Moto X: It's listening to you. But can voice control finally take off? After much teasing, Motorola Mobility has finally unveiled the Moto X phone it's hoping will restore the company's fortunes - and help repay the $12.5bn Google splashed out on the troubled mobile phone vendor. Moto X The basic handset has a 4.7-inch, 1280-by-720 pixel AMOLED screen, 2GB of RAM, 802.11a/g/b/n/ac Wi-Fi, no …
This is a phone with mid-range components at a high-end price. However, the gist seems to be that the screen and processor have been chosen for better battery life. There are power-saving tricks: only part of the AMOLED screen is lit up to show notifications, for example.
It's an attempt to make a 'one size fits all' Android phone, suitable for the sort of people whop wold have previously bought an iPhone.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/1/4578890/this-is-the-moto-x
I think that's spot on - this may be nothing of interest compared to Nexuses or S4s, but I think this is much about marketing and reaching out to people not yet buying Android. Whilst Android has won everywhere else, iphone still has a sizable share in the US. Unlike Samsung, Motorola is well known as an American company, and the Nexus line doesn't yet have the same kind of brand awareness. On top of that you've got the "assembled in the US" (or whatever) advertising. Seems plain targetted at the people who don't look at specs, but want to by a brand they recognise...
Except sadly customisation is fixed, the shell is fixed. Nokia's X-Press on covers come to mind. Except those were better. Since you could change them.
Also, from launch, custom options are only on AT&T. Absolute fail.
They needed to release this Nexus style, with 4.3, upgrades directly from Google as if it was Nexus, and available OFF CONTRACT for a Nexus 4 style price, with all custom options from day one.
Then it would have a USP. As it stands, this is poor, poor value.
There is of course the camp that is totally stupid and will be spouting (HURR NO 1080p AND QUAD CORE, this isn't 2011) - personally I think msm8960pro@1.7, 2GiB RAM, 720p is fine (although I hate OLED, but that's another story).
The problem is not the SoC and screen res, but rather.. a lot of other things. Motorola knows how to make a slim phone with a mean battery (RAZR MAXX HD) so why didn't they do that here? They also dropped the microSD for no reason at all. On the MAXX HD it simply slides in alongside the SIM behind the side tray. There's no reason they couldn't have done the same. Google is poisoning their design decisions.
- Of course, though, the real flies in the ointment are as I said first - customisation exclusive to AT&T, and on-contract prices being announced is a bad sign for a cheap, Nexus 4 style off-contract device. These things make it dead in the water.
P.S. Motorola, Google, nobody really cares about voice control. Voice control that bypasses the lock screen is even worse.
That's kind of the idea. Screen was chosen for better battery life (AMOLED can light up pixels selectively, so checking notifications uses less power), CPU ditto - but apparently is fast enough to let the phone run smoothly.
I think the idea is that Moto are trying to tightly wed the hardware to their version of Android and sell it people who want things to 'just work', as opposed to the spec-hungry modding crowd.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/performance-preview-the-moto-x-sports-a-great-gpu-respectable-cpu/
"I'll echo what we said in our hands-on with the Moto X: this is a fine phone, but we're ultimately left wondering what the fuss is about. It's plenty fast, if not exceptionally so. It has a few neat software tweaks, but nothing that would prompt us to throw our Galaxies or Nexuses in the trash. It starts at a same-old-same-old $199 on-contract price just like most flagship Android phones. Customizable backs are all well and good, but if that's your phone's killer feature, you might need to think of some more ideas."
Really?
Seperate storage options are a bad hack. I'm more than happy with my cloud powered Nexus4, 16GB for local storage is more than enough. I store my common stuff on my phone and everything in the cloud.
How big an SD card do you need to store everything you own? How big will it need to be this time next year.
Trying to store everything you may ever want to access "in case there is no network" is a sure fire train to fails-ville....
Accidentally, when a tap is misinterpreted as a swipe on the home icon. It usually gets turned right the fuck back off again, and I'd love to be able to permanently disable it but there appears to be no way to do so.
And no SD card slot. Fail.
Other than that, it looks okay I guess.
Finally they've found a way to make camera functionality easy and intuitive to use. I'm sure Canon et al will be desperate to introduce this!
Seriously that's a stupid idea. Maybe instead, some sort of button could be used. Or just say "Open Camera".
The only neat thing I can think of is that you could flick the phone in the air, catch it and the camera is activated. A bit like twirling a 6-shooter on your finger... pointless but fun.
Have to agree. I get sick of "hold on, hold on, don't move" while someone fumbles with their phone to launch the camera app.
It couldn't be too hard for them to just add a hard button and wake the phone into the camera app. (My wife's new Lumia 925 does this, and it's such a simple and brilliant feature)
The recent furore over the XBox One comes to mind once again.
Voice control? It's just another gimmick used to obtain sales from those addicted to such things. Either the gimmick will catch on and these feeble minded idiots will move on or it will die a death. I know which one I'm favouring.
A puzzling product launch from many perspectives. Yes, it is an interesting handset but it seems a tad too expensive ($600+ for the 32G device) when compared to other handsets (the Nexus 4 being a case in point). And yes, I can select different colours for the device, but building an entire supply chain based on essentially secondary selection criteria is a curious thing to do. Also, as it stands, its a US only device, which cements a view that Moto is a US only company (Droids are Verizon exclusives, for example, and historically Moto customer support in Europe has been a complete joke). So I am quite puzzled as to what they think they can achieve with this launch? Certainly, there are some interesting features but the manner of the introduction merely gives Samsung / HTC / Sony / Huawei / ZTE some good ideas for where to pitch their next set of devices without really giving Moto a winning phone. So I'm left puzzled as to what Google / Moto thought they were doing...
Dunno about you, but the first thing that that first press shot reminded me of was long nights years ago trying to track down a bug where a process would trample all over the display frame buffer.
Kids today with their memory managers and access protection! ... don't know they're born.
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