Review: Motorola Moto X

Note: Motorola updated the Moto X in September of 2014, and the second-gen version addressed some of the shortcomings of the first version. Namely, the camera, the display, and the internal specs. Many of the anticipatory features and Google Now integration remain the same or have been improved. This review has been updated to reflect the changes made to the second-gen device. Likewise, the Moto X remains one of our top recommendations for smartphone shoppers.

For nearly a decade now, we've been living in the land of the smartphone. The Moto X makes a promise to take us to another place. It claims to be something different, and something new; something that uses both on-board sensors and cloud-based services to give us an entirely new experience. It hints at the end of the smartphone, and the beginning of the anticipatory phone. Just talk to it and it turns on, ready to help.

In some ways, it's the Santa phone; it knows when you are sleeping and knows when you're awake. It won't bother you during meetings, or at night while you slumber (unless, of course, it's about something truly important.) Go for a ride with it in the passenger seat, and it will read your text messages aloud, then send automated replies to let your friends know you can't talk right now. Change its state and the Moto X responds to you. Pull it out of your pocket and the lock screen comes alive to tell you there are new mail or text messages. Tap the screen and it shows you details – who has sent them, subject lines, the text of messages. Shake it and its camera launches. Tap the screen and you've captured a photo.

It's a device that will melt away into pure information. It's capable of doing things without having to be asked. Or at least, that's the promise. But the reality doesn't quite get there.

But let's say this first: This is a very nice phone, with very nice hardware. The Moto X has solid specs—like a 424 ppi 1920x1080 display, a 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor, a 13-megapixel rear camera—but they aren't what makes it special. The back is slightly curved, made from a grippable material that's easy, and a pleasure, to hold onto. The 5.2-inch screen is in Goldilocks territory, at least for me. It feels just big enough to be useful, without going overboard like the Galaxy phablets, which I find hard to hold and operate with one hand. But again, that's not what's so cool.

The killer hardware feature is the ability to customize the phone's body to suit your taste. You can choose from an array of colors on the front, back and accents in various configurations—some 2,000 possible combinations, says Motorola. Famously, there's even an option for wood. Our test phone was all black everything.

And then, of course, there is the software—the stuff that takes the sensors and turns them into a sensory experience. You start seeing this from the get-go.

When you first fire up the phone, a program called Motorola Migrate offers to help bring your data over from your old Android device. This was convenient, but I wanted it to go further. While it snagged email, messages, and photos just fine, I was still left in setup land afterwards—adding accounts, futzing with passwords. Honestly, it ultimately didn't make that much of a difference to me given that all my pictures, texts, and emails are stored in the cloud anyway. I wanted it to do even more, and found that desire to push things just a bit further would remain a theme.

Take the voice activation. I loved being able to say "OK, Google Now" to wake up the phone and have it do things—make calls, perform Google searches, play music, and the like. This was especially helpful while I was driving. I could say "OK Google Now, play Jay Z" and Rdio would fire up (after setting Rdio as a preference, that is) and start playing Jay Z songs. "How do I get to the library," will give you options for the closest and best libraries, public and private, and then deliver directions with a single touch. It will let you dictate and send texts and emails. Tell it to "Schedule a meeting with my boss at 11:30 tomorrow" and it adds it to your calendar. If you've been using Google Now and voice search on another device, these actions are already familiar, but the ability to start them up by saying "OK Google Now" while your phone is otherwise asleep is novel and powerful.

But I found it frustratingly half-baked in other regards. The same request to "play Jay Z's new album" kicked me to a web search, as did "play Jay Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail." Saying "start Yelp" would fire up the app, but then you need to take over yourself and fiddle with it to actually make any use of it. Saying something like "find me a Chinese restaurant nearby on Yelp" just took me to a Google search, where the second option was 400 miles away in Los Angeles (In fairness, asking it to "find me a Chinese restaurant nearby" did much better, because it relies on Google's own database and reviews).

It also isn't as secure as promised. You train it to recognize your voice, so it only responds to your commands. And that does keep most people out. But not everyone. At least three different people were able to say "OK Google Now" to the Moto X and activate it – one prankster then immediately looked up pressure cooker bombs so it would be stored in my Google history. So, there's that.

But what I did like, very much, is that none of this is gimmicky. Smartphone technology has matured so much in the last two years, and reached such a level of hardware parity that some manufacturers have responded by vomiting up useless application clutter all over their devices—like Samsung's eye tracking "smart scroll" which was perhaps the stupidest goddamn feature anyone has ever put into anything. The Moto X doesn't waste time with this nonsense.

Features like Moto Assist are genuinely useful. It can tell if you're driving, for example, by tracking the speed the phone is moving and set itself to read aloud and automatically respond to your text messages. If it sees a meeting on your calendar, it will automatically silence itself and turn off vibrate, and respond to phone calls from your favorites with a text message to let them know you're occupied. And that lock screen data trickle, when it shows you recent activity when you pick up the phone or pull it out of your pocket without having to press a button, is tremendously useful. Tap the screen for details. Unlock it if you need to act. Amazing.

Likewise, I loved the camera. Not because it was so gorgeous, but because it was so easy. Your phone is your camera that's always with you, and the Moto X makes taking pictures super easy. The double wrist-shake-thing (twist it twice to launch the camera) gets the camera up and running super-fast. Likewise, being able to tap the screen to take pictures with a rapid-firing shutter (both the frontside selfie shutter and the regular one on the back are very quick) helped me take far more great pictures of my fast-moving toddler than I'm normally able to pull off. Deep integration with Google services meant these were automatically uploaded and processed in Google+. It wasn't the best camera I've used in a phone, but it was one of the smartest.

Having said that, all of these actions, all of these intelligent decisions it promises to make, everything related to being something new, an anticipatory phone, ultimately feel like baby steps. While it is a very, very powerful phone, with a very strong and smart feature set, its execution is ultimately kind of a let down.

Don't get me wrong, it's great. It's wonderful. An all around wonderful phone. An excellent Android phone. But it isn't the radical change Motorola has hinted at, not yet at least. It's iterative; a waypoint on the path to undiscovered country, but not the promised land itself.