I decided to switch to Android for a bit and started using a Moto X a few days ago as my primary phone. My friend and colleague, Joen, inspired this, so it’s only fair to show his notes in comparison each update.
Here are my observations in particular order:
- To quote Joen “Man, there are a lot of passwords to type in on a new phone.”
- The first day, I glanced down at my phone and an animated bug wandered down onto the side. Curious, I tapped it and was brought into a delightful animation that used the phone’s (very accurate) accelerometer to allow me to look around the room and interact with a story. I believe it was a Spotlight animation, but I’m not sure. It was quite fun. Bonus points for delight factor.
- A few things crashed (probably due to Lollipop) and there was some serious screen jank on a few of the apps.
- I miss my hardware mute switch.
- There are many apps with almost the exact same name. This is super sketchy.
- The phone feels gigantic. I can no longer comfortably use it one-handed. At least not yet.
- There is an app called Photos and one called Gallery. After some Googling, I learned why. tl;dr Both have almost the same functions. Photos is better at G+. Gallery is the one that’s integrated with the camera. FFFFFFFFFFFF
- I can’t find a comfortable way to interact with my phone one-handed.
- Switching from Messages was a pain. Basically, I had to turn off iMessage on all of my devices or my friends using Messages would not be able to reach me on my phone.
- I just found out about something called Motorola Connect which is basically Messages, but in a janky Chrome extension, so that’s a bonus.
- Unlocking my phone gets weird. If it’s in the time-only lock mode (where I haven’t clicked the side button), I have to swipe down to unlock. If it’s in notification display mode (probably the normal lock screen) that I get to by hitting the side button, I have to swipe up to unlock. You can probably see how this gets weird.
- The bottom back button (the one on everything) is awesome most of the time and surprising at others. I’m never quite sure what the lil’ buttony button is gonna do.
- Certain apps were hard to figure out. It took me several minutes to figure out how to post on Twitter. It’s because when I go to Twitter, out of habit, I immediately start scrolling down. Never up. Wah wah.
- Chromecasting has never been so exciting.
- I miss my fingerprint scanner unlock. It felt so effortless.
- The Play Store is loaded with clones of the app you’re looking for. This is a pain because I have to go figure out which developer made the one I’m actually looking for.
- There are a kagillion app updates all the time. Thankfully, most of them autoupdate.
- There are notifications I can’t get rid of. Things like Verizon’s garbage notifications, Up’s sync status notification, connected as a USB device notifications, Android wear notifications. Not very zen.
- There are AMAZING interactions within just notifications. I love that I can reply to messages, do Mailbox App actions, etc. This is by far one of the coolest things I’ve noticed on Android.