Nine days in

So I can’t really say that much about the Moto X in its first week, because there is apparently a nontrivial glitch in using a Moto X with Android 4.4 that absolutely pummels the battery life. In fact, last night, it bled 10% of its battery in eight hours of sitting untouched on the coffee table in airplane mode. On the good to bad scale, that’s bad, so my lovely bride did a factory reset for me while I was at work – and mirabile dictu, when I got home, the refreshed phone was offering me the mythical 4.4.2 update, which I promptly ran.

I’ve only reinstalled a handful of apps – Evernote, Instagram, Kindle and Press, the best RSS app for Android to all accounts – and done the bare minimum of configuration. Oh, and put on a solid black wallpaper in the interest of conserving battery on an AMOLED, since black doesn’t draw power. Must remember to make the Kindle white-on-black too.

It’s been hard to judge, simply because the battery life was probably the biggest influence in getting the phone in the first damn place. Setting that aside, though, it’s possible to make a few early assessments:

* The things I’d like to see show up on a notional iPhone 6: the wrist-twist for starting the camera, the larger screen (in a device that’s not heavier or materially much bigger), the ability to hear and parse voice commands without pushing a button. Assuming the power savings are real, I wouldn’t say no to AMOLED and the larger battery either.

* It really drives home how stuck into Apple services I am: the iCloud email as my public primary, all iTunes everything, the convenience of having a central account that isn’t part and parcel of Google (with the presumed data mining that goes along with that). So far, the only Google login on the refreshed Moto X is setting up Moto Care (and thus the ability to remotely find, lock or wipe the thing) and using the Google Play store for apps (which seems inevitable – my use of the Amazon App Store the first time out was a nice effort, but lacks the auto-update and latest versions that seem to appear in the Play store). Not using Google Mail or Calendar and I haven’t re-enabled Google Now, and it may be a while before I do.

* The Moto X feels nice. It doesn’t feel materially more burdensome than the iPhone to carry, hold or use (indeed, for Kindle or Instagram, the iPhone now feels unusually narrow in the same way the iPhone 4S came to feel unusually squat). Black on black on black was the right move; the thing has the sort of cyberpunk feel to it that suggests it’s what William Gibson would have written into the Sprawl trilogy if he’d known cell phones were going to be a thing.

* Wild card: podcasts. Once I sort out the battery situation, the trick becomes: can I download the Junks and the Geoff Show weekdaily and play them back without any hassle? It looks broadly feasible at the moment, but over the long haul, how convenient will it be?

* I’m using the phone on T-Mobile, prepaid, $3 a day for days I use it. It’s still cheaper than paying for a full month…for now. My presumption is that this would only need to be a monthly phone if I changed jobs and had to give up the work-provided iPhone 5, but it would also serve as a very viable phone to go abroad, being completely unlocked and capable of HSPA+ service in almost any country. And if T-Mobile doesn’t work out, there’s always AIO Wireless, unlimited talk and text plus 2 GB data for $55 a month, assuming the speed throttle isn’t too much to cope with.

* This phone cost me $325, sack and all. No contract, no commitment, no obligation. Just free and clear, as good a phone as you can buy unlocked, for half the cost of buying an equivalent iPhone. Can’t argue with the value proposition there. Put another way: given that the normal phone subsidy works out to $20 a month, this phone pays for itself in 17 months of daily use on prepaid monthly service. I’m very pleased with that – doubly so given that it was designed in the USA (partly by me) and assembled in the USA (well, Texas, but that’s practically America). First phone I bought with my own money in three and a half years, and the most money I’ve put down on a phone since…when? Maybe the V635 in late 2005? But it was a first-rate unlocked smartphone for $300 plus tax, and you can’t beat that with a stick.

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