The Moto X Pure (on pre-sale tomorrow 9/2) is tempting me. It hits a lot of those points although possibly too big at 5.7".
I don’t care about removable back/replaceable battery, and it does have MicroSD support. I’d like to see if the camera is improved, which is a must for me.
The fingerprint reader IS super nice on the Samsung GS6 and iPhone. I don’t care about it so much for unlocking, pattern unlock is just as fast, but it is convenient for Lastpass authentication.
Rei, have you tried the Google Now launcher on the G4? Any improvements? It could just be that the phone is pushing too many pixels.
Is NFC a necessary feature? My last phone had it and my OnePlus One has it, but I have no idea how or where to use it. I only paid attention to it because the OnePlus 2 is removing the NFC feature, which upset some people, but it just made me think: What is NFC for anyway?
There was a brief spur of interest in NFC-enabled “tags” and buttons. I kinda wanted to grab one to turn on/off wifi to stick on my car dash (when I leave home, I turn off wifi before streaming music in my car. When I get to work and exit the car, I need to turn it on since there’s 0 signal in my workplace. When I go back home, turn off when entering car, turn on again when I get home since signal inside is only good-ish. The NFC sticker could let me do that constant fiddling by just waving my phone near the dash).
Aside from that, Android, and some manufacturer skins, have a variety of “tap phones to share content” goofiness that has always seemed buggy and unreliable to me–by the time we’d both get it enabled and working correctly to tap and pass stuff over, I’d have been able to hit Share > Hangouts >their username and gotten it to them that way. . .
NFC is how I pay for stuff at McDonald’s and Walgreens. Essentially, any place that supports Apple Pay also supports NFC for payments. Technically, there is some extra nuance, but I still believe Apple Pay = NFC support is a safe statement to generally make.
This is also sample size of just me, but I used NFC to check how much is left on my public transit pass by just tapping/scanning the card on my phone.
Yup, NFC is currently only useful for pay apps, and Google is supposed to be making a major push with their new Android Pay to compete w Apple later this year.
A critical feature to me is a nice and loud speaker for playing podcasts. A bad example is the speaker on the Nexus 4 (and the first Nexus 7), which is rather not loud (7: outright quiet), and is placed on the BACK of the phone, forcing me to lay it touchscreen-down to listen.
I’m using the One+ One, which has speakers on the bottom edge, just like iPhones. Much better. I can point the speaker against a wall to help make it louder.
Android Pay works everywhere Apple Pay does, anywhere you see the image below on the creditcard scanner. Which is everywhere these days. You want NFC, it is incredibly useful.
The new Android Pay app is much nicer looking than Wallet. It pretty much took all of Wallet’s features but made them less onerous to use, and prettier.
Of course Google decided to retain confusion by releasing an updated Wallet app that independent of Android Pay, but now Wallet is simply a payment app akin to Square Cash.
