MotoX Coffee Break



I sat early at Starbucks on a breezy Friday morning.   I was up at 5am today and instead if rolling over I rolled out of bed and started my day.  Great walk on the beach but wasn't in the picture taking mood this morning.   I know it has been a while since I wrote and partly cause I keep thinking something interesting will happen or inspire me.

So in the interest of being out there and keeping my time here on this blog moving forward I am going to share some observations, comments and thoughts about my new MotoX phone.  Yes Luke a walk on the dark side:  I did it. I bought a Motox phone to replace my iPhone 5.  I received an email offer to buy it and not as an upgrade.  The offer came directly from Motorola and was attractively priced.
I have been an iPhone customer since the second generation and I enjoyed it mostly.   Although recently it felt more like a cult than an innovative choice.  I am sure the 6 will come out on schedule and since I have an upgrade still coming from at&t, can switch back to the Apple Force, but for now I have walked on the wild side.

First observations:

Motorola makes a solid well built phone.  I like the curved back.  The camera is significantly better but in all fairness I had an iphone5 not a 5s.

The migration was much easier than I expected.  First I had 3 days between order and delivery so I could read up on it.  Normally I promise myself to read all manuals, and be diligent and plan for something but once the box arrives all my discipline goes with the packaging... so these few days helped me.

I moved all my pics to my Dropbox account.  Went to Google music player and basically you give them your iTunes account info and magically the music bought on iTunes shows up.

So slight diversion: I have a Motorola zoom tablet.  I pull up the Google music player and test it through my Chromecast and surprise the music sounds much richer to me that when playing through my iPhone.  (Check out the announcement of the new HTC one M8 edition with sprint and this will make sense,)


Back to migration ,  when I have migrated iPhones it always feels like going to the auto mechanic. Somewhere in the cloud or iTunes is magic (or they take your data back to the mechanic) and you just believe it will work or not.  I have lost contacts ,  failed migrations and apple choices on what to leave on my phone or in the cloud.  Mostly worked well but since I live with my phone, and many contacts are work related, this becomes a little bit of an out of control high wire act for me.

So back to the MotoX, pictures are safe.  Music is settled and sounds great.  Contacts migration worried me but I thought I am safe cause Google won't be touching my iPhone.  Used to be, apparently, it was simple to sync contacts between and iPhone and gmail and then the droid being Google would just bring them down.   Not as easy these days (no surprise!) but you can export iPhone contacts to one vcf file that gmail can input and then syncing to the Motox was simple. 

Apps migration,  which I have a fair amount, was pretty easy.  Motorola has a migration tool and basically they download the comparable droid app to the Apple one.  Few exceptions, if they were basically web book marks, no migration and it seemed if Google had a competitive offering they didn't migrate (e.g. Facebook).

So, migration was a 10, as I could easily control each step.

User experience is taking some getting used to:

The music player is intuitive but Google leaves the music in their cloud and you have to choose to download to the phone. Not a huge issue and apple on my last migration made these choices for me which I complained about previously.  The sound is great, but there is something comforting for us bald headed people to know the music is on the device.  Since, I use Gigabytes of data a month.. AT&T I am sure would not be happy to have me always streaming music from Google over their lovely network.

The sound is much richer.  I think they download more of the song and there is more to play.  Follow also the Neil young discussion and this will also add enlightenment.  Honest, I remember years ago comparing a Sony MP3 Walkman to an iTouch and how much richer the sound was on the Sony and this is similar.  With processing power up on phones as well as storage Apple needs to step up here in my opinion.

As a phone it works fine, and no complaints, the way the locked screen works us different enough to need getting used to but really no complaints.  My ear tended to push buttons on my iPhone (such as mute!) and so far this has not happened.

Overall I am happy:

1) Motorola is a legacy manufacturer and the quality shows.  Hope Lenovo realizes that.

2) Google gets that the quality of their delivery of their services is as important or more so than the device itself.  I think they have and understand this clearer than Apple as reflected in Apple's purchase of Beats (looks over true innovation).  The music player is great. The migration and seamless integration with GMail and contacts is very good.  This experience extends to the Chromecast which probably influenced this phone selection.

3) The user experience is similar to an iPhone so the learning curve is low.  I feel migrating to a Windows phone would not be as straight forward.

4) Car integration is a mixed bag. The phone integration is better but the car sees the music as not secure.  But playing music through Bluetooth sounds amazing.

I have not tried the voice integration so more on that later.

Finally, the unofficial poll on Facebook, most people liked the pics from the MotoX better than the iPhone.




Hope every one has a good weekend and take care.

Brian

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