Honestly, I gravitate toward the Moto X more than the iPhone now. I don’t know how much of that is novelty, and how much of it is exasperation with the Verizon-based iPhone 5 (and the battery-gimped iPhone 4S). But on so many criteria, the X is the equal or better of the iPhone 5 – I loaded up most of the critical apps last night and so far, so good.
The battery advantage is real. I have a plain black background and most of the text apps (Press RSS, Kindle) are white text on black background, to save power on the AMOLED screen. Android 4.4.2 has fixed the battery issue, for the most part, and in roughly equivalent use it burned only about 30% of its battery in town yesterday, whereas the iPhone 5 burned over 60%. And that’s without any audio playback, either.
Right now, the biggest weakness of the X is the mail client – which is just dreadful, to be quite frank. It won’t check multiple accounts at once, there’s a separate app just for the Gmail account (which goes unused), and it doesn’t delete mail from the server in a timely fashion (if at all). I don’t really do much in the way of personal mail, so it’s not a dealbreaker.
The bigger dealbreaker is iMessage. Apple’s bespoke solution to cross-device text messaging.. Literally every single personal message I have in my text messaging since I last restarted the phone is a blue bubble, even the folks in Nashville like the tailgate crew or the basketball manager who got promoted to player this year. Even at work, I only have a couple of green messages. Were I moving to a new iPhone, this would be a piece of cake, because the number would be abstracted away automatically, but now I have to tell everyone the new number. Which has the potential to be a gargantuan pain in the ass.
The iMessage issue really pointed up how stuck into Apple services I am. Having my personal calendar in iCloud is something I’m willing to do – and unwilling to move to Google’s service. Music, of course, is all from the iTunes Music Store – I might buy some MP3 from Amazon but I’m not about to commit to the Google Play Store for that stuff. And having iPhoto Stream automatically taking care of pictures as I shoot them is more convenient than I realized.
The polish just isn’t there, either. Little things as simple as having a quick lock to keep the screen in vertical orientation, or self-labeled folder creation, have been annoyances. I wish I could get the battery percentage beside the indicator instead of having to pull down a windowshade and then hit a button. And while Google Voice Search is great for entering terms, it doesn’t seem to work as well for some random inquiries, although I need to look more at what it’s supposed to do well. I wouldn’t mind having the headphone jack in the bottom of the phone instead of the top, though that’s probably personal preference as much as anything.
On the other hand, there are some things Apple definitely needs to go to school on with the Moto X. First among them, the camera-twist. Being able to twist the phone twice as it comes out of the pocket and have it ready to shoot? Absolutely priceless, especially when you’re out at the Chinese New Year parade. The display itself is perfectly nice – the 720p decision was the right one, and the iPhone 5 is legitimately starting to feel a little narrow in the display. I read a lot more Kindle books on the Moto X than I ever do on the iPhone.
Too, the battery management is beyond crucial – it’s 50% larger and things like the AMOLED screen help, but more importantly, there’s a table showing what percentage of battery use can be attributed to what function, whether it’s an app or the screen or the GPS or the Wi-Fi. It’s absolutely necessary and it’s inexcusable that Apple hasn’t put that into iOS yet. Similarly, it’s great to be able to see which apps took up how much cellular data. Since February 10, I’ve used about 300 MB – so 2 GB a month ought to be plenty, which means either T-Mob or AIO will do at $60 or $55 respectively (assuming I could live with AIO capping LTE at 8 Mbps, and I’m not sure I could when T-Mob was outstreaking Verizon at close to 20 Mbps in San Francisco last night).
But in any event, I can live with this phone. If I were going abroad, I wouldn’t hesitate to grab it first, and I wouldn’t be bitter if it was all I had until the notional iPhone 6 ships – and that notional iPhone 6 would have to impress me enough to pay full freight for, because I think I’m going to like no contractual obligation.