Moto X vs. BlackBerry Z30 - Mobile Madness

TechnoBuffalo - Mobile Madness 2014 - Brackets - Set 3

Yesterday's match-up between the LG Nexus 5 and the iPhone 5s concluded with the Nexus 5 taking the win (68 precent to 32 percent). So now we have our Final Four devices in this year's Mobile Madness: the Moto X, BlackBerry Z30, LG G2 and the LG Nexus 5.

In today's semi-final match-up we have the Moto X vs. the BlackBerry Z30. The Moto X, as many readers may be familiar with, won the TechnoBuffalo staff's choice for 2013 phone of the year. While it may not be a stand-out device on paper it certainly is one of the more useful and easy to use Android devices on the market.

The Z30 is the device that die-hard BlackBerry fans have been waiting for. A nice big screen with top-shelf specs and a more robust OS and app store to match. All these things make for a more cohesive and pleasant phone that previous generation BlackBerrys lacked. Though it faces tough competition from other platforms, the Z30 has made it quite far in our Mobile Madness series.

Which device do you see winning this round? The Moto X or BlackBerry Z30? You decide.

Editor's Note: The voting for this round will be extended to a full 48 hours (instead of 24 hours).

Moto X

Moto X Video Review

A few years ago, it was never really about specs. Smartphones, in their relative infancy, were exciting because of the experience, how they suddenly made it possible to access information from anywhere, at any time. Fire up an app and you're connected. But somewhere the industry hit an impasse, and companies soon lost focus on what's important. We lost sight of what's important. On came the growing pains of adolescents, and the boneheaded idea that bigger, faster and more automatically meant better.

It's no secret that companies today abide by an unspoken formula, that is: flood the market with devices largely indistinguishable from the last, and see what sticks; it's become a corporate marketshare Rat Race—and, as unfortunate as it sounds, it's all so predictable. That's not to say we aren't being presented with great options. But the focus in recent months has been so narrowly on internal hardware buzzwords, that that's all anyone ever cares about. We're conditioned to always want the next beefy phone because what we have right now is never good enough.

And then we got the Moto X, which, on first impression, is more of the same, maybe even less so. Leading up to the device's announcement, the Moto X was hyped by rigid executives as something to be reckoned with, an iPhone-Galaxy-S4-HTC-One killer from the labs of Motorola and Google. What we got, well, people were quite unimpressed by. But those people just don't get it. The Moto X is unquestionably among the best handsets, Android or otherwise, that's ever hit the market.

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Moto X Specs

4.7-inch, 1280 x 720 pixel display (312 ppi)
Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean)
1.7GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro
2GB RAM
16GB / 32GB Storage

Full Specs

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BlackBerry Z30

BlackBerry Z30 Unboxing

Its size and design looks terrific, and it feels quite good in the hand. The screen, which is 5 inches, isn't Full HD, but it still looks fantastic; BlackBerry 10, meanwhile, looks much more suited to the larger display. Other specs include 2GB of RAM, 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro chip, 2,880mAh battery, 8-megapixel camera, 16GB of internal storage (microSD expandable) and NFC.

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