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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … <\/p>\n