The new Moto X costs $99 with a two-year contract and $499 unlocked. This price is not drastically lower than what you'd pay for a flagship from Samsung, HTC, or LG, nor is it as low as what you'll pay for an unlocked first-generation Moto X ($349, as of this writing). But it's a nice reversal of the situation last year, where the Moto X was cheaper on paper than its price tag implied. Motorola will now give you a nice, high-end Android flagship with all the trimmings for less than its competitors.
We're sure that Motorola is going to continue selling way more Moto Gs and Moto Es than it will Moto Xs, just because the high-end phone market is saturated with competitors, and it's hard for any individual phone from anyone other than Samsung or Apple to make much of a dent. But having a solid flagship is a good way to win early adopters and technology enthusiasts to your side, and those kinds of people are the ones who are the most likely to evangelize on your behalf. The Moto X is an important halo model, and it's great to see Motorola treating it that way.
If we have one major criticism, it's that the new Moto X just doesn't feel as good to hold as the old one did. It doesn't feel bad—the contours and curves see to that—but the original Moto X crammed a 4.7-inch display into a phone that felt much smaller than that. It was unique in a field where most OEMs seem to have settled on five inches as a reasonably average screen size. Large-screened phones are undeniably popular, so it probably makes better business sense for Motorola to go with the flow. Still, we can't help but feel a little wistful when we pick up the original Moto X.
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