I was a huge Motorola fan a few years ago. I waited months to buy my 2013 Moto X. I’d found my color combination in ten minutes and fallen in love. It was the last AT&T-branded I would ever willingly buy, and I loved it to death. No, literally. I used it quite hard and it shorted out less than two months after purchase. And I got burn-in on the next two 2013’s I went through, and when my last 2013 got upgraded to a 2014 by Motorola Support, I was honestly a little fearful about the size jump. But I loved the 2014 Moto X, even if I had to go from my lovely white face to black to avoid the pimply look of the IR sensors… And it was a faithful, if slightly underpowered and overworked device, and I loved the fluff out of Touchless Controls AKA Moto Voice.
The 2015 Moto X announcement left me groaning. Sure, they’d finally added a microSD slot, and sure, they’d finally given it enough power (though perhaps not enough batter), but the thing was a whale. Maybe not a whale like the Nexus 6 had seemed the year before, but my size 7 jeans and their tiny, tiny pockets looked at that phone and cried. And I couldn’t in good conscience upgrade to it.
This year, the Moto Z announcement is months earlier, again. And it left me groaning a little, again. I don’t think the device is terrible. Far from it, in fact; it looks like it’d be an interesting phone to play with, especially from my customization-obsessed viewpoint. But at 5.5” and any illusion of small bezels abandoned, it was still a big phone (though not the KAIJU the Phab 2 Pro was). Even worse, by the time I’d be able to buy it unlocked, it’d be old news and fighting with the full fall release schedule.
It’s one thing for a phone to be a carrier exclusive for a month. It’s another thing for a phone to be a world exclusive for an entire Duarte-damned season.
While this phone is new and hot, it’s only available to subscribers of the big reddevil checkmark. And when it comes to GSM and the rest of the world in the fall, it will be old news, even if new and noteworthy Motomods are coming out. It will be up against the new Note, the leaks of the new Nexus phones, and the new iPhones. Unless those mods are insanely hot, I don’t see the Moto Z competing with the Fall lineup. Releasing worldwide in the summer would at least give it a few months to get out there and get really used before it had to deal with newer shiner ****.
I do not take issue with three of the more popular dings on the phone:
It doesn’t have a headphone jack. Fine. I use Bluetooth most of the time anyway. It’s one less thing to break and it means I have an excuse to go test out USB-C headphones, including those noise-cancelling ones from HTC I’m still waiting for. And if you’re a true audiophile, you’re not buying this phone anyway, you’re buying a V10, HTC 10, or an audio-centric phone. Android’s about choice, and if you’re an audiophile or someone who just hates Bluetooth (you are WRONG, by the by), then you have other options to exercise. No one’s holding a gun to your head to buy this phone.
It’s not too thin. It’s not. All the people who went to the demo area and started using the phone without at least a Style Shell on it said the phone is too thin, and they’re right, but this is not a phone that was made to be used naked. You don’t need those pogo pins exposed and vulnerable, so if you’re not getting either a case (oh sweet binary, the case market for this phone is gonna be a nightmare), you should at least be getting a Style Shell to cover the pins. Get a nice color or maybe the leather. Cleaning the leather won’t be a ***** this time since you can take it off the phone! Or get a battery mod in a nice design and be functional _and_ fashionable.
The instant you put a shell or Motomod on this phone, it’s no longer too thin. Once you get into the functional mods like the speakers or the pico projector, the phone’s verging on too thick. If the phone had been made the same thickness as a Galaxy S7, once you stuck a shell on it, it’d’ve been too thick. It’s not too thin; it’s just not a complete phone out of the box, which is a whole other issue that needs to be discussed closer to launch.
The camera bump is ugly and it makes the bump pointless. The camera bump has a point, and they're some pretty points, too. The first being that you needed more space for the camera sensor, the flashes and the laser focus. Second, if the camera wasn’t bumped out, once you put a shell on it, the camera would be recessed, which would be pointless, and once you’d put the speaker/projector mod on, it’d be in a tunnel. Third, the camera’s bump is distinctive and helps keep the magnetic mods aligned and in place instead of slipping all over the back of this steel smartphone.
That camera bump ain’t pointless - it’s required.
There’s still a lot about the Moto Z to love, and it’s the stuff that wasn’t even mentioned in the presentation. It’s the IR sensors that lit up the screen when Yang Yuanqing finally pulled the sheet off the Moto Z. It’s the Moto Voice that I still use even more than I use Google Now because Google Now still won’t let me customize my launch phrase. It’s the mostly stripped down version of Android that Motorola achieved during its short tenure under Google. That’s the Motorola I fell in love with, and it’s still hiding under the mods and the camera bumps and that horrible square fingerprint scanner (WHAT WERE YOU THINKING). And even though that Motorola is still hiding in there, it can’t break the spell and give me back the magical phones I proudly owned the last few years.
The honeymoon is over. And Motorola needs to get through this mid-life crisis, get out of these horrendous Verizon exclusives, and get its spark back.
The 2015 Moto X announcement left me groaning. Sure, they’d finally added a microSD slot, and sure, they’d finally given it enough power (though perhaps not enough batter), but the thing was a whale. Maybe not a whale like the Nexus 6 had seemed the year before, but my size 7 jeans and their tiny, tiny pockets looked at that phone and cried. And I couldn’t in good conscience upgrade to it.
This year, the Moto Z announcement is months earlier, again. And it left me groaning a little, again. I don’t think the device is terrible. Far from it, in fact; it looks like it’d be an interesting phone to play with, especially from my customization-obsessed viewpoint. But at 5.5” and any illusion of small bezels abandoned, it was still a big phone (though not the KAIJU the Phab 2 Pro was). Even worse, by the time I’d be able to buy it unlocked, it’d be old news and fighting with the full fall release schedule.
It’s one thing for a phone to be a carrier exclusive for a month. It’s another thing for a phone to be a world exclusive for an entire Duarte-damned season.
While this phone is new and hot, it’s only available to subscribers of the big red
I do not take issue with three of the more popular dings on the phone:
It doesn’t have a headphone jack. Fine. I use Bluetooth most of the time anyway. It’s one less thing to break and it means I have an excuse to go test out USB-C headphones, including those noise-cancelling ones from HTC I’m still waiting for. And if you’re a true audiophile, you’re not buying this phone anyway, you’re buying a V10, HTC 10, or an audio-centric phone. Android’s about choice, and if you’re an audiophile or someone who just hates Bluetooth (you are WRONG, by the by), then you have other options to exercise. No one’s holding a gun to your head to buy this phone.
It’s not too thin. It’s not. All the people who went to the demo area and started using the phone without at least a Style Shell on it said the phone is too thin, and they’re right, but this is not a phone that was made to be used naked. You don’t need those pogo pins exposed and vulnerable, so if you’re not getting either a case (oh sweet binary, the case market for this phone is gonna be a nightmare), you should at least be getting a Style Shell to cover the pins. Get a nice color or maybe the leather. Cleaning the leather won’t be a ***** this time since you can take it off the phone! Or get a battery mod in a nice design and be functional _and_ fashionable.
The instant you put a shell or Motomod on this phone, it’s no longer too thin. Once you get into the functional mods like the speakers or the pico projector, the phone’s verging on too thick. If the phone had been made the same thickness as a Galaxy S7, once you stuck a shell on it, it’d’ve been too thick. It’s not too thin; it’s just not a complete phone out of the box, which is a whole other issue that needs to be discussed closer to launch.
The camera bump is ugly and it makes the bump pointless. The camera bump has a point, and they're some pretty points, too. The first being that you needed more space for the camera sensor, the flashes and the laser focus. Second, if the camera wasn’t bumped out, once you put a shell on it, the camera would be recessed, which would be pointless, and once you’d put the speaker/projector mod on, it’d be in a tunnel. Third, the camera’s bump is distinctive and helps keep the magnetic mods aligned and in place instead of slipping all over the back of this steel smartphone.
That camera bump ain’t pointless - it’s required.
There’s still a lot about the Moto Z to love, and it’s the stuff that wasn’t even mentioned in the presentation. It’s the IR sensors that lit up the screen when Yang Yuanqing finally pulled the sheet off the Moto Z. It’s the Moto Voice that I still use even more than I use Google Now because Google Now still won’t let me customize my launch phrase. It’s the mostly stripped down version of Android that Motorola achieved during its short tenure under Google. That’s the Motorola I fell in love with, and it’s still hiding under the mods and the camera bumps and that horrible square fingerprint scanner (WHAT WERE YOU THINKING). And even though that Motorola is still hiding in there, it can’t break the spell and give me back the magical phones I proudly owned the last few years.
The honeymoon is over. And Motorola needs to get through this mid-life crisis, get out of these horrendous Verizon exclusives, and get its spark back.
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