Sometimes, I stop and think about something that should never have happened.
Technology should get better with time, user experience should improve, and it should always feel like we're living closer to the best it can give us.
I love my Pixel 6; it's the best all-around phone I've ever had. But as I hold it, I can tell that what I like about it is mostly what I loved about the one that got away. The Moto X 2nd Gen felt like the future.
You could go to Motorola's website and customize the back with different materials and colors. It looked like this:
This alone is not enough. Yeah, no major smartphone release allows you to pick the back like this, but now we have vinyl skins if you really want to change the look of your smartphone, and most people use a case anyway. It mattered then, but it doesn't now.
The back was curved so that it fit better in the palm of your hand. That too was nice. The hardware was otherwise limited by the time. It was not the most performant or highest spec phone on the market at any time.
What set it apart was the software experience. You could flick it at any moment, and it would open the camera. Flick it again, and it would switch to selfie mode. This second part is now a feature that you can enable in the standard Google camera, so I guess a lot of people really liked that.
One other thing I loved was Moto Voice. It hooked up to Google for most queries but allowed you to wake it up with any phrase you picked. I could just say, "Listen to me, Leo" (Leo was the name of the first dog I actually spent some time with. He was the reason I picked a white back for my Moto X, and I still miss him every day), and the phone would wake up and be ready to answer.
To this day, this is still not a feature of Google Assistant. I cannot stress enough how more personal having your hotword is against having to preface almost every query with "Hey Google".
It felt like the phone was an extension of you in the best possible way, it felt like the future, and it was there, at hand, for a brief moment in time.