Moto X and Droid MAXX Developer Editions Available Now

[cereal killer]

We're a little bit late to the party with this one, but in case you missed it, Motorola has made good on their promise to release a Dev Edition Moto X. This handset will set you back 649 bones, is packed with 32GB of on board storage, and the ability to unlock the bootloader. The Moto X Dev Edition is currently available on Verizon. As a side note the X (Dev Edition) for AT&T and T-Mobile still has a “coming soon” label, but should start shipping in a few days. You will lose the ability to customize the color choices when the handset ships on AT&T and T-Mobile (Verizon never had that option). The GSM Moto X Developer Editions are only available with black front and white back plates.

If you've been holding out for the Droid MAXX Dev Edition wait no longer. You can snatch this handset up today as well. You'll still have to kick out $649.00 for it, but that's the price you pay for a totally open Droid branded handset on Big Red's network. So who is picking up either of these Developer Edition handsets? Hopefully we won't hear any crickets.

 

[cobravnm13]

I'm hoping that when I'm able to get a new phone it will be one of these two. And seeing as how you can't customize the X Dev Edition, the better choice would be the MAXX. You get everything the Moto X offers plus a big battery.

 

[GoCliffGo05]

Put my HD up for sale last night when I saw these were released. Excited about them.

 

[jamjr74]

Already sold out on Moto site too!

 

[jspradling7]

I called Verizon customer service yesterday just to see if it would come up on their computers. It didn't.

 

[skennelly]

I can't imagine paying 650 for the dev moto x. IMO, if you are buying the dev edition you plan on running a custom rom which won't be able to take advantage of the hardware. Now you paid way to much for a mid tier phone. Personally, I'd spend my money on the s4.

 

[TatDroid]

I can't imagine paying 650 for the dev moto x.

It's the same price as the non-developer edition, isn't it? (plus, I think it has 32GB memory, which I don't think is available yet from Verizon)

 

[GoCliffGo05]

Yea, the whole reason I'm buying the Dev edition (when it comes back in stock GRRR) is because I'm not due for an upgrade... So I would have to pay full price anyway for any phone.

 

[FoxKat]

Dev edition of the MAXX when I sell the S4 and accessories! S4 is a nice phone, but I miss the Moto build and radios. Can't stand not having 4G in my home anymore, or having almost no WIFI signal in the bedroom. Also, I'm now dropping calls in a gully where the trolley crosses on a road that I haven't dropped calls on for over 4 years...all on Moto phones, but now Sammy can't keep up.

Also, my Sammy battery is right now at 2%. I charged fully overnight last night, unplugged this morning (actually the morning of September 26), and it's basically dead after 16 hours. That's GOOD for what I've been experiencing lately. It would often die around 6:00pm or so, but I've removed ALL apps that run in the background - apps I normally ran without a problem on the RAZR MAXX, just to keep it live till bedtime.

I now keep WIFI off, shut Bluetooth off when I can, and basically use it as a phone, texts, a little email and little data or web, if at all. That's NOT what I pay a data plan for, or what I want this device to do for me.

Great camera, some neat features, but it just doesn't hang where it counts...phone service, data service, wifi and battery.

 

[alafferty82081]

Sounds like you just got a bad s4 cause I have none of those issues, I get on average 23-26 hours with heavy use daily, and call quality has been fantastic as well as 4 g and I live in the boonies...west Jefferson to be precise...and how long does it take to switch out a battery anyway?

 

[xeene]

switching batteries is not practical. you can live in the boonies and have a cell tower in your neighbor's yard, which will make all of the above listed problem none existent. but if you live several miles from a tower, forget about signal and battery life as one will kill the other.

 

[alafferty82081]

Having no exspandable storage is not practical, and I live 37 miles from the nearest tower, the closest is in boone n.c I live in Jefferson n.c...and awhat happens if your battery IS defective , but you realize it after your 14 day return/ exchange policy...so much for just replacing the battery and now you get a refub to replace a brand new phone .....best of luck ....

 

[jamjr74]

Technology is moving in the direction of cloud storage as much as SD card fans fight it (myself included). I have never had a battery go bad in a device so that really doesn't concern me. All phones come with a one year manufacturer's warranty. If you're someone who keeps your phone for over 3 years then I would worry about a battery dying but other than that I think it'll be fine.

Sent from my XT1060 using Tapatalk 2

 

[FoxKat]

Sounds like you just got a bad s4 cause I have none of those issues, I get on average 23-26 hours with heavy use daily, and call quality has been fantastic as well as 4 g and I live in the boonies...west Jefferson to be precise...and how long does it take to switch out a battery anyway?

I don't know about a bad S4, because my wife and I got them together and they both show the same battery issues. The issues with battery are likely related to geographical area. Signal levels contribute HEAVILY to the amount of power the phone uses during the day, even while resting. Where you live, even if in the "boonies" may still have better 4G coverage than I do where I spend the bulk of my time, both home and at work, and that will result (for me), in the phone having to send stronger signal out to reach the towers, and also to dropping into 3G instead of remaining on 4G, which in turn uses more power to move the same amount of data since it takes longer to do so.

All this is the same with the WIFI, so again where my Moto phone had strong WIFI signals in the remote areas of my home, this phone doesn't, and it robs the battery of power to maintain a connection, or it forces the phone back into the cellular radio when it can't hang onto the WIFI connection...again using more power.

I know this is true because I have an OGD, a D2 and a D2G and all three of those phones can hang onto the WIFI in the same room at more bars while the SGS4s lose WIFI in the room right beside them. Same goes for the cellular. I held onto the RAZR MAXX phones for several weeks rather than sending them right back to Verizon and did tests back and forth. The comparisons in signal level and ability to hold onto 4G in my home were conclusive and remarkable.

As for how long it takes to switch out a battery, well with the Droid RAZR MAXX it took literally no time to do...since they're not removable and I never had a problem with it failing to last the day. In fact, I often got 2 full days without a charge (like you said you do with the S4), but that's not happening with the S4 here. Within a day of receiving the S4, I realized I would need a second battery and it's a pain to remove the back and pull the battery, then replace, boot and be ready to use again. I'm a businessman and don't want the burden of replacing the battery, I don't have a stand-alone charger so charging and keeping two batteries full is a task in itself and when it fails is usually at the most inopportune time.


I'll post a pic below of the prior day's 16 hours of battery power. You'll see it was dramatic. During that day, I might had made or received 7 calls for a total of 18 minutes of phone time, may have looked up a few things on the web for perhaps a few minutes at most, and other than that it was email sync'ing in the background and a text or two...that's it.

You'll notice that I did have WIFI on all day, and also that the signal levels for cellular were poor at best. Otherwise, nothing was keeping the phone awake, and the screen was on for short blips only infrequently through the day.

Today, I am at 11 hours 8 minutes and I'm at 28% (below). As you'll see there's not really anything sucking down huge amounts of power, other than Google Services, which I have no control over. The phone sits either on my desk or in my shirt pocket through the entire day while at work. There was a stint of what looks like about an hour this morning where it had a good signal level but otherwise it was a duplicate of yesterday. As you can see, the screen was on even less today than yesterday.

I also keep the phone in a case (from day 1), to protect the screen from a hit to the side and spidering, something that is seemingly rather more common with the S4, but I NEVER had a case on the RAZR MAXX. Yesterday I went to a phone center store and asked the manager who is a friend of mine, how the S4 compares to the MAXX in regard to durability. He said a guy dropped his brand new S4 on the step on the way out of the store, from a height of about his knee and shattered his screen. Another put it into his glove compartment and closed the lid...just the jostling in the compartment from the lid closing caused the phone to bounce against the upper interior of the compartment and shatter. He's replaced numerous S4s but said he's yet to have a MAXX come back for a screen shatter.

My wife's RAZR MAXX was also naked and she dropped it in the parking lot at the supermarket, on the asphalt and concrete of our driveway and walkway, and other places. In all those drops it only suffered some minor scuffs on the anodized aluminum surround, but the screen was never affected. I believe the reason is due to how thin the bezel on the S4 is, the fact that it's right against the glass, and that the glass is flush with the bezel, leaving NO room for any "give".

I may be what you would call a "moto fanboy", but if Samsung and Motorola merged their operations I believe that the phone they would make could ultimately be the best phone ever. Couple Samsung's screen, camera, some of their features, and then bring in Motorola to do the radios, the battery and the build...you wind up with the earlier "IBM Thinkpad" of the phone world.

 

[FoxKat]

Having no exspandable storage is not practical, and I live 37 miles from the nearest tower, the closest is in boone n.c I live in Jefferson n.c...and awhat happens if your battery IS defective , but you realize it after your 14 day return/ exchange policy...so much for just replacing the battery and now you get a refub to replace a brand new phone .....best of luck ....

Technology is moving in the direction of cloud storage as much as SD card fans fight it (myself included). I have never had a battery go bad in a device so that really doesn't concern me. All phones come with a one year manufacturer's warranty. If you're someone who keeps your phone for over 3 years then I would worry about a battery dying but other than that I think it'll be fine.

Sent from my XT1060 using Tapatalk 2

I concur...batteries are RARELY the cause of the problem. Statistically across the entire industry, of all phones returned for a so-called "bad battery", only about 10% actually show a battery that is performing at below recommended and specified levels. This means that about 90% (9 out of 10), phones returned for poor battery performance are suffering NOT from a bad battery but from symptoms of problems just like I am having, or from a bad radio that's sucking the life out of the battery, or from a software glitch that's causing the screen to not remain powered off, or due to a rogue application or service (or more than one), which are keeping the phone "awake", or from overloading the phone with so many background applications and wizards that are constantly updating such as Facebook, Twitter, Ingress, News feeds, Yahoo or other messaging feeds, etc.

As for the "location" of the tower...nothing could be more misleading. Location could be right nearby, as short a distance as 1/4 mile and you might have poor to no service, whereas someone else could be as you indicated, 37 miles away, but have relatively good service. The towers' TOPOGRAPHIC location is FAR MORE important than distance, and also what TYPE of tower, in other words what type of antennas it has.

There are "beam" antennas in various types, some are multi-element antennas arranged in a sort of long narrow "V" shape (like a rooftop TV antenna), called YAGI antennas, others are either partially or completely reflective, where the signal is actually sent backwards toward a parabola or dish/bowl, half of a tube, etc., that then reflects the focused signal, any of which can send very small signals great distances and on the receiving end the signal level you receive can look like there's "a tower nearby".

Then there are other towers which use small reflector antennas designed to "blanket" a geographic area much closer by but don't reach very far from the tower. Those latter towers are the typical tower. They're arranged in what is called a "TRIAD" configuration, three antennas on the corners of a triangle laid flat at the top of the tower...you've seen them, I'm sure. Each antenna on the triangle's corners projects out a 120+ degree horizontal pattern that may reach only 1 or 2 miles, or even only 1/8 to 1/4 mile depending on the lay of the land. The three antennas create what looks line a 3-sided oval pattern of signal. This works very well for concentrated residential and business areas since they can position multiple towers in a matrix over a wider area so that these 3-sided ovals (triads), overlap a bit on the rounded sides and essentially create an uninterrupted blanket of signal.

When the area is less-densely populated, and when it's more flat than hilly or doesn't have large buildings, bridges and other structures in the way to reflect and block signals, they will opt for the beam antenna configurations which can reach well beyond 37 miles if configured that way, and believe it or not, use less power to cover greater distances since the signal will continue to travel and the only thing to dissipate the signal is the particulates in the air over such distances. In densely populated areas they opt for more towers that project far shorter distances and blanket signal from multiple paths.

I know all too well how long distance communication can happen over radio frequencies with very little power, by using a beam configuration to concentrate that power in one direction. This, I would guess is why your "boonies" 1-tower signal is likely better than my suburban multi-tower matrix signal. My house sits on a hill, but at the bottom of the street down another hill, and my home just barely gets 4G, but if I walk to the end of my 5-house-long street...up-hill, suddenly I have 4 bars of solid 4G.

My office is as they say around here "on the main line", right next to a large SEPTA Train power Substation which sits inside a cyclone fenced in area, and has large transformers, and giant towers bringing in 3 high-voltage power sources which then feed the train lines, and the rail lines runs right behind my building. The surrounding area is densely populated with both businesses along that rail line and residential sections on either side of them. Our back of the building sits against the train station parking lot. All that interference HAS to be killing the signal for me at the office. I'll post a pic out the back window of our office tomorrow so you can see what I'm right next to.

THAT ^^^ is the problem with my battery usage, and yet the Motorolas manage to cut through all that far better than my SGS4 does now.

P.S. One 42 minute phone call later from the last screen shot of the battery and I'm now at this...

So I went from 11 hours at 28% to 13 hours at 15%, or 7% per hour while on the phone less than half that time.

And now one short call later, and I'm at 7%. 1 hour, 27 minutes of phone calls, 34 minutes, 55 seconds screen time. 93% of the battery used in 14 and a quarter hours.