I am still liking my Droid Turbo so far. The Moto suite of apps that Motorola have made has been pretty great from what Ive used of them so far. Moto Display (what they used to call Active Display) is a great alternative to the lock screen. Contextualizing the screen to make it easier to go straight to the app a notification is from, without cluttering the whole screen with all or the last X notifications is a novel way to handle that functionality. Its also a neat trick that it only puts energy on the pixels needed to render the info, so you save on battery since it doesnt have to light up the whole display to show info to you (it looks pretty crisp too, although slightly minimalist). Its nice to see that Lollipop will have their own version of that feature if the hardware supports it (theyll be calling it Ambient Display). Moto Actions, gives a bit of a Jedi feel to the phone. The case for my phone has a piece that acts like a stand, so I usually leave it on the desk standing up. If I want to check the time or notifications, I normally hit the button to wake it from sleep to look at that info on the lock screen. On this phone, I just wave my hand in front of it: You want to tell me something. Its really a reach for the device and it will wake up, but the wave is a bit more natural since I dont intend to actually pick it up. There are some other actions that I havent used as much, like a gesture for opening the camera app even when its locked. Moto Assist has some nice automation features: where you can silent the phone at night so you can get some sleep (I cant do that since Im technically on call), it can learn when you are driving and enable more voice-assisting features for you, and you can set it to monitor one or more calendars for events that put you as busy and silent your phone during those times (so you dont have to manually do that for work meetings). The silent the phone stuff has some additional settings so you can auto-reply or set up rules to allow calls that are emergencies to come through. Moto Voice (honestly the least used feature for me), expands on Googles own voice functionality. When Google Now first came out, you had to open the app to get their Siri-like functionality. The Nexus phones had a custom launcher (that Google eventually released for the public so all phones can use it if they want) where you could use the OK Google key phrase to initiate the voice control part of Google Now without being in the app (because the app was integrated into the launcher). Moto Voice lets you use your key phrase to initiate the voice control even when the phone is locked. You can also customize the key phrase to be whatever you want (so you dont have to use OK Google or OK Droid). The actual voice commands part is pretty similar to what Google Now has been (which is pretty robust), the app just provides the extra benefit of not having to touch your phone to be able to do it. While the voice command stuff on Android is pretty robust (much like it is with Siri and Cortana), I only see myself using it to call someone hands-free or maybe an easy way to set a reminder for myself. Im sure on the whole, voice-assistant services like Google Now, Siri, and Cortana are great and useful. I just dont currently have a need for most of what they offer. I think part of that is how I keep expecting it to work vs how they actually work is different. Im very used to needing to be precise with commands, so I keep trying stuff like Tea, Earl Grey, Hot, when theyre actually expecting normal speaking structure like Make me a mug of hot Earl Grey tea. Because, thats how normal people would be asking for that. Unless you like Star Trek, then youd order your tea like Picard (you know, the RIGHT way). Other than that, the only thing Ive been really mucking around with is the camera. They went overboard on the megapixels on the phone, which I think is compensation for not having hardware-based image stabilization. The images come out great, you just have to not shaky-cam it. Its a stark contrast to Hillarys LG (and likely every other modern phone), where it takes a pretty good quality picture resolution-wise but has the OIS to back it up, so youre less likely to blur the photo. We were taking some pictures of the cats last night to compare (because Im a crazy cat person, so why not), and we ended up with photos of about the same quality once I learned I cant hold my phone steady enough when hyper from coffee to zoom in before taking the picture. The hyper from coffee thing might just be a coincidence though. The reason why I never liked painting or inking was because I was always too shaky-hand to be precise.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 16:49:11 +0000