Review: Moto X4

Say what you will, but the normalisation of the ‘phablet’ form factor may have given consumers the bigger screens that they wanted…albeit with a clear tradeoff — finger-stretching phone sizes! If you, like me, still prefer compact phones, consider the Moto X4. Not only has Motorola kept the X4 true to the Moto X family tradition of compact phones with manageable proportions, but it also has given the device a combination of an aluminum frame and a glass rear panel that looks rather slick. The only thing that detracts from an otherwise smart design is the presence of the front bezels above and below the display.

Flip side? You get a fingerprint sensor on the front which doubles up as a gesture control to perform the usual functions of multitasking, invoking Google Assistant and locking the screen, allowing you to hide the on-screen controls and eking out a little more screen real estate. Motorola’s introduced a new feature that lets you use the phone fingerprint scanner to authenticate passwords on your Windows PC, which is neat. Water resistance is a welcome addition.

Under the hood, the X4 is well equipped to handle pretty much anything you would throw at a mid-range phone — there’s the Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 chip along with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage (Rs 22,999). Performance on the stock Android 7.1.1 version leaves no room for complaint, and I really like how Moto adds in subtle software touches that deliver real value to the user. That said, I found it perplexing that it didn’t ship this phone with Amazon’s Alexa assistant (as it does internationally), but that feature should arrive in the coming months, as should an update to Android Oreo.

Rounding out the package is a dual camera setup I personally like a lot, where the secondary camera offers a wide 120-degree field of view for shooting landscapes and cityscapes. Camera performance though was a bit of a letdown, with the camera struggling in low light.