I’ve been living with the Moto X Developer Edition for about a week now and have been using it as my daily driver for as long as I’ve had the device.
The Good: The natural language processing in the extended Google Now functionality is impressive to say the least. In my limited and admittedly anecdotal testing, the voice response is the best of any device currently on the market; it beats the pants off of Siri for instance. Though the X does not run stock Android, it’s pretty close to it and is far snappier than any recent skin from other vendors. Though this might be a bit of a personal quirk, the fact that the device is assembled in the USA is a big plus for me — call it sentiment I suppose.
The Bad: Pound for pound the camera doesn’t match that of the HTC One. The body is plastic. Despite the plastic being fairly solid and high-end it is still plastic and the device looks a little low-end when stacked against the HTC One; however, it holds up just fine compared to the Galaxy S4, another plastic device.
The Ugly: Beyond the plastic body the phone is pretty well designed. However, it is a bit underwhelming when compared to the marketing that preceded it. In particular, a lot has been made of how customizable the body is but unless you are an AT&T customer (at least in the US), you aren’t going to be able to customize the device’s body any further than “black or white”.
Conclusion: The voice recognition software in the X is impressive, however, beyond that it is basically an Android 4.x device. In a way, one of the best features of the X is how close it follows stock Android and allows the elegance of the system to shine through, only slighted hindered by customizations.
