Motorola Moto X Style review

Hot on the heels of the Moto X Play, the Moto X Style is Motorola's flagship handset for 2015. If the 5.5in Moto X Play wasn't large enough for you, the Moto X Style is a true phablet, expanding its screen size to 5.7in and increasing the resolution to 2,560x1,440. It also comes with a more powerful processor, but is it all worth spending an extra £120 SIM-free, or £10-per-month on contract, compared to its slightly smaller brother?

Design

At first glance, the Moto X Style certainly puts forward a convincing argument. When holding both phones in my hand, the Moto X Style is clearly the superior product, as its sculpted metal frame feels much classier to the touch. The very slim 6.1mm edges only add to that sense of premium build quality.

At 76mm across, it is rather wide, but its smaller bezels actually mean it's only 1mm wider than the Moto X Play. As a result, it's no more difficult to hold and I can still just about reach across to the other side of the screen one-handed. I need to adjust my grip to reach the top, but this is to be expected given its size.

I'm also pleased to see the Style's machined power button and volume rocker also don't rattle and shift in the chassis like the Moto X Play, and I much prefer the Style's grippy, soft-touch rear panel over the Play's slightly more rubbery finish. It's very similar to the 3rd Gen Moto G, only slightly softer. Whereas the Play's rear panel is removable, allowing you to swap it out for different colour if you fancy a change further down the line, the Style's back panel is fixed, leaving no room for further customisation once you've bought it.

As with all Motorola handsets, though, you can personalise your handset through the Moto Maker service at no extra cost. You can choose the colour of the frame and front of the handset, the metallic accent on the back of the handset and the type of rear panel, including a variety of soft grip colours as well as wood and genuine leather. The latter two options cost an extra £20, though, taking the total cost to £419 SIM-free. You can also increase the internal storage from 32GB to 64GB for another £35, but when you can mount a microSD card on the back of the SIM card tray, you'd be better off spending the same amount of money on a 128GB microSD card instead.

Display

As great as the phone looks and feels, though, it all starts to fall apart when you drill down into its specs. For instance, the Moto X Style's 5.7in, 2,560x1,440 display has a distinctly yellow colour cast, as whites were much warmer than those on the Moto X Play and Sony Xperia Z5, which has one of the most colour-accurate displays I've ever seen. Initially, this led me to believe the Style must be using an AMOLED panel, as Motorola hadn't specified the type of panel it used when it was first announced. However, it's since been confirmed to be using an IPS display, which makes the colour cast all the more disappointing.

Its colour accuracy rating is still reasonably high, covering 93% of the sRGB colour gamut, but it makes little difference when images look obviously oversaturated. Admittedly, it does lend images an eye-pleasing vibrancy, but I prefer the slightly cleaner, cooler colours on the Moto X Play. You can change the colour mode in the Settings menu, but even switching over to Normal makes little difference. Likewise, the Style's black levels were also higher than the Moto X Play, measuring a rather mediocre 0.48cd/m2. This is a shame, as its high brightness of 502.07cd/m2 gives it great outdoor visibility and a contrast ratio of 1,045:1 provides plenty of detail in darker pictures.

Battery Life

The most disappointing part of the Moto X Style is its atrocious battery life. In our continuous video playback test, it lasted just 08h 54m when the screen brightness was set to 170cd/m2. This is terrible for a phone with a 3,000mAh battery, and is more than four hours less than the Moto X Play. I'll be keeping an eye on how it performs during day-to-day use over the next few days, but this is a pretty big deal breaker either way.

Performance

It's a shame, as the hexa-core, 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor and 3GB of RAM give the Style a significant leg up in speed over the Play. In GeekBench 3, for instance, it scored 1,243 in the single core test and 3,579 in the multicore test, putting it way out in front of the Play's respective scores of 708 and 2,567. The Style's multicore score isn't that far off the HTC One M9 either, and it's over 1,000 points faster than the LG G4, which also uses a Snapdragon 808.

The difference was plain to see in everyday use. The Moto X Style not only loaded apps much faster than the Play, but menu animations were a touch smoother as well. The Moto X Style was also more adept at handling complex games, as it managed a much more respectable 919 frames (around 15fps) in the offscreen Manhattan test of GFX Bench GL. The Moto X Play, on the other hand, only manged 361 frames (around 5.8fps). As a result, demanding games like Hearthstone ran much more smoothly on the Style, and games like Threes! felt slicker and more fluid when playing at speed.

The Style also produced a high Peacekeeper web browsing score of 1,557, which sails past other flagships, including the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. Web pages loaded quickly and it handled embedded videos, images and adverts with no problem at all.

Camera

The 21-megapixel camera produced some great photos even in cloudy, overcast weather conditions. Motorola's camera app is fairly basic, so don't expect to find any fancy filter options, but images were detailed and well-exposed with rich and natural colours. More importantly, detail levels didn't drop off toward the edge of the frame and skies weren't overexposed.

^ On default settings, the camera produced excellent, if slightly dark, detailed photos

^ With HDR mode enabled, colours were much brighter, and it also captured more cloud detail

Some photos were perhaps a tad dark for my liking, but Motorola's excellent HDR function soon rectified this. HDR can be a little harsh at times, but it does help brighten up your photos if lighting conditions aren't great.

Indoor shots were equally excellent, and photos were much less grainy and gritty than those I took on the Xperia Z5, for example. With my external lamp turned on, my still life arrangement looked great, offering plenty of contrast in the dark flower petals, crisp outlines and plenty of fur detail on our teddy bear. Lines did become quite soft in places when I turned the lamp off, but colours still looked pleasingly punchy.

^ Outlines could be slightly blurry in lower lighting conditions, but colours still look excellent

Conclusion

When it's marred by a yellow screen and exceedingly poor battery life, the Moto X Style just doesn't measure up to its cheaper cousin. As mentioned above, I'll be keeping an eye on the phone's battery life over the coming days to see how it fares away from our usual tests, but even if this does prove to be less of a problem than I first thought, there's still the issue with the phone's display, which just doesn't look as natural or appealing as the screen on the Play.

Then there's the problem of price, as contracts for the Moto X Style start at around £32-per-month, which is the same price as the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Sony Xperia Z5 Compact. Both of these are faster and longer-lasting, and more importantly their screens look much better. The Style has the edge SIM-free at £399, but when the Galaxy S6 costs just £50 more, and the Z5 Compact just £30 more, there's really no contest.