Hands-on with the White Moto X

We’ve already taken a pretty extensive look at the Moto X, both at the initial launch in New York and, more recently, when it arrived in Canada via Rogers.

But being a completist, and a lover of white smartphones, I thought we’d take a look at the Moto X in that oh-so-elegant shade.

Underneath the polycarbonate, this is still very much the same phone: a 4.7-inch 720p AMOLED display, 1.7Ghz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor with Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage, a 10MP rear camera, 2MP front camera, 2200mAh battery, and Android 4.2.2 with a few interesting additions.

One of the best aspects of the white device, however, is the way it highlights Motorola’s exquisite industrial design. The display, for example, appears to float below the glass, owing to the way the front plays tricks with light and shadow.

Similarly, the repeating almost-houndstooth pattern on the back is more striking in white, and that Motorola logo dimple/finger rest feels even more natural on this variant.

This is one of the few devices that offers a uniform colour all the way round, and the impeccable way Motorola has fit the front and back pieces together leaves few distillable breaks or joints on the chassis itself.

There’s also something interesting about how the flat white of the top plays with and transitions into the repeating back texture. It’s a subtle and delightful practice, and we wish more manufacturers spent more time focusing on the minutiae that customers face every day.

There is something to be said about how great the Moto X feels in the hand, even if it’s only marginally smaller than the HTC One and Galaxy S4. It may not be the fastest phone around, nor have the best camera, but Motorola got a lot of things right with its latest flagship, and we’re hoping many of the issues around battery life and camera performance get sorted in a future update. We’re hearing rumours that it may skip over Android 4.3 completely and jump straight to KitKat.