So Motorola built a phone that’s marginally smarter, slightly more comfortable, and a little bit more usable than most others. And while that may never displace Samsung or Apple, it’s an important first step. This new Motorola is listening. Listening to customers who want their phones to feel more personal. Listening to critics who endlessly complain about battery life. Listening to an industry that knows the spec race is out of hand. And, perhaps most importantly, the new Motorola is listening to Google when it says solving people’s actual problems, simply and beautifully, is the path to success.
The Moto X looks interesting, but I doubt it can handle the competition. Specifications do seem to matter in the shops, and the Moto X doesn’t measure up. On top of that, how are they going to do the custom design thing in other parts of the world?
Regardless of how it does, this is a beautiful device imo. I applaud Motorola for bucking the trend in the spec wars too and making the same arguments that Microsoft made with Windows Phone specs.
Yeah, below 5 inches you don’t really need a 1920×1080 screen.
Everyone calls this phone midrange now, I guess they all will forget about that once the Iphone 5S comes out, which will probably have an even smaller screen with less pixels and won’t be AMOLED.
And this core hype on phones is just stupid. The perfect phone would have two really fast cores(like A15) that go to sleep once the heavy lifting is done(which is most of the time unless you play) and one core that does the rest(an A7 or something)
It is not like all Android software is perfectly tuned to use 4 or 8 cores.
AMOLED sucks. IPS, while more battery hungry, is actually usable in sunlight.
While I don’t know if IPS is good on sunlight, I can confirm that my AMOLED GS3 sucks on sunlight, which is quite annoying..
I bought a GS3 because I hate washed-out blacks and AMOLEDs are guaranteed to have sweet inky blacks no matter what (because there is no backlight, duh). I had heard about AMOLEDs looking crap under sunlight, but when I put my GS3 under sunlight, I didn’t have any problems. In a summer day, I just disabled auto brightness and pushed the brightness to 60%, and the screen looked good.
OK, if you go into the desert and put your phone directly under sunlight, then you might have some problems, but I just can’t confirm all those people complaining about AMOLEDs being terrible under sunlight. In fact, the phone I cannot use under sunlight is my old LG Optimus 2X, due to excessive screen glare, and it has an LCD screen. I think people complaining about their phones being terrible under sunlight either have phones with glary screens (like my 2X) or have low-quality screen protectors slapped on.
Edited 2013-08-02 10:09 UTC
> but when I put my GS3 under sunlight, I didn’t have any problems. In a summer day, I just disabled auto brightness and pushed the brightness to 60%, and the screen looked good.
I’ll try disabling the auto mode, thanks for the hint, it’s a bit strange that the auto mode doesn’t do its job, but I’ll try.
Not true, my Panasonic AMOLED works great in direct sunlight, it is has the most insane contrasts. Blacks are true black(like not a single photon is emitted), not some glowing grey like on IPS. Just compare a good AMOLED and IPS in the dark and you will see. So it all depends on the AMOLED panel. I had a ZTE Blade AMOLED once and it was totally unusable in sunlight.
It depends ..
That isn’t universally true, the Lumia 1020 with an AMOLED screen is readable in sun light.
100% agree. Rarely is CPU a limiting factor on Android. Usually I/O or network is the bottleneck, and games depend on GPU. Samsung’s 8 core only uses 4 cores at a time anyway. Having dedicated cores for sleep functions is a much better idea.
720p(non-pentile) is more than enough for a 4.7″ screen. Resolution after a point is not the main factor in screen quality and some of us don’t want a 5″ phone.
Motorola’s improvements on Android seem much more useful than Samsung and HTC’s. Let’s hope they can wrestle enough marketshare to make the smartphone landscape better.
My HTC One has 4.7inch with 1920×1080. 4.5 might be able to use 1280×800 without losing sharpness.
Because of the specs and I am not talking about the screensize.
I often see 4 cores being used while doing something intensive like starting an application.
I see my 4 cores being used more often on my phone than my pc.
I really hope this is a success. The spec war must end someday, so manufacturers can focus on improving other things, like the battery.
What worries me is Googlerola aren’t making the fuss they should about the battery of the moto x, instead focusing on “look, many colors and voice commands!”. If the number of people complaining about battery life in forums represents the majority in real life too, Googlerola has a strong card, and should play it accordingly.
Edited 2013-08-01 21:38 UTC
Of course they’re not, and why should they? All they have to do is run an ad campaign that says, ‘Oooooooo, look at the pretty colors!’, and the iDiots will come in droves, with glazed eyes and credit cards in hand. To hell with what’s actually inside the phone… they’re apparently making them in wood now, so that should be enough to appease the millions of dumbasses who probably couldn’t tell you anything else about the phone, such as what the battery life is.
Oh, and btw… thanks, Apple
You think that if this sells well it will take sales from Apple? I don’t think so
Why not, the HTC One did. That was the phone that iTards flocked to when they wanted a new fashion accessory that wasn’t an iPhone.
When one assumes that IOS users buy iPhones merely as fashion statements, one is painting with a broad brush….sloppy thinking for sure!
So AT&T’s version will be $575 off contract. At that price it’s not gonna fly.
Only Android 4.2, no microSD slot, locked boot loader will put off too many customers. If the rumours of a $299 unlocked Google Play version turn out to be true, then it could become moderately successful.
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Edited 2013-08-02 01:45 UTC
This is nice and all, but it doesn’t add much new over the nexus 4.
I wish they would just release a new droid.
Hardware (slide-out, landscape) keyboard, 720p screen, micro SD card slot.
Is that really too much to ask? Such a simple featureset doesn’t exist at all.
The patents thing with micro SD can be easily avoided by just using ext2. Keep a small app for windows and osx on the phone, which can be seen through the same mounting method they currently use.
Edited 2013-08-01 22:45 UTC
Hardware keyboard would be nice, but aside from BlackBerry (and maybe Jolla) I doubt that we will see that in modern phones any more.
Unfortunately not. People will plug in their existing exFAT formatted microSD cards and will blame it on Google/Motorola if the phone can’t access them.
A Droid 5 available around the world on launch day would be wonderful! Especially if it took design cues from the Photon Q.
The main problem with the Droid line was that it was locked to Verizon for too long. And the Photon Q was locked to Sprint. If the Droid4/Photon Q were available on other carriers, or in other countries, a lot more of them would have sold.
Everyone keeps saying “no one wants sliders” and “no one buys sliders” without looking at the fact that there’s more to the cell world than Sprint/Verizon! If there were sliders (good sliders, with modern / up-to-date specs) available on every carrier, then more of them would be sold!
We just bought a HTC one and an Xperia Z in the last month.
The Moto X doesn’t really seem to have anything over these phones especially in the display department.
It’s a good start.
Bring back Lapdock! and make a phone with 4-8gb of ram, and unlock the damn Linux side so we can have a phone that’s also a computer. I had an Atrix 1 and the potential for that device was mindblowing, but it was crippled by lack of system RAM for processing. It would always run out of memory when opening 3 or more webpages. Give it 4-8gb and it could easily replace a laptop for many people.
Why don’t you get yourself one if these babies then?
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge
The Ubuntu Edge should be able to fullfill all your needs, at least if you’d believe the hype…
Which brings me to the question why the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding project hasn’t been mentioned at OSNews, something which should have interested people here, I would have thought…
Edited 2013-08-02 08:55 UTC
We do not report on fundraising campaigns, ever. Especially not for vapourware.
http://www.osnews.com/story/26457/Ubuntu_asks_for_donations
Yes you do.
Must’ve been a slow news week.
Should have done a news raising campain.
You should consider releasing the news I submitted but you discarded
Kochise
Screw the lapdock, it was the lamest piece of hardware ever, especially the way the phone docked into it.
Asus PhonePad Infinity is what you want. Modern phone specs (basically a Nexus4), slides into a screen+battery to become a tablet, which clips into a keyboard+battery to become a laptop.
Unfortunately, each piece needs to be purchased separately, and the total price comes out to around a grand.
If they made a bundle for around $500-600 CDN, I’d buy one in a heartbeat!
Apparently the stock ROM sends some rather sensitive information like account credentials to Motorola – and over plain HTTP at that!
That was on the Droid X2, a two-year-old phone that predates Google’s acquisition of Moto. I haven’t heard anyone reproduce the findings on a newer model.
For my needs, the Moto X has three fatal design flaws:
1. Non-removable battery
2. No expandable storage
3. No QWERTY keyboard.
Motorola!! Get back to your roots! Apple and Samsung and HTC already do an admirable job of producing sealed black-box phones without physical keyboards. If you want success, focus on a market that isn’t already dominated by other big players.
It is good for it price. But if the marketing strategy will not get more consumers, it will fail
I have recently gone out of my way to buy a Motorola Razr Maxx (hardly managed to found one on Amazon, second hand). The reason: the f*cking battery life!
The phone overall appears sturdy and more than functional. The battery life is still not what it should be (reason why my phone is a Nokia asha 501), but it clearly outperforms all other smartphones.
I wish them good luck and I hope the other manufactures start to seriously think of the battery.
Battery life is at the top for me. I love Nexus S and after tinkering with it for a few I have working the way I want it, it’s fast, responsive, and a joy to use. The battery life, well it nothing to write home about. So I have made a choice of going with the Moto X considering they promise a lengthy battery life.
Long answer: Very Unlikely.
It looks about like a galaxy nexus, but doesn’t have an SD card slot. And it’s way too expensive. By the time prices come down on this, the S4 will be dropping too, and it’s a WAY better phone, AND it has a SD card slot.
And there’s a Google Play edition.
And cyanogenmod….
Sorry MOTO you needed to undercut the competition, and this is just way too expensive. Oh yeah, and for that price you’d think you could get and SD card slot!!
Honestly, I’m not impressed.
Shape and showing time and status icons all the time seem to be inspired by Nokia N9. Now, if only Nokia could publicly admit that N9 ever existed, they could sue Motorola. 🙂
That phone doesn’t get me excited at all. And I haven’t heard of anybody epbeing enthusiastic about it either…
There was a live session on Twit where other countries were mentioned. Basically other countries meant South-America and there was no information at all about the rest of the world.
They were also really honest that it was just “assembled in the USA” because it is simply impossible to create an American phone (and most people wouldn’t care anyway)