Moto X (2014) - Review

Replaced my rugged, really rugged, 3yrs old HTC Incredible-S and got a Moto-X (2014) on flipkart billion-dollar day. Thought of posting a quick review of the device. 

Pros

1. Performance - Excellent - Swift and highly responsive with 2.5GHz Quad processor and 2G RAM.

2. Display - Amazing quality while playing 1080p videos. 

3. Stock Android - No big OS customizations made by Motorola. Pure stock Android with few additional Motorola Apps. Seamless upgrade to Android-L in near future.

4. Speakers - Dual speakers on the front panel. Directly can compete with a Korean set on decibel aspects. But they aren't Stereo capable.

5. Camera - Good quality 13Mp cam. Very highly responsive. It snaps even before touching the screen. :)

Cons

1. Notification - No LED on the front panel. When the mobile detects hand-movement over the display, it displays notification messages on the screen. (Active display notification'aam). No blinking LEDs for missed call/charging etc.

2. Earphone quality - Poorest. My 150Rs road-side earphone was far better than Motorola supplied accessory

3. Audio driver - Poor. No proper surround/bass-boost tuning done. Music plays - that's it. (not even 10% quality compared to HTC's Surroud-System audio output. I miss my HTC badly now :( ). 

4. Finish - Very sleek on sides and smooth finish. Slips from hand easily. 

Moto X (2014)

5. External App dependency - With my HTC Sense UI, I always was able to sync Google, Corporate and Facebook contacts together in a jiffy. Moto has not done any tweaking in OS. He left the user to rely on third party APPs for such customizations.

6. No external SD support - Though I'm aware of this before purchasing, this is a big setback. I already filled 7Gb songs of the available 16Gb memory. 32Gb version wasn't available on flipkart.

7. Protruding Speaker grill - With iphone/HTC/other phones, the metal grill covering the speaker will be the same level of front gorilla glass. In Moto-X, by design, the speaker grill is slightly protruding outside, and can get stuck/scratched when taking the device from pocket.

Yet to see the battery performance and OS stability. So far, a charge holds good a day. Need to see over time and usage

Overall - If you get a billion dollar sale again in flipkart, the device is really really worth a buy (I got it for 22k) for it is equipped with the latest hardware spec. But, if you are planning to buy without offers (32k), Moto-X is not the one to look for.