Motorola has been putting out rather poor cameras in comparison to other major manufacturers for quite awhile now. As has already been stated, megapixels mean absolutely nothing for the quality of a picture. Manufacturers advertise them like they do, but basically, all that an increase in megapixels means is an increase the actual size of the picture. It does nothing for the quality. There are a lot of things that impact the quality of the pictures that a camera takes, but two of the main things are the sensor and the lens. If you have a good sensor and a good lens, then having a larger megapixel count is nice if you're looking to make a very large print or crop in closely. But the megapixel count itself has no bearing on the quality of the pictures or the camera. I have an eight-year-old 5MP Sony Cybershot that still puts all of the mainstream cameras on phones today to shame.
I find the camera on the MAXX to be serviceable, and even slightly above average in the right conditions. But the conditions have to be right, and more importantly, the phone has to be held very, very steady. I'm hoping Motorola will start stepping up their camera game, because they lag behind pretty much everyone in that department.
...and yeah, don't zoom in. Since it's just a digital zoom, you'd be better off taking a picture zoomed completely out and then cropping it closer in later. This is basically what a digital zoom does anyway, except when cropping, the results are likely to be less pixelated and blurry.
