Motorola’s second-generation Moto X (2014) reviewed

Performance is also pretty strong, expected given the hardware found inside the Moto X, though you may find a bit of lag here and there, something we suspect is mostly due to not all apps being totally optimised for the Android 5.0 operating system.

Generally, the OS was super speedy, working beautifully across the board, but it was in certain apps — generally games — where we encountered speed issues from time to time.

Mobile performance is also decent as well, with anywhere between 20 and 50Mbps popping up on our tests on Telstra’s 4GX network in Sydney’s CBD, though more is certainly possible thanks to the use of a Category 4 4G modem, supporting uploads speeds of up to 50Mbps and downloads speeds of 150Mbps.

And despite this being mostly a Google phone, Motorola does include some nice touches that we feel the need to talk about, with many of these also appearing on other Motorola handsets, but still pleasant all the same.

One of these is called “Spotlight Stories”, and basically is a small augmented reality theatre whereby you can watch animated stories happen around you, where your camera position will determine what you’re looking at.

We’ve touched on it before, and if you own a Motorola handset but haven’t yet tried the app, it will eventually make itself known to you by dancing on your screen with an animated avatar, a strange inclusion that encourages you to try the app by making its way to your display and looking almost like a foreign entity.

Touch it and you’ll find yourself in Spotlight Stories, with three stories for Motorola to show you. They’re all short, and the latest of them is “Duet”, a love story hand-drawn and animated by former Disney animator Glen Keane, that will have you moving your phone around a 360 degree space to watch the story of a boy, a girl, and their dog.

It’s very sweet, and while it joins to cute story of a mouse and a hat in “Windy Day” as well as some creatures in the dark in “Buggy Night”, we want more of these from Motorola, as they’re lovely additions that not only show off what the phone can do, but also what the future of animated movies can be, involving your placement in the scene.

Motorola also includes a fair amount of little bits to help you with using the phone, and generally to not touch it as much. The phone can, for instance, always listen for your words to have it do things without touching it, meaning it can always look out for your voice.

We tried getting this to work, but no matter where we tested it, our test rooms were either always too loud or our phrases weren’t complicated enough, even when we used their phrases as guide.

Hopefully you’ll have better luck.

Motorola’s Assist mode is more than just about talking to your phone, with gestures like waving above your phone silencing it when you get a phone call, a wrist twist when you take it out of your pocket switching the camera on, and even some software smarts to work out when you’re in a meeting, when you’re sleeping, and when you’re driving to either divert calls or silence them, accepting alerts from approved contacts or reading out messages so you don’t have to reach for your phone.

In essence, what we get from Motorola’s Assist software is that the phone is trying to do more than just be another smartphone; rather, it is trying to be an assistant, and aside for the issues we had setting up the voice technology, it doesn’t do a bad job of this.

It’s particularly noted on the Active Display technology, which lights up small sections of the screen to save on battery power when you get alerts and notifications. The alerts are also a subdued text only, a grey on black, and while you can touch the alerts to open them up, you can quickly hold the unlock buttons for a Google Hangout, email, or Instagram, and see what the notifications are in one glance, before letting the phone switch back to standby and continue saving power.

This is a technology we wish more phones had, and we’re especially appreciative of what it’s doing to the battery, we also like knowing that all we really need to do is touch the screen lightly or move our hands near phone to get Active Display to start up, ready for us to prod and check a minor notification when we need it.

Indeed, there is a lot to admire about the Moto X for 2014, but Motorola still hasn’t nailed some of the things you’d expect a flagship device to have, especially one that competes with so many other top devices that were released last year.

One of these is the camera, which provides decent photos, though generally only when the camera fires the shot in focus.

If you’re too fast for the camera’s auto-focus to get a lock, or it doesn’t agree with what you’re trying to focus on, you’ll find a few blurry photos waiting for you.

Sometimes focus doesn't work...
...and yet other times it does.