Good mid-range phones

So far, I am liking this.  The camera is super simple as you can touch the actual little "button" on the screen or tap anywhere to take a picture.  That's cool.

The fingerprint scanner takes a few seconds to set up and works really well to unlock the phone.  If you get a bad read, a 4 digit code is necessary to unlock.  So, that will keep my special needs students from getting into the phone if I lay it down at school.  I gave my wife the 4 digit code so she can get into the phone if something ever happens to me and she needs to let you guys know what happened.

The weight isn't bad.  It is just slightly larger than my S5 was.  With the whole phone being metal except for the Gorilla glass screen, it is heavier.

The nano SIM is easy to install.  But, be extra careful if you take it out as that baby will shoot across the room.  Trust me--it happened.

By keeping all of my apps and contacts backed up to Google, they all transferred to the new phone seemlessly.  A couple had new updates, so the Google Play store prompted me to update while I was setting everything up.  I did.  Easy peasy.

Getting my service transferred from one Straight Talk SIM to a different one took about 5 minutes.  I also had a month's service with the SIM I bought at Walmart and was able to add it to my account in standby.  I won't pay another bill now until the end of March.  NICE!  At that time, I will be increasing to the $55 a month plan for unlimited everything.

Nice, I was going to ask how you liked it. Might be an option for me in the future and as an Amazon Prime user I don't think I would mind those lock screen ads.

I try to stagger our payments so they are not all due at the same time. I do the monthly, my wife's is set up for 3 months and my daughter's on 6 months. They never come due at the same time and that is good. Still not enrolled in auto pay, I just wait til the last couple of days and renew the service.

That 55 plan sounds pretty sweet but so far I haven't used up the data on the 45 plan so I'll stick with that for now.

Plus, Netflix has the option to download shows to your SD card. So while I am on wifi I might download a few shows then watch them while working out on the eliptical machine. Saves on data not streaming anything from Netflix.

Still weighing my options, but that sounds pretty good to me too

The lock screen ads are not an issue.  As soon as you lay your finger on the fingerprint scanner, you can swipe them away.  I think I made the right choice on getting a lesser expensive phone.

The only downside to this phone thus far would be the complaint I would have with any current release phone.  Apps are stored in your device memory and cannot be moved to the SD card.  SD cards are meant for movie, book, and music downloads nowadays.  I am going to make the suggestion on the Motorola forums to change this.  This should be our option--not theirs.  If enough people want this feature, it would pay for them to change this.  Every Droid phone provider has a set OS for them.  Motorola could push Google to open this feature up on all newer Moto phones if enough buyers ask for this.  This could result in more sales for them, too.

The processor on the Moto X4 feels lightning fast for a phone.  My previous laptop had the same speed processor.

Oh that would be a deal breaker for me (unless all phone do that now). I had an old Alcatel phone with a 5.5 screen (nice screen but terrible memory). I move all of my apps over to the SD card on my ZTE. Frees up a lot of room. I think I have a 32g card in my phone and never had an issue moving things over. Tons of music downloads from Amazon Prime on it as well and it is not full, even with movies from Netflix.

The latest OS for both Android and Apple do not allow the moving of apps.  Most phones are coming with bigger internal memory to handle apps.  Some suggest storing the apps on their cloud.  I don't have enough apps to fill my phone's memory and may be removing a couple that I just don't use.

The X4 should be a good phone for you. I just couldn't justify the price increase over the G5 Plus.

I wonder if I'll regret getting the 2GB version instead of 4GB like I got my son. I don't use many apps and my prior phone only had 1GB, but this one pretty much always says I'm using an avg of 1.5 of 1.8GB (I assume it must dedicate 0.2GB for graphics like many PCs do.) Runs great though. Much faster than my 5 year old Droid, of course. It slowing to a crawl was the only real reason I decided to upgrade.

My wife bought the G5+.  They had it on see at Target for $210.  She had some money saved in her Virgin Pulse account from her work.  They get money for doing different fitness challenge.  She used that money to buy a Target card for $140.  So, out of pocket she only paid $60 for hers.

Like I said, I had $100 in Amazon cards from Speedway (reqwards points) and Shopkick (points for visiting stores and sanning some products).  The $279 price tag dropped drastically to $179 on my Moto X4.

I am still tweaking a few things to suit my preferences, but I love this phone and would highly recommend it to anyone.

I also was having trouble with lag times with my 2 year old refurbished Galaxy S5.  It would also open something other than what I would touch.  It would black out at times and take up to 30 seconds to come back on.  It needed replacing.  I will keep it as a spare, but I will do a factory reset on it before I ever actually use it if I need it.