We might be approaching the end of the viable life of this Moto X on which I type this entry. It’s a model that hit at the end of the summer of 2013, although I only bought mine in February 2014. It’s three generations and two versions of Android behind current. And it’s a colossal pain in the ass to run a dozen updates for apps every time I fire it up after a week or two. Hell, I’m lucky if it’s only a dozen.
And yet this phone was week ahead of its time. 2 GB of RAM, so more apps could stay open at once. Separate co-processors to allow for always-listening voice command at a time when nobody at all had that. Awareness of whether you were walking or driving. The iPhone only got those features a couple years on, and still hasn’t adopted the power savings of AMOLED when they desperately could have used it – or reduced the bezels to fit a 4.7″ display in a one-handable phone.
That’s one huge indictment of Google – they owned Motorola while this phone was developed, they had the most innovative new phone since the original iPhone, and they overpriced it and under-promoted it. Add it to the long list of things Google swore would change everything and got bored of within six months. And now I don’t even know when it’s going to get a security update. Forget about Android 6 or 7, this thing shipped with 4.2 – it’s a minor miracle it runs 5.1, even if it took a year to show up.
But it’s an indictment. Because a couple months before the Moto X, I fell into the fortune of an iPad mini, the first with a retina display. That iPad has been my home laptop, for all intents and purposes, for two and a half years. And it got the upgrade to iOS 10. It’s running it now and running it just fine, and there are no signs it’ll need replacing anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the Moto X is challenged. Part of it is just speed. It struggles to render Instagram contents in a timely fashion. It really struggles with RSS through Press, although that could be a function of the app. In fact, the real struggle is with anything that doesn’t have an iOS equivalent – apps like Swarm or Slack seem to behave a lot better than PocketCasts or Press.
It still occupies that same space in my imagination. It’s almost a species of cosplay, a way of walking out the door with a completely different tether to the world. I won’t ever get rid of it, and I’ll keep fiddling with it for as long as I can. But as the phone that goes abroad, the phone that’s my personal phone, the iPhone SE has displaced it in every meaningful respect.