The sweet spot

The sweet spot

Early on in the Moto X design process, Motorola’s executives went to the Google leadership team with a bunch of ideas and prototypes. The response? "Get more data." So Motorola built a huge archive of focus group responses and test data — including thousands of handprints — and distilled it all into the design of the Moto X.

The X is warm and inviting

With no cold aluminum or glossy plastic, the Moto X is warm and inviting. It nestles perfectly into a palm, the slightly bulbous middle feeling thinner than it is. It's also surprisingly solid despite clearly being made of many disparate parts. It has the same size display as the Nexus 4 or the HTC One, but it's far smaller than either model, with miniscule bezels on all four sides and a glass screen that curves gently into its plastic sides. It's totally usable in one hand.

Jim Wicks calls this size "the sweet spot." Clad in a pink dress shirt that may well have inspired a Moto X color option, he says that Motorola's goal was to build an X that worked for everyone, and the process started with screen size. "We had a lot of debates about the density of the display — 1080 versus 720 — and what the right size is," says Wicks. "It's easy to hold for people. Basically they feel like they have an ample screen to do everything they want to do, but also it's highly pocketable."

Wicks and his team ended up choosing a 4.7-inch 720p AMOLED display, with whites that look a little pink when examined closely and the same motion-blur problems that plague every similar panel. Compared to the the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, both of which have 1080p screens, it’s a mid-range panel, but Wicks says it doesn’t matter. "We could go and make a higher-resolution screen," Wicks says, "but it would just suck battery and nobody would know the difference."

The screen allows the Moto X to do some other tricks, though: AMOLED displays can be lit up pixel by pixel, and a feature called Active Notifications takes full advantage. Motorola’s research found that that people turn their phones on and off an average of 60 times a day, just to check the time or identify the beeping in their pants. So Moto X starts to pulse when you miss a call or get a text, and a small square in the center of the screen displays the time and icons for your notifications. Tap anywhere on the screen and you can see into the notifications without unlocking the phone, and open right into the app you need. It’s a great feature, even if I’m not a fan of AMOLED displays; the Moto X’s screen is too saturated and contrast-heavy, and the white balance is off as well.

The X’s specs are mid-range throughout, actually. Wicks makes his same sweet-spot case for the internals, which Motorola has loftily branded the "X8 Mobile Computing System," but which in reality consists of an off-the-shelf Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and two custom chips for the Moto X’s always-on voice recognition and gesture controls. The S4 is far from the most powerful chip available, but it's in Wicks' sweet spot — it’s optimized for everything the phone needs to do, and nothing more.

The phone does feel fast, fluidly opening apps from notifications and swiping around the operating system. The upside to lower horsepower, Motorola execs tell me again and again, is battery life. Osterloh confidently says the Moto X will get a full day of battery life — a full, 24-hour day. When I wonder if X will hold up over time, Wicks just smiles.

Motorola isn’t worried, but a $199 phone with mid-range internals is a big bet: even the most powerful Android devices have a history of faltering as time wears on, and it’s hard to justify signing up for two years of a device at flagship pricing that’s already behind the top end of the curve.

But Motorola’s betting that the future of Android isn't about spec sheets. The company thinks we'll stop being concerned with cores, and gigabytes, and megapixels, and that we'll start caring about how our phones feel, how they make our lives easier, and, maybe most importantly, how long they last.

If that sounds a familiar refrain, it’s because it is — that’s pretty much exactly how Apple sells the iPhone, plus extended battery life. "It's really not about being intimidating and tech," Wicks says. "It's really about being human and comfortable."