Moto X (2nd Gen) By Motorola Review

Next, we'll take a look at how the 2^nd gen Moto X compares to other smartphones by examining a few benchmarks that are currently available in the Android Marketplace. 

First, let’s take a look at the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:

This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval). In addition, in comparison mode it tells you if you have enough data to determine if the difference is statistically significant.

JavaScript testing JavaScript Android and iPhone testing

In the past, we’ve tested smartphones using all preloaded browsers. The 2^nd gen Moto X only comes with Chrome preloaded. Interestingly enough, Chrome has been the slower browser on other phones. Since we’ve seen slower results in Chrome on other phones, we weren’t too surprised to see the Moto X coming in at the bottom of the SunSpider test.

Rightware recently updated the BrowserMark benchmark to a version 2.1. Scores are not compatible with previous versions. For the sake of comparison, we ran the previous version of the BrowserMark benchmark. Using version 2.0, you’ll find the Moto X near the top of the comparison chart coming in fourth place.