Update 1/4/2016: It would appear that the 6.0 Marshmallow update has been made available for the Motorola Moto X Force!
Out of all the smartphones that have sincerely caught our attention recently is a rather intriguing end-of-the-year release that shifted its focus on something else than reducing thickness of body the body and the ever-growing power of the hardware that a phone can pack. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t rate the Motorola Moto X Force that we’ll be taking a closer look at today mid-tier by any means. It may not come up to the absolute best specs a smartphone is capable of now, on the brink of 2016, but it’s certainly still great.
Now the main focus of the Motorola Moto X Force is, instead, cancelling out the danger of damage to your phone; and more specifically to your screen. Now, it personally never happened to me with any of my previous phones – and I have to say, my iPhone 5S took a little over a hundred tumbles and fearless leaps towards the floor – but that may very well just be my luck. Or surprisingly good cases. Regardless, there seems to be a ridiculous amount of times where the owner isn’t as lucky and what should be the bountiful long life of a newly purchased phone ends abruptly. Motorola knows that and made a point out of ensuring that the new Moto X Force does not share the same fate.
By employing the new Moto ShatterShield technology, the display of the phone is made strong enough to withstand the shock of falling and impact against various surfaces, including being hit by a blunt object. There is a vast number of videos on YouTube and other media channels depicting various “tests” being run to see just how strong the phone really is.
But that may not be the only thing that your regular user is interested in; so all things taken into account, let’s see how well the Moto X Force fares in when it comes to a 2015 smartphone release.
Pros:
- Incredibly sturdy
- Above average hardware
- Great performance
- Stock Android OS
- Great battery life
Cons:
- Pricey
- The sturdiness of the screen comes with multiple downsides
- Not a great timing for release now that 2016 hardware is about to come out
Motorola Moto X Force Design
The Motorola Moto X Force is mere steps away from falling into the bigger brother, phablet category given its 5.4 inch display. It is undoubtedly a large device in more ways than one: given its 149.8 x 78 x 9.2 mm dimensions, it scores a weight of 169 grams, making it somewhere around 20% heavier than its slimmer and smaller counterparts such as the Samsung Galaxy S6. That can’t possibly come as a surprise however, given the phone’s thickness: at nearly 1 cm thickness, one probably stops to ask themselves how can a phone so large even be handled.
Truth is, this phone may not be particularly comfortable for every user out there. Despite its attempts at slightly curved edges and back panel, along with the relatively adherent material used to improve your grip, it may feel increasingly difficult to hold and operate the Motorola Moto X Force because of its sheer size.
Design-wise, I won’t list the Moto X Force in my top 3, but there are a few touches to it that make it look pretty nice. The aluminum frame features slightly curved top and bottom sides, giving the phone a less sharp shape to look at, especially taking the rather wide build that the manufacturer chose into consideration. If there’s any part of the phone that turns out to be particularly catchy, it is probably the back cover of the phone. Featuring two unique patterns that you can get it in, the back is curved and covered with a leathery-feeling material, meant to not only assist with maintaining a good grip on the phone, but also take the overall design up a notch. While I couldn’t shake off the feeling of bulkiness throughout the entire time I studied the Motorola Moto X Force, I would be unfair to the design choices if I didn’t offer them some praise too.
The back cover of the phone – while we’re at it – also manages to look sleek, with a smooth strip dragging down the upper center of the phone, hosting the rear camera sensor, its LED flash and the Motorola logo buried in the classic “Moto dimple” as everyone likes to call it. Sadly, my original thought that the logo was in fact a hidden fingerprint reader did not turn out to be anything else than a design choice.
If you look at the back of the phone at a perfectly perpendicular angle, you’re able to see the metallic edges along with even more visible buttons sticking out around the frame – bringing some unwanted emphasis to the width of the phone. The buttons don’t bring any clever innovation to the table, nor any new and improved feature key. You’ll find your on/sleep button and volume rocker on the right hand side, while the top is left for the 3.5 mm headphone jack as well as the microSD/nanoSIM tray and the bottom for the micro-USB charging port.
While the display is certainly as well protected as it can get, it is worth mentioning that the bezel of the phone doesn’t exactly share the same treatment. Conduct too many experiments on your new and well-protected phone and damage will show on its edges and back; that’s something to take into consideration. On the front of the Motorola Moto X Force you’ll find the front facing camera along with its LED while the bottom of it features 2 orifices that you’d think hide the dual speakers. Instead, we are only provided with one, while the other serves as a microphone instead.
Overall the Motorola Moto X Force ends up feeling like a more stylish military-grade phone, vastly different from what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing when we refer to such a device. It’s not the greatest looker out there, but it makes for a sleek enough choice; especially when you take into account just how much beating it can actually take.
Motorola Moto X Force Display
The display remains the focal point of the Moto X Force. And it’s not even solely thanks to the ShatterShield technology that we have previously mentioned. In fact, the Motorola Moto X Force packs a rather outstanding display. For the 5.4 inch sized screen, the device offers the user a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels, which makes for an outstanding value of 540 ppi pixel density. In the lack of other recent smartphone models to use for scaling purposes – the only one immediately coming to mind being Samsung Galaxy S6’s 577 ppi and the iPhone 6S’s seemingly underwhelming 326 ppi – I’ll whole-heartedly declare that display of the Motorola Moto X Force is a sight for sore eyes.
It employs an AMOLED build that taxes a small portion on color vibrancy in favor of better contrast and less taxing on the battery. That’s why while brightness and color vibrancy seem to be excellent, blacks deep and whites bright, the only downside the AMOLED panel will face is a possible decay of color saturation over time. However, shifting the subject onto what most of you probably want to hear, the ShatterShield technology has its apparent ups and downs too.
Basically, instead of the usual 3-layer display that most devices employ, the ShatterShield has no less than 5. While that alone can ensure the survival of your screen, it comes with increased thickness (more than obvious in the overall thickness of the Motorola Moto X Force) and a few other mentions that might cause some dissatisfaction.
The first major issue is that the extra two layers are thick enough to make you aware of the fact that the display is buried deeper within the phone than it may initially seem. In other words, you’ll probably be fully aware that there is a visible layer of glass between the outer edge and where the image is actually projected.
Secondly, the outer layer of protective glass is awfully reflective. For some reason it feels like the manufacturers completely disregarded that aspect of smartphone development as the display doesn’t even make an effort in that direction; using it outside in broad daylight conditions also makes the display feel amazingly dim lit.
Motorola Moto X Force Specs & Hardware
Just like I mentioned earlier in the review, the Motorola Moto X Force does not come with something I would call mid-tier hardware by any means. If anything, I’d say it matches the competition pretty well unless you count the 2016 releases we’re soon to get in. Long story short, what you’ll find in this Motorola smartphone is an octa core Qualcomm MSM8994 Snapdragon 810 CPU along with its inbuilt Adreno 430 GPU, 32 and 64 GB hard disk variants, as well as 3 GB of RAM.
There’s plenty of debate whether the Snapdragon 810 is still a match against the newer Exynos chipsets that have made their way into flagship devices. Considering it’s one of the later, octa-core models, I’d say that it can hold its own extremely well. Consisting of a quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 and another quad-core 2 GHz Cortex-A57, it can go to a clock speed of up to 2,5000 MHz. Thus, it is not only an extremely fast processing unit, but also extremely efficient when it comes to multi-tasking.
The Adreno 430 graphics processing unit is a separate GPU that supports DirectX 11.1 has a frequency of 500 MHz. Once again I’m placed in the situation where I have to say that while it is not the most proficient, it will serve you well with a vast number of 3D applications and games without so much as a whimper in most – even the more graphic intensive ones picked out of the lot.
Only coming as a compliment to everything stated above, the 3 GB of RAM memory are more than plenty. The particular model implemented in the Motorola Moto X Force is a 800 MHz 64-bit LP-DDR4 SDRAM unit, giving you quite a fair amount to work with and earn great performance results.
Lastly, the phone only comes in two variants – either the 32 GB or the 64 GB versions; however, you can easily expand the amount of storage space you’re stuck working with via micro-SD cards. That way you can add up to a maximum of 200 GB of storage space for your daily needs in case the base amount won’t suffice.
Motorola Moto X Force Software & Features
Well, here one piece of good news that cannot and won’t be altered by any side effect or possible downside. And that is the fact that the Motorola Moto X Force comes with pure, stock Android installed on it. Now, it’s not the latest version, instead making use of the Android v5.1.1 Lollipop operating system version. However, it’s already been announced merely weeks post its launch that the 6.0 Marshmallow update will be making its way to the happy owners of the Moto X Force “sometime soon”. There’s no actual mention of a date, but highest chances are it won’t take very long until you can enjoy the very latest updates to the Android operating system.
If you choose to do so, you can also use the smartphone with some small UI improvements that the manufacturer has brought as a personal input in the say of things. They’re not gigantic features and mostly revolve around notifications and sound control – for example the Moto Display will also send you a pulse notification via the display when a notification pops up.
In terms of performance, the phone really manages to pull itself through amazingly well. Part of that is thanks to the hardware that the manufacturer stuck in the not-so-small device but it is unfair not to also thank the particularly clean operating system for it. Because there’s no bloatware or anything that will not only clog up your storage space but also eat up resources such as memory, the phone will work like a charm with whatever you put it up to.
Motorola Moto X Force Camera
As you’ve probably already picked up on the way, the Motorola Moto X Force features two, separate cameras. The rear camera – and most likely the focus of anyone reading this segment – is a 21 megapixel piece that uses phase-detection autofocus. There’s a half-nifty, half-annoying manual focus feature that allows you to take photos and manually choose the focus of the wanted image by tapping the screen where you want it to literally focus. It’s good for taking shots on the go and immortalizing special moments, but can lead to either completely defeating the purpose or a few extra attempts when you accidentally focus on the wrong side of your screen. That being said, there is no dedicated button that you press to take a photo.
There’s a fair amount of modes that you can select from when you attempt to take a picture. And I don’t mean just things such as HDR or panorama (which are present while we’re at it). By that I mean the actual editing extent that the phone offers its users; things such as exposure fall into your pre-shooting control. There are a fair few things you can do as on-screen post editing you can do, but there’s no reason to expect any PhotoShop-level processing either.
Already something that we can call a usual thing to the Motorola series of this year, there is a front-facing camera present on the Motorola Moto X Force too; scoring 5 megapixel in zoom potential and with its very own LED flash, this one will surely suffice when it comes to any of your selfie or video-conference needs.
Both cameras are capable of video capturing too, but the rear facing one is obviously a lot better at it being able to capture video in 1080p at 60 frames per second and even slow motion in 720p.
Motorola Moto X Force Battery
The Motorola Moto X Force packs an unusually powerful battery in its build: the 3,760 mAh cell that is tucked neatly inside is capable of outstanding amounts of juice for even the most intensive of activities that you choose to undergo on your phone. That is watching videos, playing games and multitasking in its core sense. Not only that battery usage is a very satisfactory thing to watch (as a whole movie will take you down somewhere between 15%-20%) but charging is done particularly fast thanks to the micro-USB charging. It’s not as fast as, say, Type-C charging would be, but in a little less than 2 hours you should be able to get a full charge up.
Motorola Moto X Force Verdict
So who can make the best use of the Motorola Moto X Force? If you ask me, this device is not only the best Motorola phone of the year, but comes as a worthy contender to many other devices that made it in the 2015 list. For anyone who knows and feels guilty about always ending up dropping their phone one way or another, the amount of protection that you’ll find on the Motorola Moto X Force will be more than welcome. You would have to pay the price of stylishness and slimness to some degree, but that aspect falls in your ability to judge.
The Motorola Moto X Force is a great phone overall; in terms of performance and capability, you’ll find yourself being more than just satisfied with what the phone can do. If you can live with the downsides of it all, then you’d get yourself a great thing that can assure longevity over anything else.