A new alternative to the indestructible Nokia

The Force follows the good, mid-range Moto X Play and the excellent Moto X Style, as well as the successful Moto G, which is now in its third generation.

The Moto X Force isn’t a phone you would describe as pretty. The front of the device looks utilitarian, with a front-facing flash and two front-ported speakers at the bottom. The phone has a trapezoid cross section and a back that comes covered in black nylon by default. It’s wide, solid and feels like a work horse that can take a beating, which is rather the point.

The Force is quite chunky by today’s standards at 9.2mm thick. But it’s relatively light, weighing 169g – which is 9g lighter than the 7.3mm thick Nexus 6P and 23g lighter than the 7.3mm iPhone 6S Plus.

The quad HD 5.4in AMOLED is of very high density with 540 pixels per inch, which makes it one of the crispest smartphones available. It’s pin-sharp, has very good blacks and is bright and vibrant. It’s a high-quality display that shows no visible signs that it is different from those fitted to devices such as a Samsung Galaxy S6 or iPhone 6S.

The Moto X Force has Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line 810 processor with 3GB of RAM, which is pretty standard for a flagship smartphone from 2015.

Motorola says the Moto X Force should last 48 hours of mixed use with a large 3,760 milliampere-hour battery. For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+ has a 3,000mAh battery and the iPhone 6S Plus a 2,750mAh battery.

I found the Force consistently lasted two working days, but not quite 48 hours. With about two hours of browsing, hundreds of push notifications and emails, as well as 90 minutes of listening to music via Bluetooth headphones a day, it would be on its last legs when going to bed on the second day and dead by the time I woke up for the third day.

Only Sony’s Xperia Z5 Compact has consistently lasted longer in my testing.

The Force isn’t waterproof, but has a water repellent coating, which will help it survive a drink being spilt over it. It didn’t die when I spilt coffee on it, which is good. There’s a microSD card slot in the sim tray in the top of the device for adding more storage.

The Moto X Force runs the same version of Android 5.1.1 Lollipop as Motorola’s other Moto X smartphones, with little in the way of modifications from the standard Android experience.

Motorola has added a few apps, including the Moto app that supports gestures such as karate chop to switch on the torch and a quick twist to launch the camera app. It also has expanded voice control and Motorola’s active display, which lights the display with notification icons and the time when you approach the phone with your hand. All work well.

It’s a shame that it didn’t ship running the latest version of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Motorola has promised an upgrade to the new version, but hasn’t given a date yet for when that will happen. The Force also ships with vulnerabilities to the Stagefright bug, which isn’t great.

The 21-megapixel camera is similar to that fitted to the Moto X Style, and produces very good images in good lighting conditions, with excellent colour and detail. It has no optical image stabilisation, however, and struggles a little more than some high-end rivals in low-light conditions.

The 5-megapixel selfie-camera is one of the best available, but the front-facing flash does little to help anything taken more than an arm’s length away.

A standard smartphone screen typically has three or four layers, including the display. The glass on top, a touchscreen layer and then the display underneath, as well as some sort of frame. The Moto X Force has six layers: a user-replaceable, scratch-resistant top layer, a second transparent layer, two touchscreen layers – just in case one breaks – the AMOLED display, and a rigid aluminium back to hold it together.

Impressively, the Moto X Force lives up to Motorola’s claims. No matter how rough I treated it, the screen would not shatter. It even withstood a good blow from a hammer – and the touchscreen still worked.

The verdict:

The Moto X Force is an excellent road-warrior phone. It’s solid, lasts two days at a pinch, has a decent camera, wireless charging and great-looking screen.

There are a few downsides: it doesn’t ship with the latest version of Android, is vulnerable to Stagefright, there is no fingerprint scanner, and it won’t be aesthetically pleasing to most.

But all of those are far outweighed by the fact that you simply can’t smash the screen. If you ever drop your phone or think you might, the Moto X Force is the answer. It’s really quite remarkable.