The New Motorola Moto X (2nd Gen) Review

WiFi Performance

For the most part, WiFi performance is generally driven forward due to an increasing need for better battery life and higher speeds. In order to get a closer look at this, we use iperf on UDP mode. In the case of the Moto X, we see that the WiFi solution continues to be the same WCN3680 that is quite popular amongst OEMs as a 1x1 802.11ac solution. In order to get ideal performance, the phones are connected to Asus' RT-AC68U router as the sole client in order to try and eliminate the router as a gating factor.

As one can see, there's a mild performance uplift compared to the previous Moto X. The Samsung Galaxy S5 continues to lead because of its 2x2 MIMO solution, but the new Moto X doesn't give any reason for concern when it comes to WiFi performance.

GNSS

While at this point GNSS reliability is not nearly the issue that it was in early smartphones, there are still some differences to be had. For the most part though, any phone with a Qualcomm modem is utilizing IZat to enable GPS. In the case of the Moto X and Snapdragon 801 phones, this is IZat Gen 8B. Any lock with the cellular radio on is incredibly fast as the initial time and location data from the modem drops time to first lock to about 8 seconds in good conditions. From a cold start without assistance data and on airplane mode, it takes about 30 seconds to get a location fix. The Moto X seems to have a strong GPS antenna, and it's relatively easy to reach 10 foot accuracy if the sky is visible.

Misc.

Unfortunately with these reviews it isn't feasible to cover every aspect in the level of detail that I'd like to, but I still want to mention some of my observations. First, the TFA9890 speaker amp seems to only drive one speaker at a time, and while the lack of stereo speaker functionality is a bit disappointing the speaker gets quite loud, and feels comparable to the M8 in sheer volume. There is a BCM2079x NFC controller in the Moto X, and tap and pay with Google Wallet seems to work. I also see an Atmel touchscreen but I'm unsure what family it falls under as there isn't any public information on the model. The same TPA6165 amplifier is used for the headphone jack as on the previous Moto X, so any improvements will come from the new audio codec in Snapdragon 801 when compared to Snapdragon S4 Pro. In addition, while I don't have a setup to test noise cancellation I wanted to note that Motorola has made their own custom solution for noise cancellation instead of using an Audience or Qualcomm Fluence solution. Finally, if the "STM401 Sensor Processor" is really the STM32F401CC MCU made by ST-Microelectronics, there's potential to integrate similar functionality into Samsung Galaxy S5 as it has a similar IC for sensor hub functionality.