Motorola Moto X Force review: Handle without care

Telephony and phonebook

The Moto X Force held on to a signal and voice quality was good. The phonebook, the dialer, and your favorites share a single app with tabbed interface. Smart dialing is available, as well as noise cancelling. Finally, if your carrier supports Wi-Fi calling - you can do that as well.

Dialer • Favorite contacts • call log • phonebook • a single contact

The single loudspeaker on the front proved rather quiet, but has a deep sound with good tones. You can squeeze a few more decibels with the built-in equalizer, but nothing to escape the average loudness of the Moto X Force loudspeaker.

Multimedia

There's a Gallery app on board, which is the stock AOSP gallery, modified by Motorola. You're greeted with a grid view of your albums, and you can easily create a new one. Inside the album the images are displayed two-a-row, and no pinch gesture is going to change that. The gallery supports highlights - automatically created small clips of your images and videos from a certain event.

The editor is quite powerful. It offers the obvious cropping, rotation and mirroring, color filters and picture frames, but also more serious editing like curves adjustment.

The Gallery app • Albums • viewing an image • editing • editing

Google's Photos app is also on board; in case you lie it better. It supports pinch zooming for thumb resizing, picture sync with your Google+ account, shared albums, among others.

Google Photos

There's no dedicated video player, the task is handled from within the gallery. It doesn't do a terribly good job and refuses to play DivX, WMV and MOV files. MP4 and XviD videos player fine, but you'd be needing a third-party app, if you do any video watching on the Moto X Force. AC-3 audio is no go, in case you wanted to know.

Watching videos

Finally, Google Play Music is the default player for your tunes on the Moto X Force. The app has been treated to the new material design, though it functionality remains unchanged - it can play your local files, as well as stream music from the cloud.

Motorola provides you with customizable equalizers for both the loudspeaker and the headphones.

Google Play Music • Albums • Playing a song • Equalizers • Equalizers

Chrome is the default web browser

Chrome has been integrated into Android to the point where it feels like a native part of the OS. By default, each tab goes into the app switcher as if it was an actual app, but you can disable that and opt for the built-in tab manager. The browser has several options that can make sites feel more like native apps too.

Chrome also encroached on Opera's turf by enabling website data compression. It helps sites load faster on spotty connections, but also uses less of your data cap too. For privacy reasons, SSL sites and Private tabs do not go through Google's servers and are handled normally.

Chrome • Chrome • Settings • Data Saver

Just like with apps, sites can use the functionality of your phone (say, location or microphone), but only if you give them permission first. This way you have access to location-aware services and voice input, even if you don't install an app.

Audio output is loud, mostly clear

The Motorola Moto X Force delivered perfectly clean output in the first part of our audio test. The smartphone also had impressively high volume levels to round up one of the best performances in this testing scenario.

Stereo crosstalk rose quite a bit when we hooked up our standard headphones, but at least none of the other readings were affected. The volume remained just as high as in the first test so it’s another solid showing by the Moto X Force.

And now here go the results so you can do your comparison.

Motorola Moto X Force frequency response

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