Motorola has been part of Lenovo for four years now and has made several Moto X devices over that time, the first having been made in 2013 when Google owned this particular chunk of the classic Motorola company.

However, the last non-Moto Mod X-series phone, 2017’s Moto X4, was a bit of a disappointment, outshone by other phones like the OnePlus 5 or even the cheaper Moto G5 Plus (also soon to be replaced by the Moto G6).

Or you could have opted for the not-too-dissimilar Moto Z2 Play with a better screen and Moto Mod combability.

But there were signs that Lenovo could make a great handset, not least in the long battery life (also see the epic Lenovo P2 battery). So it’s great that Motorola appears to be releasing a Moto X5 this year.

Moto X5 release date and launch

 

Even though we recently saw the G6 series launch, there was no X5. 

We originally found out about the Moto X5 name back in November via renowned tipster Evan Blass: 

Moto X5 design

Droid Life obtained a leaked image of the new handset - you’ll notice that the bezels are very slim – much more so than with the Moto X4. At the top of the phone there are two cameras either side of a speaker which are carved into an iPhone X notch at the top of the phone. A black bar at the top of the screen contains the signal and battery indicators, again very similar to the iPhone X.

Presumably the new Moto X5 will be running Android 8.0 Oreo but the device is rumoured to be ignoring Google Assistant in favour of a proprietary “smart AI” assistant called Moto XP’s (presumably “experiences” rather like a little-used – ha – version of Windows).

We’re a bit surprised at this choice, partly because Google Assistant is growing significantly in terms of user recognition and partly because other Lenovo products use Amazon’s Alexa assistant.

Moto X5 display and specs

Expect an 18:9 borderless display (well, with small bezels to the sides at least). The new Moto G6 series will also feature bigger screens, too. The Moto X4 featured a 5.2-inch IPS LCD display that used Gorilla Glass 3, while the X5 rumours seem to be pointing towards a 5.9-inch display. Could the X5 make the leap to OLED? And surely it will move beyond Full HD at that size?

The Moto X4 ran a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 so expect an upgrade to the 635 or even 845 chip this time around. Internally there was also 64GB of onboard storage with 4GB of memory and we reckon we’ll see that again. And USB-C was also used, so that’s a no brainer.

There’s no home button (instead it will be a virtual home button; see the white line under the dock on the screen above) so expect a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor – could this be housed within the Moto logo on the back of the handset?

And could the Moto X5 have facial recognition to unlock the handset? That seems very possible with the cameras on the front. There are also dual cameras on the rear, too. Finally, the Moto X4 also featured IP68 water and dustproofing so expect that once more.

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