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It’s been a long time coming (and a lot of rumors), but today, we finally got our hands on the Moto X, the first phone Motorola co-designed with Google. Though it looks a lot like the new Droids we saw a week ago, the Moto X will make a much bigger impact. For the first time since the original Razr, Motorola is launching a phone on every major U.S. wireless carrier. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint,T-Mobile, and US Cellular will get the Moto X beginning later this month (some carriers may not launch until early September). The phone itself is great, but the real selling point is how customizable it is.

If you see a white or black Moto X on a shelf, nothing about it is going to blow you away. This is an ordinary looking phone without a whole lot of flair. Then again, can a smartphone really shock us these days? We’ve reached a point where they’re all beginning to look very similar.

However, Motorola has taken a lot of time to choose the right size, shape, and button layout for its phone. With a 4.7-inch screen, it pushes no screen size boundaries, but it’s one of the most comfortable phones we’ve ever held. The body is made of polycarbonate plastic that bleeds right into the Gorilla Glass on the front, and the back of the phone has an arc to it. A Googorola executive told us that the phone has been designed to fit the shape of your palm perfectly. The Power and Volume buttons were placed on the right side so that they can be easily pressed right alongside the Home, Back, and Recent Apps navigation buttons on the bottom of the X. It’s this attention to detail that makes it a thrill to hold the X.

The Moto X’s most interesting features don’t involve holding it at all. In our first few minutes with the phone, we were able to try out the Touchless Controls, which utilize Google Now to answer questions for you and do your bidding – a la Siri. What’s different here is that you don’t even have to wake the Moto X from sleep mode to use Google Now. You can yell at it from across the room. It’s now possible to wake your phone up using voice commands. And it recognizes your voice thanks to three microphones, active noise canceling, and a voice profile that you help it create by saying some words for it a few times in a row.

Active Display mode also caught our eye. It shows you the time and some recent notifications every time you move your phone. Execs told us that the average smartphone owner presses the Power button and looks at their screen 60 times a day. Thanks to this feature, the information you need may pop up faster.

And, of course, since Google owns Motorola now, the Moto X’s interface mostly sticks with the standard design and feel of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. On the inside, the specs are pretty good. It has a 1280 x 720 pixel AMOLED screen (and we swear, it pretty much looks as good as 1080p), 2GB of RAM, a 10-megapixel camera, 16GB of internal storage (or 32GB if you want to pay $50), and Motorola’s fancy new X8 chipset, which includes a Snapdragon S4 Pro dual-core processor, a quad-core GPU, a language processor, and a “contextual computing” processor. Those last two chips are specifically designed to help it hear your voice and understand what’s going on around it via an array of sensors.

The phone is fantastic to hold and use, but Motorola’s custom manufacturing process is what sets it apart from anything else on the market. Instead of just buying a black or white phone, you can order it on Motorola’s new “Moto Maker” website. It allows you to completely customize your phone in 2,000 different combinations. There are 18 different backplate colors, seven accent colors (the color of your power, volume, and camera ring), two front plate colors (white or black), two different types of cases, two storage size options, 16 wallpapers, and many other options. You can even put a written message on the back and buy Sol headphones that match your device. Wood backplates will also be available soon, and Motorola plans to continue rolling out new designs after launch.

More impressive is that your custom phone will arrive on your doorstep within four days and is assembled in Ft. Worth, Texas. Yes, this is the first smartphone to be made in the U.S. 

We need to spend a few more days with the Moto X before we know how we feel about it, and we wish we could actually try out Moto Maker for ourselves, but one thing is for certain: Motorola is finally making some moves. The Moto X may be the phone that puts Motorola back on the map.