post.the X8 is essentially an off the shelf Snapdragon 600, but they've taken away 2 of the CPU cores and replaced them with a NLP and a contextual computing core, "But Dom, it's branded as an S4 Pro, why would they lie?" because they do that's why, nah im just joking, im not sure why, but still, the X8 has 2 CPU cores, clocked at 1.7Ghz each, and those core are based off of the new Krait 300 architecture in the Snapdragon 600, not the Krait 200 in the S4 Pro from last year or the Dual-Core S4 Plus, and it has the new Quad-core Adreno 320 GPU, the exact same part from the Snapdragon 600, and faster than the Adreno 225 from the S4 plus, and the Same from the Quad-Core S4 Pro from last year. So now we've gotten to the point where we can litterally say that the Moto X8 is a Snapdragon 600 with 2 CPU cores removed and they replaced them with Dedicated cores for other stuff, the NLP (Natural Language Procesor) is for the always on Mic listening for "Okay Google Now" and the CCC (Contextual Computing Core) is for stuff like Active Display, the shake to camera stuff and all the sensors in general. so whilst the X8 might not be the Quad-core super monster beasts that the new flagships have, it isnt a slouch either, and with the optimization Moto and google have ben doing, the Moto X apparently runs faster than many of those quad-core behemoths.

See, Optimization matters

Next is the Camera, now a lot has been made about the ClearPixel camera, and im not smart enough about cameras to go very deep into it, but from what i can understand a standard camera sensor is RGBG , there is two green ,a red and a blue part, like this photo below explains

But as you can See on the RGBC camera, the green lenses are replaced by Clear ones, and this apparently lets in up to 75% more light than the standard RGBG sensor, making it (hypothetically) great for night or low light shots, now this will have to wait till the reviews are up to make proper camera decisions, so im stopping with the hardware there, what im really interested with, is the camera software and as you can see, it's pretty spartan

Which, again, In my opinion, is a good thing, you know what Normal people want to do when they open the camera app, they want to take photos, they dont want to change the exposure settings, or the ISO or the whitebalance, or change the Scene mode, they want to take a photo and be done with it, having two buttons on display is a smart move, the buttons are "switch to the front camera" or "switch to the Video recorder" ,it's uncluttered, and it's simple, the phone has lightning fast autofocus etc, so as soon as you tap the screen to take the photo, it's taken, which is great, and if the person wants to change some stuff, like put HDR mode on,shoot Slow motion video, enable or disable tap-to-focus, they cando that by sliping from the left edge inwards, so by default its out of the way, so you get the most of the view fiinder for the photo, not the controls, ou know whats scary to a layman, 20 gazillion controls on a smartphone camera, if i asked my mum or sister what they do when they open their camera, they'd say the take a photo or shoot a video, they dont mess around with all the fine detail because the auto settings do it well enough so that they dont have to worry.

So now i promise im going to wrap this overly long post up, but do you see where im going with this guys? Mororola isnt positioning this as the be-all and end-all for techies, they are promoting it ,as the smartphone than anyone can use ,because its got a big screen, its the phone that has worry free 24 hour battery life, its the phone that can take easy,good photos without messing around, it's a phone for the people who, like i said earlier, dont know Gigahertz for the Hertz rental car company.

All that being said though, i Wish the Moto X would come to the UK, i'd actually pur my Nexus 4 in a drawer for it (i never actually "get rid" of phones) and for 2 main reasons, one of those reasons, it's a proper 720p display, now i've gone on long enough about how i hate WXGA in both it's 1280x768 and 1280x800 forms, but on phones, WXGA sucks because it makes the device unecessarily wide, the Nexus 4 In my opinion feels too wide, it's wider than the GS4, which has a larger, higher resolution display, which is ridiculous, i would love to have a proper 720p screen on my Nexus, the Moto X takes it one step further and makes it AMOLED as well, and as you all know, i Love me some AMOLED, and the second reason for me wanting this device, Motorola actually put some thought in how the phone should feel, and they got rid of as much unusedspace as possible, so even though the Device has a 4.7" screen, it's much closer to that of a 4.3" device, and its a fraction taller than an iPhone 5, so that is just phenomenal.

So yeah, Moto X, not for geeks, surprising seeing as im pretty sure the Geeks and tech bloggers basically named this phone for Motorola with all the rumours.