The benchmarks are impressive considering its older architecture. Combined with the fantastic battery life and novel features, this may be the Android phone to buy. I'm not exactly sure why Engadget concluded that it isn't worth $200.
But the battery life is definitely one of the killer features of this phone. If you want good specs, without paying a lot, there is the very nice Nexus 4 (likely due for a refresh soon), but that phone in its current incarnation certainly can't boast great battery life.
For me that was refreshing to hear because when the first Android Phone came out (the G1), battery life was so poor that it made the phone seem unusable (well you were afraid if you used it at all you wouldn't have charge in an hour or so).
My use case is roughly:
- About half an hour of screen on per day, mostly web browsing
- About 2h of audio playback per day
- About 3-4h on HSPA every day, on WiFi for the rest of the day
- Several kinds of automatic syncing going on (for example all default Google services, Google Now enabled, automated podcast polling + downloads)
Now, that might not be the heaviest workload in the world. But it's certainly realistic, and at least compared to any other Android phones I've used the battery life is nothing short of amazing.
Blame Qualcomm's idiotic naming scheme. They are calling this a Snapdragon S4Pro, same as what's in the year old Nexus4.
In reality, it has the same Adreno 320 GPU as of the Galaxy S4 and the HTC one. Also the same Krait 300 CPUs of the S4 and HTC One, just 2 of them instead of the 4.
www.anandtech.com/show/7197/a-quick-look-at-the-moto-x-motorolas-new-flagship