Motorola Moto X Force review

Introduction

Tired of handling your smartphone with care? Want to have a flagship with all the bells and whistles but you're not good at keeping an expensive piece of equipment out of trouble? Motorola to the rescue. The Moto X Force is a shock and water-proof flagship, with high-performance hardware, an impressive camera and a clean Android experience.

The Moto X Force is the true heavyweight in the Moto X lineup. It has a 5.4" Quad HD AMOLED screen, a Snapdragon 810 chipset with 3GB of RAM, a 21MP camera with PD-AF, a massive 3,760mAh battery, and stock Android Marshmallow.

Motorola has always tried to meet two popular market demands: a clean Android OS with on-time updates and protection against the elements.

There are plenty of waterproof phones on offer and this isn't the path Motorola chose for the X Force. Instead, it's covered against different, but equally likely, accidents such as cracking the screen or putting a dent in the case. In addition to the shatter-proof screen, the Moto X Force's internals feature a water-repellent nano-coating, which means it is more likely to survive accidental dips than an average handset.

Let's explore the Moto X Force in details.

Key features

• 5.4" AMOLED display of QHD (2560 x 1440px) resolution; 540 ppi
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset; quad-core 2.0 GHz Cortex-A57 & quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU; Adreno 430 GPU; 3GB of RAM;
• 32/64GB of built-in memory; microSD card slot (up to 200GB)
• Launched on stock Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with no bloatware, Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow already available
• 21 MP main camera with f/2.0 aperture; phase detect autofocus; dual-tone LED flash; gesture controls
• 4K video capture @ 30fps; 1080p video capture @ 30fps; slow-motion video capture
• 5MP front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture; LED flash
• Cat. 6 LTE support; 802.11a/g/b/n/ac + MIMO; Bluetooth 4.1 LE; NFC; GPS; IR blaster
• 3,760mAh battery; TurboPower quick charging; Wireless charging
• Internals with water repellent nano-coating
• Shatter-proof display

Main disadvantages

• The battery is not user-replaceable
• No fingerprint sensor
• Snapdragon 810 is no longer Qualcomm's best SoC, and it makes the phone heat up under pressure
• Single color option

The Motorola Moto X Force omits the fingerprint scanner, which has been steadily making its way into the midrange, but is a feature most people can probably live without in a rugged phone. The battery sounds beefy enough even for that QHD screen, so the fact you can't swap it is at least somewhat mitigated.