Motorola Moto X Force review – the incredible shatterproof smartphone

Camera

Like its Moto X siblings, the Moto X Force uses a 21-megapixel rear camera. However, Motorola’s promised it should be able to take better pictures than the Moto X Style due to the extra processing power afforded by its more powerful Snapdragon 810 chipset. The front-facing camera, on the other hand, has a 5-megapixel sensor and front-facing flash to help brighten up selfies.

Outdoors, photos were a tad dark with HDR turned off, but it captured a pleasing amount of detail across the frame on top of plenty of lowlights in the overcast clouds. You’ll probably want to keep HDR switched on, though, as colours were much brighter and richer when it was enabled. Alternatively, you can change the focus and exposure levels with Motorola’s handy onscreen slider, which lets you open the lens manually to let in more light. This produced photos that looked just as good as, if not better than, my HDR shots, as I was able to capture a good balance of light and dark without overexposing the clouds in the sky.

Indoor performance was also excellent, regardless of lighting conditions. Artefacts started creeping in darker shadow areas when our external lamp was turned off, but otherwise colours looked great and details levels remained high. The Moto X Force’s dual LED flash was also very accurate, maintaining a neutral colour temperature while keeping everything sharp and crisp.

^ My initial shot down the street looked great, if a little dark, but detail levels were high and colours were accurate

^ Luckily, Motorola’s onscreen exposure slider can help brighten up your photos without blowing out the sky too much

^ Here’s the same shot again with HDR switched on. Clouds are more dramatic and the office windows show more detail, but colours are perhaps a little oversaturated, it’s good to options and here you can take your pick

Moto apps

Of course, as a Motorola phone, the Moto X Force comes with all of Motorola’s handy gesture shortcuts, such as a karate chop to activate the torch, a quick wrist twist to open the camera from sleep, and its motion sensor will automatically show the Moto Display when you reach out for it with your hand. Moto Display is one of my favourite Motorola features, as this shows the time and up to three notification icons when the screen is turned off or locked, allowing you to see everything at a glance without turning the screen on. It also goes hand in hand with the phone’s AMOLED display, which uses minimal power to light that handful of pixels, as there’s no backlight .

When will my smartphone get Android Marshmallow? 

The Moto app can also be configured to silence your phone at night or when you’re in a meeting, send auto-reply texts when you’re busy, and read texts aloud and play music over Bluetooth when you’re driving, making the phone feel that much smarter than the competition. Sadly, it doesn’t come with Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box, instead sticking to stock Lollipop 5.1.1, but Motorola promised that Marshmallow would be coming very soon.

Conclusion

With its incredible display, fast specs and excellent battery life, Motorola has quite possibly brought the smartphone war to an end. It’s expensive, but the Moto X Force really is an astonishing piece of kit that flat out annihilates every other smartphone on the market, making it worth every penny of its £480 SIM-free asking price or £37.50-per-month contract. It’s the perfect phone for the accident prone, but even if you’ve never dropped a phone in your life, it always helps to have that peace of mind that it won’t break over the course of its life. It’s without doubt my smartphone of the year, and so deservedly wins a Best Buy award.

Buy the Motorola Moto X Force now from Mobile Fun