Moto X Style (Pure Edition) review: Made to order

Controls

The area above the display of the Moto X Style (Pure Edition) is quite busy. It is home to one of the stereo speakers which also acts as an earpiece, the 5MP front-facing camera and its LED flash, as well as an ambient light and proximity sensor. An IR sensor for the device's gesture controls is also on board.

Busy area above the screen

Below the screen is where the second stereo speaker resides, with the mouthpiece seemingly integrated there too. A duo of gesture control sensors are also present.

A look below the display

There is nothing on the left side the device. On the right is where the power/lock key and the volume rocker can be found.

The sides of the handset

The 3.5mm audio jack is located on the top of the smartphone, joined by the nano-SIM/microSD card tray and a duo of antenna strips. The microUSB port and two more antenna strips sit on the bottom.

The top and bottom of the smartphone

On the back of the Moto X Style (Pure Edition) is where the hot new 21MP camera and its dual-tone LED flash reside, tucked into a dedicated area with contrasting texture from the rest of the device's back. The signature dimple with Motorola logo is also there, as is a tiny pinhole for a secondary microphone for noise cancelling.

The back of the device

Battery performance

Last year, the second-generation Moto X took a few knocks for its small battery, so this year Motorola took notice and equipped the XT1575 with a 3,000mAh non-removable unit. As always, we put the smartphone through the paces of out battery test and its came out with an endurance rating of 63 hours.

This means that the device will easily make it through 2 days if you use it for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. Such usage pattern is of course entirely artificial, but we've established it so our battery results are comparable across devices.

As a reminder, we test standby power draw, which is taken into account for the Endurance calculation.

Overall, the device's endurance rating is considerably better than that of last year's Moto X, though not the best we've seen in a 2015 flagship.

Connectivity

In terms of available cellular network connectivity options, the Moto X Style (Pure Edition) could well be the best equipped smartphone we've seen to date. To kick things off, the device covers the basics with quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, followed by penta-band UMTS/HSPA+ connectivity.

Even more impressively, the smartphone supports the LTE bands of all wireless carriers in the United States, thus meaning that users can easily switch service if they so desire. The Moto X Style (Pure Edition) can also handle cat. 6 LTE when it becomes available.

Additional network connectivity options include WCDMA, CDMA, and EV-DO support. To sum things up, we are quite impressed with the network connectivity chops of the latest Moto X Style (Pure Edition).

Of course, the Moto X Style (Pure Edition) features Wi-Fi 802.11a/g/b/n/ac as well. Bluetooth 4.1 LE, NFC, and GPS feature as well, as does microUSB port. Like its predecessor, this year's Moto X Style (Pure Edition) has nano-SIM card slot.