It's easy to overthink Active Display on the Moto X. It's also easy to underestimate its impact. What we've got here is a quick and easy way to get information onto your display without having to hit the power button and firing up the whole screen. From there you can decide whether the notification is important enough to act on — Oh, no! Timmy's stuck in a well! — or or whether it can wait till later — Yes, I'll take out the trash. Later. Think about that for a minute. How many times a day do you pull your phone out of your pocket to check the time? Or to check for a notification? Each time you're hitting the power button. On LCD displays, that's what you're stuck with. AMOLED displays let you fire up individual pixels, and that's what Motorola's doing here. And it's done it pretty well. Verizon is offering the Pixel 4a for just $10/mo on new Unlimited lines

How Active Display works on the Moto X As far as the end user — that's us — is concerned, Active Display lives above the lock screen, and above the lock screen widgets. Save for the clock, the only other thing you get is notifications. But you're not stuck with just a few notifications. Practically any app that can spew notifications can ping Active Display. Active Display is enabled by default. You'll start to see it work, well, immediately. As soon as your phone is sleeping, you'll see the white digital clock flash onto the screen. Then off. Then on again. Motorola calls that "breathing." And Moto X is pretty smart about it, showing the clock when you take the phone out of your pocket, or by picking it up if it's left face-down. Need to see what time it is, or if you have a notification waiting? Just look at the phone. Don't press the power button. It's handy as hell. And it's good on battery life. (That's something to remember before you start yelling for a certain editor to show his screen-on time. Less is better, by design.)