Moto X: UPDATED

update:
My phone broke yesterday. I'd had it about 45-46 hours and the screen broke. The phone fell 1 foot onto a table. The case is fine. The glass is intact. The screen below the glass cracked. My old Droid 2 survived almost 3 years of being dropped, kicked, being driven over once, and general rough treatment. My Moto X didn't survive simple butterfingers while sitting at a desk. Apparently it's made of cobwebs, old china teacups, and pleasant dreams.


original:
It was time to replace my phone. I liked my old one, but it was becoming defective. A strip of screen had become unresponsive to touch and then freaking out much later. Time to let it go.

I tried doing some research, but really, I have trouble telling them apart. The Moto X came highly recommended by some friends so I just went with it. And you're going to hear me complain about it.

I liked the physical keyboard. Some people don't like them, but I liked seeing the screen and being able to type at the same time. Moto X doesn't have that.

Google Talk has been replaced with Hangout. I tried the upgrade on my old phone and hated it. But there I could uninstall the update and go back to Talk. I can't do that now. So some other app is pretending to be Talk. Hangout just sucks. I've not heard from anyone who thinks it's an improvement over Talk. Talk takes the people who are available and clusters them at the top. Hangout just sort of mutes the colors on people who aren't available. So if you have more than a dozen contacts you have to go hunting to see if they're online and keep checking to see when they come online if you're waiting for them. I want them all clustered like in Talk. And so does everybody else who isn't Google.

It does make it easier to uninstall apps, once you figure out how.

I'm not sure if the GPS is on or off. Bluetooth and wi-fi I can at least still look up in the system preferences.

I'm told there's brightness control. I haven't seen it yet.

I had to reconfigure Gmail to make it useful instead of graphical.

It's only the first evening, but so far I'm struck more by what it can't do than what it can.