The phone came promptly; the quoted delivery time was four days, and it arrived in three. Setup was easy, but all the application update downloads failed. The operating system update — to KitKat — succeeded, and after that all the applications updated themselves properly.
When I upgraded from last year’s Nexus 7 to this year’s, all my old apps were automatically installed. That didn’t happen with the Moto X. I guess that’s appropriate, since the apps you want on your tablet aren’t necesarily the same as those you want on your phone. When I went to the Google Play store and search for the old apps, they were identified as paid for, so I didn’t have to pay again when I installed them.
By the way, this thing has fast Wi-Fi. I watched the download of the upgrade to KitKat on the firewall’s dashboard, and it chugged right along at 12 Mb/s, with peaks to 20 Mb/s.
I set up an Exchange account for email, calendar, and contacts synching. This is quite unintuitive with respect to server and account naming under Android, but fortunately I had the Nexus 7 all set up, so I could copy the entries.
I couldn’t get the email widget, which works so well on the Nexus 7, to either display any folder but Unread Mail, or to update the display when the contents of the folder changed, so I trashed it and just used the email app icon.
It was easy to pair the phone to the car, and when it saw that I’d done that, it immediately offered to show me a bunch of tutorials about how to do various car-related things, including prompting me to set up the voice activation and comand feature. I did so, but haven’t used it much. I’m a little concerned about the battery life implications of having it always listening for me to say “OK Google Now.”
One thing I don’t like about both the Moto X and the Nexus 7 is the micro USB connector that you use for charging. It only goes in one way, and it’s fiddly. The new Apple charging connector is much better. The Nexus 7 has a Qi inducting charging loop built in, so you don’t have to use the USB connector for charging. The Moto X doesn’t support Qi. Maybe I should have bought the Droid Max which does.
I’ll report again when I’ve go some time in on the new phone.
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