[X 2014 General] Elsydeon:
I have a few more days to decide whether to keep my Moto X or not, and have to admit, I'm leaning towards not keeping it, and going back to my HTC One M8. What originally attracted me to it was the real wooden back, as good as stock Android experience, Lollipop was already released for it and ready to go, Motorola's impressive track record at releasing updates quickly, and what appeared to be useful hardware features. In practice though, I'm bothered by quite a few things about it in daily usage:

1. While the phone is physically beautiful in design, prior to getting a Case-Mate Hula case, I found this phone literally painful to use, due to the extremely thin edges. It made it really hard to hold the phone using my fingertips securely, and after a week, my thumbs felt permanently strained.

2. I've always preferred the natural colors of good LCD screens, and knew upfront that going to the Moto X's AMOLED screen was already going to be a downgrade to my eyes. Coming from an HTC One M8, the poppy colors were literally disorienting and dizzying for the first few days, until my eyes finally adjusted. The way screens present whites is most important to me, as the large majority of apps and websites out there use white backgrounds, and unfortunately the Moto X has that dirty looking grayish/yellowish tint to its whites. Sadly there's no way to adjust this out of the box, unlike Samsung's nowdays which let you adjust their AMOLED screens to a more realistic looking tint.

3. The various hardware features, namely the always-on active listening, and the IR sensors, which I initially thought sounded cool on paper, end up being more gimmicky than useful to me. Instead of Moto Display, I'd really rather just have a traditional blinking LED. Most of the time I find Moto Display far too sensitive and distracting, turning on the screen randomly if I just so happen to reach around my desk for something, or just pick up the phone to move it. The few instances I tried Moto Voice, I found it tremendously slow, with it basically just passing everything on to Google Now. Between the time Moto Voice finally registers, only to pass it to Google Now, which takes its time registering my command, I could've easily executed or typed out what I needed done 10 seconds ago.

4. People said in reviews said all along the 2014 Moto X's camera was not that great, and I kept thinking ahh, it'd be good enough. But one immediate thing I already couldn't help noticing was its failure to get a properly sharp focus on anything, no matter how much I try. What looks sharp on the viewfinder screen ends up always coming out slightly blurry. Pictures also appear pretty grainy as well in general.

4. Probably the biggest issue of all to me is the Moto X on the latest Lollipop version just feels like it's in some beta stage. There's lots of very aggravating bugs that ruin the daily usage experience. I've encountered an issue with ringtones inconsistently starting off softly, which in some cases kills an entire ringtone off if it's a short one, causing me to miss notifications entirely. I've also had issues with wifi constantly being disconnected, where it looks like it's connected, but in reality, no data actually gets through. I've also experienced far more app freezing and crashes then I've ever had in my last 3 phones combined. I made very certain that my phone was set up from scratch, ground up, resetting it every which way possible, with the OS booted up, and through recovery, before I started using it. I'm not sure if it's whatever Motorola did software-wise, or Lollipop itself that's so buggy, but boy it's a mess.

I was really hoping the Moto X would be the phone to get me away from the HTC One M8 finally...but just like when I had the One M7, I find that HTC just seems to make one heck of a solid and stable phone, both in hardware and software. The One M8's only real weakness to me is the camera's pixels. It's nonetheless been by far the most consistent camera I've ever used, taking sharp, well lit pictures consistently without trying very hard.