I haven’t put up a blog post here in half a year because I got promoted at my job. Promoted in terms of work load but not so much pay? I don’t know. It got really busy.

I took the blogging down a notch both here and at the anime blog because I just don’t have the time and motivation after work. A lot of context switching suck my energies. I guess it’s also to say the work I’m doing at work is definitely more challenging and taxing intellectually, perhaps not in a technical sense but in an organizational sense.

At any rate, I purchased a Verizon Moto X 2nd gen on Black Friday using their $140 off coupon deal. I logged into the deal page maybe a couple minutes after clock hit 1pm Eastern and didn’t even lag a bit as I put in my entry code. GJ Moto. The Moto Maker experience is not 100% but overall the customization options are a great thing and a major distinguisher between this phone and the others on the market. Of course in exchange your phone is a little bit harder to buy, you have to wait for your gear to get Fedex’d from China, all that.

I probably should have purchased the developer phone instead of the carrier version of the phone. It’s a minor detail because the carrier experience on the Moto X is pretty clean, but the major difference here is that I have to wait for a Verizon patch instead of just being able to hack my way with xda forum’s support. Locked bootloader and all. At the same time, I opted for the football leather version of the Moto X, which is working out pretty well besides how it forces me to change my current car mount due to the limitation of the kind of case you can use with it sensibly. All because with a leather (or bamboo etc) back, it’s not really a good match with a traditional, full-body case. Using a bumper is perfectly okay, but it makes this big phone even harder to hold and nullifies the advantages of the tapered edges. Not to mention my magnet-driven car mount has nothing to stick the backing piece to. I’ll have to go back to the clamp style mount.

The other sort-of mistake I made was upgrading from 4.4.4 to 5.0. Android Lollipop is not ready from prime time. The new UI experience is pretty good actually, but not a drastic improvement from before. More just a drastic overhaul in notification that has some improvements. The issues so far are a penchant for background apps to close for no reason, and there’s a wifi bug that prevents me from connecting to my work wifi. I don’t know if it’s because of the switch they’re using or how it’s configured, but it just doesn’t connect.

Bugs and mistakes aside, this phone is very nice. The display is tops and the battery is adequate. It’s speedy and what not. The customized Moto app experience blows the Samsung one far and away. Should last me another couple years while I figure out how to refurbish my old phone, the cracked GS4.