Motorola Moto Turbo

We’re ecstatic that most high-end phones are beginning to wean off plastic, but metal and glass are also becoming monotonous. Which is why the Moto Turbo is so refreshingly unique. The non-removable rear panel is made of ballistic nylon, a tough, woven material that World War II airmen wore as body armour to fend off bullets and flying debris. We hope you won't have to use the phone to take a bullet, but having that kind of protection is great for when you’re clumsy with your phone. We (accidentally) dropped it a few times during our testing period, and we could swear it almost bounced off the floor. Unfortunately that toughness doesn’t extend to the front and sides. The tight basket-weave of the ballistic nylon makes it impenetrable to smudges, but you might want to keep your hands clean to avoid getting crumbs lodged inside the tiny stitches. If you are a messy person though, rest assured the black hue (the only one it’s available in), will go a long way to hide grime. In the US, where the Moto Turbo is called the DROID Turbo, you can get the phone with a kevlar back panel – an equally tough material, but with a shiny finish.

Like the second-gen Moto X, the Moto Turbo gets a 5.2-inch display, which is just about right for one-handed use. The resolution has been bumped up from 1080p to 2K, resulting in a blistering pixel density of 565ppi. Calling the display sharp is an understatement. Even peering closely at the screen, you’d be amazed at how crystal clear the icons and text appear. Like the Moto X, the Moto Turbo gets a Super AMOLED display – what we've seen on most Samsung phones. This means that colours look very vivid, saturated even. But the result is that everything from apps to videos to photos look delicious. The AMOLED tech also enables the Moto Display feature, which we’ll discuss in the software section.

The Moto Turbo’s primary camera features 21MP resolution, a big upgrade over the Moto X’s 13MP snapper. The front camera remains the same at 2-megapixels, Motorola’s camera app hasn’t changed either, and that’s a disappointment. It features extremely minimalist controls, but instead of simplifying the shooting process, it often ends up having the opposite effect. The app doesn’t have an onscreen shutter button, so you have to tap on the viewfinder to shoot an image. By default, the camera is configured to focus automatically. You can change this in settings, but instead of tap-to-focus, you have to drag the bracket around the viewfinder to focus and adjust exposure. This can be annoying for those of us used to tap to focus, and we often ended up taking photos accidentally.

Motorola’s devices have a reputation for shipping with stock Android, and the Moto Turbo is no exception. It runs the latest version of Lollipop, v5.0.2, dressed with the usual Moto enhancements. The only pre-loaded apps you’ll find are Motorola’s own, comprsing of Alert, Connect, Migrate and one simply titled Moto. We’ve already covered these apps in detail in our Moto X 2nd-gen review, but we’ll skim through them again.

The steam engine at the heart of the Moto Turbo is the powerful quad-core Snapdragon 805 chip clocked at 2.7GHz. Motorola’s low-power cores for Natural Language processing and Contextual Computing processing are also present. This is paired with a generous 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 420 GPU.