Jacob Krol of NJTechReviews was on hand at the Moto X event today in New York City! At this event Motorola officially unleashed the Moto X, their first smartphone that has Google DNA inside of it. The Moto X is the first device that Motorola developed, after becoming a Google company. It is their big device for the year, coming just a few days after the announcement of three new Droids for Verizon Wireless. The Moto X is coming to the big five; AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular. It will begin it launch at the end of August and will hopefully be rolled out to all by early September. The Moto X is being assembled in the USA and was designed for you. Not for the latest specifications, but designed for you the consumer who will be using the device. Let’s dive into my first impressions of the brand new Moto X.

The Moto X is going after the largest part of the market and that would be the middle of the market. It was designed for you and made for you, plus it can designed by you as well. Above you can see my unboxing video of the Moto X, I got a AT&T Moto X 16GB in Woven Black to review. For all of the carriers in store you can get the device in either Woven White or Woven Black. It will retail for $199.99 with a 2-year contract for the 16GB and $249.99 for the 32GB variant of the Moto X. One of the killers features of the Moto X is customization and for now it is exclusive at first to AT&T users, after that it will be coming to BestBuy. With Moto Maker you can make your custom Moto X from an easy to use website. The most amazing part about Moto Maker is that it will be at your house in 4 Days Or Less, this is because it is assembled in the USA at Motorola’s new plant in Fort Worth, Texas. There are over 2,000 different combinations for your Moto X. You have a choice of 2 front colors, 18 back colors, 7 accent colors, and a message printed on the back. All at no extra cost, you can customize your Moto X to your liking. This is a first for the mobile industry and you get to customize your own phone now. Coming in or around Quarter 4 of 2013 you can get a Wooden Back, with choices like Teak or Bamboo. The prototypes that I saw looked absolutely gorgeous, but you don’t have to take my word for it check out my hands-on video with them below! These Wooden Backs will be available from Moto Maker for no extra cost as well!

On to the design and hardware of the Moto X. This device was designed around the human hand, the first thing that Motorola’s design team focused on was how will it feel in the hand. They picked the size that would fit the best in the palm of your hand, after that they wanted to back the biggest screen possible on that space. The end result is a device that feels very nice in you hand at just 65.3 millimeters thick and weighs just 130 grams. It is a curved device all around at the top, the bottom, and the sides. This makes it feel incredibly comfortable to hold in your hand. There are three microphones on the device they are on the top, bottom, and back of the Moto X. You get a micro USB port on the bottom and a headphone jack at the top of the device. You have a nano SIM card slot on the left hand side, while your power/sleep button and volume rocker have a home on the right side. Above the display you get a 2 megapixel front facing camera and a earpiece. On the back of the device you get a 10 megapixel camera with LED flash, a AT&T logo, a speaker, and a Motorola logo. You get a bright and colorful 4.7-inch 720pHD AMOLED display and it is almost like a waterfall as it stretches to every inch of the front of the device. You get a 10 megapixel Clear Pixel back camera with an LED flash, we will put this to the test with a full camera test. The front has a 2 megapixel camera that records video in 1080pHD. Motorola says you will get a full 24 hours of power on the 2200mAh battery. Inside you get a Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System with a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.7GHz Dual Core Processor with a Quad Core Adreno 320 processor, plus a natural language processor and a contextual computing processor. And you get 2GB of RAM inside the Moto X as well. For speed on the go you get access to 4G LTE and there is a HSPA+ 42 band inside as well. You can see my hands-on with the hardware of the Moto X below!

Last but not least we will dive into the software of the Moto X. Have you ever wanted to be able to use your phone with out the need to even touch it? Just simply say “OK Google Now” and you are ready to go. It can even work if the Moto X is in your pocket or if you are with in 10 feet of the device. You can ask it to call your friend Jake, Navigate to MetLife Stadium, How tall the Empire State Building is, set an alarm, and much more. It can even open applications and the best part is that Google Now is always learning and will always be improving with full updates coming around every 2 months. During my first hours of testing “OK Google Now” worked well and I was quite impressed. With Active Display you can see what is important to you with out unlocking your Moto X and going through multiple steps. Simply flip over your device to the display and you will see the Breath mode of Active Display come on. Here you can see the Time, new messages, and other mixed notifications. You can go into Peek Mode by holding down on that message and sliding up you can see that main message at the top of the display and on the bottom you can see the other notifications. From here you can go and reply to that message automatically, as it will open up that application. Motorola wanted to make the phone very appealing and easy to use, it is running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. It has very little pre-loaded software, on the AT&T version all you get is My AT&T and Visual Voicemail. You get the basic Google Application Suite like Google Chrome, YouTube, Play Music, and the others. From Motorola you will get Assist, Migrate, and Moto Care. With Migrate you can easily switch from your old smartphone too your new Moto X. Motorola has made some customization to the camera application as well, there is a new scroll wheel on the left hand side that lets you quickly and easily access your settings let HDR and more. If you swipe to the right you can quickly access your gallery. You open your Camera application by a simple flick of your wrist when your Moto X is asleep, this is a very nice feature and gesture built-into the Moto X. A great feature of your Moto X is when you get your device you will get 50GB of free storage in Google Drive! Other software features include Wireless Display and Trusted Devices. You can see my hands-on with the software on the Moto X below!

The Moto X is a very exciting device and will be coming to market beginning at the end of August. But my full review of the Moto X is coming very soon, so be sure to check NJTechReviews soon for that full review. The Moto X is coming to AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular. It will retail for $199.99 with a 2-year contract for the 16GB and $249.99 with a 2-year contract for 32GB. Moto Maker will be exclusive to AT&T at first and will be eventually coming to BestBuy. When you got your AT&T store and sign up for the 2-year contract in store, you will get a card with a redemption code to customize your Moto X from Moto Maker. Stay Tuned For The Full Review Of The Moto X On NJTechReviews!

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