Moto X: iPhone's latest challenger

The new Motorola phone comes with exciting features, which make it standout from other smartphones, says David Pogue.

It’s getting harder and harder to invent the iPhone Killer. Even for Apple. The one truly huge, magnificent, radical idea of the iPhone, back when it was introduced in 2007, was to get rid of buttons. Make the whole phone a black rectangular touch screen.

By now, every company and its brother has done that. Everybody’s added voice recognition, GPS and navigation. Everybody’s sharpened up the screens to the point where you need a microscope to tell the difference.

So now what? How do you distinguish your phone from the more than 4,000 other touch-screen phones? (That’s not a joke. There have actually been 3,997 different Android phone models so far. And six iPhones and a motley assortment of Windows and touch-screen BlackBerry phones. Heaven help the landfills.)

With much fanfare, Google proudly presents its answer: the Moto X.

This phone ($200 or Rs 12,378 with contract, 5.1-by-2.6-by-0.4 inches) is the first that Motorola has produced since Google bought it a year ago for $12.5 billion.

By looking at it, you’d never guess that this is the Android phone that Motorola hopes will change everything. Its curved back is plasticky, not classy metal (like the HTC One) or glass (like the iPhone 5). Its comfortable 4.7-inch screen looks great, but it isn’t as big or sharp as the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. The phone is plenty fast, but its processor isn’t the latest and greatest.

But the Moto X does offer five features that no phone has offered before.

Feature 1: You can design your own colour scheme. You’re offered a choice of 18 colours for the back panel, black or white for the front, and seven colours for the accents (the buttons and ring around the camera lens). The colour choices are excellent; the odds of you and your frenemy showing up at a party with an identical Moto X phone are one in 252.

Later this year, you’ll even be able to order a back panel made of real wood - in bamboo, teak, ebony or rosewood. Motorola’s testing shows these beautiful panels to be just as tough as plastic (although more susceptible to termites, I’m guessing).

While you’re online, you can also order colour-matched cases and earbuds, specify the wallpaper you want or request an engraved message for the back. For now, only AT&T offers the colour choices. Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile will offer only black or white until later this year.

You get your customised phone within four days, courtesy of Feature 2: it’s assembled right here in these United States. The components are still made in Asia, but they’re put together in Texas - you can lose less sleep worrying about underpaid Chinese workers.
Feature 3 is the most useful: touchless mode. As with Siri on the iPhone, you can command the phone to dial a number, send a text, open an app, set your alarm, look up a fact on the Web, and so on.

But unlike Siri, you don’t hold down a button to speak. The phone is always listening, even when it’s in your car’s cup holder.

It works remarkably well, as long as you precede your command with the salutation, “OK, Google Now.” Without ever taking your eyes off the road, you can say, “OK, Google Now. Give me directions to the Empire State Building.” Or, “OK, Google Now. Remind me at 8 pm to give the dog his pill.” Or, “OK, Google Now. Make an appointment for Thursday at noon with Bob.”

This truly inspired idea is a leap forward in both safety and convenience. It owes its success to a special chip that does nothing but listen all day long. It does, however, come with fine print.

For example, you have to train the phone to recognise your voice. In a silent room, you have to say “OK, Google Now” exactly the same way three times.

If you’ve password-protected your phone, this feature loses much of its power. It won’t execute most commands until you first pick it up and unlock it. So much for touchless.

And Android’s voice commands are still no match for Siri. The phone recognises the basics, like “Wake me at 7:30 a.m.,” “Open Angry Birds,” “What’s Google’s stock price?” and “Check the forecast for Memphis on Friday.”

Unlike Siri, though, it can’t speak answers to queries about movies, sports and restaurants. It doesn’t recognise “Read my new text messages,” “Add pickles to my grocery list” or “Tweet, 'I just saw a double rainbow.'” Android just doesn’t have the smarts.

Or the personality. Try saying “Tell me a joke” or “Do you believe in love?” or “Open the pod bay doors, Hal” to Siri; you’ll get hilarious replies. By comparison, the Moto X feels lobotomised.

But the Moto X does come with superb situational awareness. If you turn on the Assist feature, the phone changes modes according to the time and place: Driving, Meeting and Sleeping.

In Driving mode, the phone detects that you’re in motion. It starts reading new text messages aloud, routing calls to the speakerphone and, if you like, responding to calls with an automatic text message: “I’m driving and will get back to you soon.”

In Meeting mode, the phone knows when you’re in a meeting or at a show by consulting your calendar. During those hours, the phone mutes itself and can respond with a text message. (“In a meeting. I’ll get back to you soon.”) Smart little software!

Sleeping mode, as the name implies, mutes the phone during bedtime hours that you specify. (In Meeting and Sleeping modes, you can choose to make exceptions for Favourites and when a caller urgently redials.)

Feature 4: Motorola observed that many people wake their phones many times a day just to check the time or missed messages. The Moto X displays this information briefly - the time and an icon for a missed event - every time you move it. You don’t have to press a button; just pull it from your pocket or lift it from the desk. The company says that there’s practically no penalty to the battery life (which is about the same as its rivals: You have to charge it every night).

If that screen shows an icon (text, email or call, for example), you can hold down your finger on it to view the details. Or swipe upward to open the corresponding app to reply. Sadly, this feature shows you only one notification - the most recent.

Feature 5: You can fire up the Camera app by twitching your wrist a couple of times, as though trying to dislodge a mosquito; it works whether the phone is on or off. Within two seconds, you’re ready to take a shot by tapping anywhere on the screen.

That’s wonderful, and so is the streamlined app itself. But the camera leaves something to be desired. It does a ridiculous amount of focus hunting, so you get blurriness sometimes, and the videos are a bit soft.

It’s nice that Motorola is focused on polishing up a few innovative features that you’ll really use; this isn’t the Samsung Galaxy S4, weighed down by a bunch of unreliable gimmickware. It’s nice that the phone has a splash-resistant coating. It’s also nice that, because this is a Google phone, you’ll be able to upgrade it promptly to new Android versions as they come along. That’s often untrue of the Android phones from other companies.

Unfortunately, the Moto X’s five breakthroughs don’t exactly shake the earth. It’s a fine phone, but it has to compete with the deeply satisfying beauty (and superior speakers) of the HTC One, the seething power (and superior screen) of the Galaxy S4, and the infinite app-and-accessory ecosystem (and superior voice control) of the iPhone.
Moto XI, anyone?