104 Days with a $100 Android Smartphone

In early July of this year I accidentally sent my Nexus 5 smartphone to the bottom of [beautiful] Lake of the Woods in Northern Minnesota. Without a phone I found myself at an interesting impasse: should I rejoin the Apple ecosystem or stick with an Android device?

The weight of this decision felt significant, and I actually sustained without a phone for two weeks as I pondered my options. I couldn't definitively choose and resolved to wait and see what new Android devices would be released in the fall season. Living without cellular connectivity until autumn was not an option though, so I sought to find an interim solution.

The search for that provisional fix brought me to the second generation Motorola Moto E (with 4G LTE support). The phone ran the Android 5.1 (Lollipop) operating system and was only $100, unsubsidized and without a contract. I bought the Moto E on July 14,2015 and used it as my primary device until last week when I picked up the new Nexus 5X.

As I reflect on my 104 day experiment with a commodity smartphone I am left pondering the future of the mobile hardware market and smartphone user experiences. Below are observations I made while using the Moto X:

Negatives:

• AT&T’s useless bloatware software is ridiculous and frustrating. On a lower end device these hopeless preinstalled apps suck up valuable system resources and negatively impact the user experience.
• A major challenge with this device was the 8GB of internal storage. In hindsight, I spent a bit too much time uninstalling apps and clearing the cache.
• The 5MP camera on the Moto E takes fairly low quality photos which, because I am a nostalgic guy with a beautiful young family, I found strikingly disappointing.
• The screen was fairly low resolution, with room for only 21 app icons on the home screen.
• I got into a regular habit of power cycling the phone every few days just to baseline the device and to alleviate any performance issues. I suspect those terrible AT&T apps were sucking up resources in the background and bogging the phone down over time.
• The voice-to-text and calling workflows on the Moto E could be a bit laggy. They worked, but there was a noticeable stutter when engaging these features.

Positives:

• The device was $100 to replace whether it was stolen, lost or broken, so I never worried about protecting the phone. In an odd sense this was refreshingly liberating.
• The Moto E is durable; it withstood my active lifestyle and periodic punishment from my young daughters.
• The small form factor (5.11 x 2.63 x 0.48 inches) made the device comfortable to carry in my pocket.
• The phone worked reliably without incident. It made calls, gave me access to the Internet and kept me on the grid.

Things I didn’t miss:

• Near field communication (NFC)
• Wireless charging
• Google Now
• 5 GHz wi-fi support

It certainly seems that as mobile hardware gets smaller and less expensive the differences between high end and low end devices will become less distinctive. Though my new Nexus 5X is slick and fast, I will continue to carry the Moto E in my backpack as a spare device that I can leverage as a backup.

With most of our data living out on the Internet (I refuse to invoke the word “cloud” here) the access points we use to reach this information are increasingly immaterial. Switching from my sunken Nexus 5 to the Moto E and then to a Nexus 5X was seamless. I didn’t lose any music, contacts, photos, notes or emails.

I think that hardware commoditization and harmonious transitions between devices is the power of Android’s value proposition, and represents an exciting future for smartphone users.