It's been no secret whatsoever that the Moto X was coming, but now it's finally here. It's the first cross-carrier hero phone out of Motorola since it was taken under Google's wing. We just spent a little while loving it up, and here are our first impressions.
Design

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One could argue that Motorola has not been so focused on design the last few years. At least not from a mainstream consumer standpoint. The whole Droid line for Verizon really kind of catered to geeks. It had hard angles, kevlar toughness, and scary robot eyes. This is very different. It's incredibly smooth, with even the glass screen bending over the corners, making everything feel nicely rounded. The back has a satisfying curve to it (even more pronounced than the curve on the HTC One). To accommodate that, Motorola had to build a special, non-rectangular battery (coming in at 2200 mAh). It has a stepped design, so that curved back is full of battery, instead of air.

That's kind of the theme for the build of the device. There is essentially no wasted space. The clearest way we can drive that home is that it has the exact same sized screen as the HTC One (4.7 inches), but the Moto X is significantly shorter and a bit narrower (5.09 x 2.57 inches for the Moto vs. 5.41 x 2.69 inches on the One). It also weighs 4.58 ounces vs 5.04 ounces on the One. This is quite a feat. You have a device with that same large screen but it feels much, much smaller in your hand and pocket.

We were told the back is a composite material, and while we don't believe it's that same Droid-like Kevlar (we think it's a slightly rubberized polycarbonate), it feels rock solid. It has a soft-touch finish to it, so it feels grippy yet smooth. Fingerprints won't be a problem on it.

Up front there's a 4.7-inch AMOLED display that comes in at 720 x 1280 pixels (or 316 PPI). That may be a disappointment for some who were hoping for a 1080p display like other flagship devices out there (the HTC one comes in at 468 PPI). The thing is, most people won't notice or care. 316 PPI is still pretty damn pixel dense (the iPhone 5's "Retina Display" is 326, by comparison. More so, the screen is bright, the colors looked good (and first glance), and the blacks were that inky darkness you know and love from an AMOLED screen. Suffice to say, 99 percent of people who look at this screen will think it's awesome. In fact, if someone told you it was 1080p you'd probably believe them.

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Performance

Motorola is doing something pretty unique with the guts on their new phones. It uses the new X8 Mobile Computing System. "It's not a SoC (System on a Chip), it's a series of discreet products that we put together on one board," Motorola's Steve Sinclair told me. Geeks were worried because the CPU is a slightly dated Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro dual-core clocked at 1.7GHz, but there's also a quad-core Adreno 320 GPU, and two low-power processors, one for natural language and one for contextual computing. That's a total of 8 cores, all optimized for different tasks. It also has 2GB of ram under the hood.

What's actually important, though, is that it is FAST. In the couple hours that I've spent with it, I have seen zero lag or skipping. Experientially, it's every bit as quick as the HTC One, Galaxy S4, or iPhone 5 (though we'll see how it does after a longer period of testing). Apps fly open and scrolling is buttery smooth. We expect this will only improve when it gets the most recent Android update. Speaking of...

Software

Despite that fact that Motorola is now "a Google company," the Moto X is launching with Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean). Android 4.3 was released just a week ago. It wasn't a major update, but it should help speed things up even more and it will add support for Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy. Despite that, the good news is that the Moto X is basically running stock Android. It's very clean, and all the ugliness of MotoBlur is finally no more (though we do miss the improved dialer). Moto hasn't really changed the design at all, and that's a good thing. They have added a few significant features.