Motorola Moto X4 review

Google Photos handles photo viewing and video playback

Moto uses the default option for viewing pictures or videos on Android: Google Photos. Gallery functionality isn't as intuitive as other custom galleries, but there are plenty of features and functionalities for Google Photos.

Just keep in mind, many of these features require you to upload all of your photos to Google's photo cloud. You can search photos by person or keyword, and Google Photos can even automatically generate collages, GIFs, and short video montages.

Google Photos

If you opt out of Google's cloud service, you can still manage albums and edit photos. There are plenty of editing tools as well. What you won't find in Google Photos is a way to scribble on photos or inserting stickers. But you will be able to use filters, basic crop and rotation, and light/color correction with levels.

Photo preview • Photo editor: Filters and Auto adjustment • levels • crop and rotate

Depth editor

Video playback is quite barebones. You can seek with a progress bar, toggle loop playback, or share the video. Otherwise, there's no support for subtitles, swipe-to-seek, or playback speed adjustment. You can also edit videos taken with the phone - though that's limited to trimming, rotating, and stabilizing the videos.

Video playback

Google Play Music

Using Google's default audio player seems only fitting as well. Google Play Music offers a vast collection of music, or you can upload up to 50,000 tracks from your own MP3 collection that you can stream anywhere you go. You can opt for a subscription that includes all of the features above with no ads and unlimited skips. YouTube Red comes bundled with the subscription, too, and it allows for watching YouTube videos offline, screen-off playback, and an ad-free viewing experience.

Google Play Music is very contextual and can recommend music for you based on your location. It learns what you listen to, and at what times to offer suggestions for stations or playlists.

But even if you don't want to take advantage of the cloud aspects of Google Music, it is still quite functional for local audio playback. Granted, navigation is arguably cumbersome. You have a hamburger menu with several options. Still, you can browse by playlist, stations, artists, albums, songs, and genres.

Google Play Music

There are system-wide equalizers with separate settings for the built-in speaker and for headphones. The visuals are nice and there's a short description for each preset. There is, however, no option to set the levels for each frequency band yourself.

Equalizer settings

FM Radio

While flagship models tend to skip FM radio receivers for one reason or another, the feature is a lot more common and sought after in more affordable devices. Such is the Moto X4, and it does indeed have an FM receiver. It supports RDS and the accompanying application is neat and functional, offering up favorites and recording.

FM radio

Audio output is nicely clean

The Motorola Moto X4's output impresses with its clarity. The phone had no weak points whatsoever when hooked to an active external amplifier and it suffered next to no degradation when headphones came into play - certainly one of the better performances out there.

Volume was above average in both tests, although a slight drop with headphones was noticed. A very solid showing nonetheless by the Moto X4.

Motorola Moto X4 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.