“The first Google-influenced Motorola phones will start to appear in the second half of 2013, Wicks said, and if you like smaller form-factor devices or stock Android, you’re going to be excited.” This is exactly what the market needs, to be honest. Stock Android phones straight from Google that aren’t Nexus devices. Nexus devices are nice, but are available in a limited set of countries only, and the Nexus 4 is continuously out of stock. Hopefully Motorola will do a better job on the availability front.
… Google opening Play hardware sales in more countries.
While they are at it, why not also sell subsidised phones (on contract) from the same site? Need a new phone anywhere around the world? *bang* Google Play!
I’d really like a worthy successor to the Droid 2 Global…
(The Droid 3 and 4 don’t really count that much, although they do have better keyboards. PenTile displays, and the Droid 3 has the exact same software situation as the Droid 2 (2.3.4), and runs SLOWER than my D2G.)
Edited 2013-04-16 18:28 UTC
Motorola Photon Q (unfortunately only available on Sprint) is what you are looking for. If they ever make a GSM/LTE version of that, with updated SoC, I’ll gladly buy one at full price.
I believe the Photon Q is just a Sprint-ized Droid 4, PenTile screen and all.
Nope. It’s very different from the Droid4. I had both in my possession for a bit last year. The Photon Q has much higher build quality. IMO, the Q is what the D4 should have been … as the Q is much more of an upgrade to the D3 than the D4 is.
The SoC in the Q is slightly faster with a better GPU. The dimensions are different, with the Q being slightly smaller. The keyboards are completely different, with the Q having the better one.
If the Q had been GSM-compatible, I’d be using it right now. And I found the Droid4 to be too bulky and slow, in comparison.
Here’s a brief comparison of the two, although it’s missing some info:
http://www.phonearena.com/phones/compare/Motorola-PHOTON-Q-4G-LTE,M…
Edited 2013-04-16 21:30 UTC
It’s 960×540 and PenTile, so same as the Droid 4.
Keyboard might be better, but it sure looks the same.
Case may be different, because they are using the soft on-screen buttons rather than the “hard” buttons below the screen, and SoC is different, but still…
We didn’t got any of those in Europe, so my hopes are getting slimer with this announce
Just wait ’till it’s officially confirmed that “stock Android” means no MicroSD slot. Because “stock Android” doesn’t officially support external MicroSDs, it’a a hack (customization) by OEMs using mount, where the MicroSD is mounted as a folder to internal user memory.
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Since Android’s internal file system is slowly turning into ext4, I’m wondering when ext4 formated micro-SD cards will appears and become the de-facto standard, replacing fat32 and exfat.
Kochise
Never
I hate to agree with you on this, though it could be different.
It is really unfortunate: A mediocre and expensive filing system will be the standard for high capacity cards, when ameras, media players, tablets, phones and computers could all share a free, high performance filing system.
If Apple had any interest in external media, it could be pulled together. It need not even be a Linux original FS, it could be one of the FreeBSD filing systems which Apple already supports and are also supported by Linux kernel. It could be jointly marketed by mostly everybody that makes consumer electronics, be it cellphones, tablets, cameras or whatever.
Hardly anybody is using cards over 32GB yet, and that is probably because of the costs associated with licensing and porting Microsoft’s FS for flash cards. If a new, free, Fs were introduced, it would not inconvenience users yet if new devices offered to reformat the cards.
I’d like to see something like F2FS, or one of the other flash file systems specifically designed for the task, succeed. They could be freely licensed and used as an industry standard. That would solve both the business and the technical issues we’re having right now.
Very probably true, but maybe Google will say sdcards have to be formatted to ext4. Using the device as USB storage will allow some degree of file transfer and there could be a warning that directly using sdcards formatted by the device “will not be compatible with Windows. #dealwithit.”
If I understand how the MTP file transfer protocol used by Android ICS and up works, a client computer never actually gets to see the filesystem on the SD card. It only uses a set of standard queries to probe it, while the phone’s virtual filesystem does the actual work in the background.
Two advantages of this approach are that 1/both OSs are seemingly able to access the SD card at the same time and 2/the underlying FS doesn’t matter, and a Windows computer should be able to access an Ext4-formatted SD card through an Android phone that supports both Ext4 and MTP.
Can someone who is more familiar with MTP than me confirm this?
Edited 2013-04-17 15:59 UTC
Your assessment is correct to my awareness, that’s the big differentiator between MTP and the older USB Mass Storage protocol which was predicated on direct block-level access.
Unfortunately, my xperia mini pro with cyanogenmod 10.1 and MTP support doesn’t supported on Linux, only windows. Try it several time, with no avail. So, my take is, you can only use MTP with windows OS. CMIIW.
I have the same phone, but running cyanogenmod 10 (from freeXperia). I managed to get it working under linux by using go-mtpfs. One caveat though: if the screen is locked at connection time, no MTP device will appear, with any method. Be sure you unlock the device before you connect it, even if it doesn’t have to stay unlocked after that.
There is a really nice tutorial somewhere about how to do this and automate it through udev rules and fstab tweaks, but I couldn’t find it again. So here’s the go-mtpfs documentation so that you can check if it works at all already.
https://github.com/hanwen/go-mtpfs#readme
EDIT: This tutorial reminds me of something, so perhaps it was the one I used…
http://bernaerts.dyndns.org/linux/247-ubuntu-automount-nexus7-mtp
Edited 2013-04-18 08:21 UTC
Correct, but only true as long as the card remains in the phone. If you take it out and put it in your laptop or camera or USB card reader, the format on the card becomes relevant.
Then again, considering how cumbersome handling MicroSD cards is, and how cost-effective pen drives get this day, I can’t think of a use case where someone would want to do this.
Correct.
All thanks to Microsoft for pushing exFAT as a mandatory piece of SDXC spec.
Why not?, the first Windows Phone hardware used a SD Card with an internal format and the documentation said that the SD Card was designed to be used only with the phone, not to be extracted and use on other devices
If they do exactly that, promote the SD Card only as an expansion for the phone but not as an interchange format, and continue to use MTP to access it, there shouldn’t be any problem. In practical use a lot of people use the SD Card as a permanent expansion for their phone. I don’t see people moving cards from their camera to their phones, it is a good use case but if you want to avoid Microsoft trollish patents, you need a compromise
lucas_maximus is probably right on this one (never), but for flash storage you’re better off using a simpler native file system (with no journaling) like ext2. Of course, that will probably never happen either… but if my phone supported ext2, my SD card would be formatted with it now. I already tried; Android stubbornly could not understand its kernel’s own native file system.
Actually ext4 was second only to FAT32 in a filesystem benchmark on generic USB sticks. It’s faster and safer, and unless you’re beating the living hell out of your USB flash drive journaling isn’t a big issue.
The only thing that could trounce fat dominance is some kind of genious, reconfigurable thin fs layer over NAND that would make existing devices speed up considerably and live longer.
And only if MS endorses it.
It won’t. Nothing save Linux and FreeBSD support EXT4 without the user needing to install drivers, so unless Google creates an MSC layer between the USB connection and the filesystem as opposed to exposing the filesystem directly, that will never happen. The two dominant systems do not support EXT4 out of box, therefore EXT4 will not become the default. To do otherwise would introduce extra steps for the users, and invalidate the Android user base’s claim that Android phones act as an external drive with no additional drivers. Isn’t that one thing you guys love to say, as opposed to iOS or WP8?
You mean, exactly like how PTP/MTP work, which is the standard in AOSP 4.x, and one of the reasons Nexus devices no longer support SDCards?
More and more Android vendors are moving away from USB Mass Storage and to MTP-only, so it’s only a matter of time before this is the standard method for accessing files on Android devices.
I hope they can make the smaller screen with the same powerful CPU/GPU/RAM that the larger phones have. My biggest complaint about my Nexus 4 is that it is just too big. I also hope they sell it the same way they sell the Nexus, ie. no carrier involvement at all.
So what’s going to be the difference between “stock android” and “nexus”?
“Stock Android” means “you still have to wait six months to a year for version updates, and you may never get updates that can technically run on your hardware”. “Nexus” means “you get updates right away, but since we don’t have a beta process, you’re the beta tester”.
LOL, we saw how well stock Android worked out on the Verizon Galaxy Nexus. To be fair though, at least you could manually install all of the updates that came out for the real Nexus devices.
If these Motorola phones aren’t officially supported by Google with OTA updates (or at least a source code dump), they’re not really going to be any better than the fake Android phones with vendor bloatware, esp if the bootloader is locked.
Someone needs to put a stop to the screen size bloat, and a revitalized Motorola would do the industry good. Samsung does not seem to offer much innovation besides spec sheet one-ups-manship. HTC looks like they are getting back on track but it may be a rough road. Here’s to a healthy android competition this year.
But I actually want a huge screen
(Also stock Android, before someone gives me a flippant suggestion.)
On a tangent, I hope they aren’t totally ditching physical keyboards. Motorola was one of the last companies serving that niche, albeit only for Verizon.
Edited 2013-04-17 05:18 UTC
Are all the rage where I am at the moment.
Women seem to love them but they already have a place to store them while they are out and about (handbag)
Many of the men hate them with a vengance. The don’t fit into pockets or anywhere else for that matter.
At least two of them are giving their Samsung devices to their wives/children and going back to their old phones. These happen to be iPhones btw.
The old saying about the size of a mans phone relates inversely to the size of his you know what….
These large phones do IMHO say nowt more than
‘Hey look at me, aren’t I a poser’
Much like the gold medallions that men used to wear in the 1970/80’s
Just get a messenger bag.
Man bag.
I currently carry my wallet, phone, and keys in my pockets.
I see no reason to carry a bag with me at all times.
Is there something other than your phone that you’d be keeping in this messenger bag?? I’m curious now.
Phone, keys, sunglasses, reading glasses, USB charging cable, the book I’m currently reading, loose change, pocket knife, mini torch and water bottle.
..and yes I use them all on a regular basis.
It’s probably a cultural thing then.
I drive or bike to work, and carry my work laptop and a few random other things in my backpack. Then I bike or drive home.
If I’m out and about I prefer to have the bare minimum. My eyeglasses are my sunglasses (transitions), everything else goes in my pockets. I haven’t found need myself of a flashlight or pocket knife, though I suppose I’d put miniature ones on my keyring if I did.
I don’t have a problem fitting my nexus 4 in my pockets.
Or is that not a large phone anymore?
I have to say, I had a Samsung Galaxy3 (i5800) for a loong time, not because it was a beast (hehh, it’s slow and cheap) but because it fit well in one hand, and easily operable with fingers on that one hand. Even today I wouldn’t really want a phone with a size bigger than that (higher resolution – yes, better cpu – of course, larger size – big no).