Is it all up for LANDFILL ANDROID? BEHOLD, the Moto G The Moto G smartphone from Motorola has finally landed, as if you didn't know it already with its arrival leaking all over the web from reseller promo materials to Amazon product pages. Still, this sort of thing is guaranteed to get attention. Considering it's all for an Android 4.3 Jelly Bean handset that's a mere £135 ($179 …
I won't even think of getting one until the folks at Cyanogen do their stuff. Nice as it is, I've had enough of Google slurping data on me to last a lifetime. Sorta takes the shine off an otherwise pretty nice device.
I don't want no effing adverts. I am adult enough to make up my own mind about what I want to buy.****
I don't weant you profiling me
I don't want you tracking where I go.
Ok Mr Google?
Nah, thought not.
**** Actually, the more adverts I see for something, the less likely that I am going to buy it.
@AC 19:28 -
Did you try turning off location tracking in your settings?
Using AdBlock?
Turning off WiFi when you aren't using it? Turning off GPS when you aren't using it? These two will save you battery life also.
Not saying I disagree with you there - Cyanogen offers something that neither Google nor Apple care to offer to their customers. It's a tremendously valuable project.
Well actually, there was a rumour going around a while back that a certain Sam Sung was working for Apple. I don't know if it was ever properly confirmed/denied.
"There are certain companies that wouldn't dream of doing such a thing as lowering the price."
Indeed quite right - this product seems to be deliberately aimed at forcing other Android manufacturers into proper price-competition with good handsets at the lower end, probably as a push to get half a billion or so more users using the OS. They've really avoided competing in recent years, except on the high-end.
I am interrsted too. I wasn't criticizing the phone. Obviously it is a great phone and the price is fantastic. Just thought the editorial slant of the article, viz moto attacking Google partners by making a good product at a decent price was overwrought. Of course this is ElReg, and that is their special sauce.
Sigh. I'll get my coat.
Putting the price point so low is almost a guarantee that the damn thing has so much data slurping tech locked in that if you tried to remove it the phone would die/blow up/stop working.
Bad enough with all the Google crap on my Android from China but at least with a little help and forethought there are workarounds. I never used my main email to register with the phone but made the dumb mistake of accessing it using the phone, now I am getting Google spam about 3 or 4 times a day!
What a bunch of arseholes!!!
I've been using gmail for about 7 years and used that account to sign in to Android for 3 years (2 x HTC phones and now a Nexus 4) and have that account as my google wallet. I've never had any spam from Google. I use AdBlock on my browser and on my Android phone. Is any of this significant or useful to you? You did say it was an Android phone from China?
@frank ly - " I use AdBlock on my browser and on my Android phone."
Yup - if some of these posters would learn about AdBlock, 75% of their complaints would have already been resolved.
I haven't seen an ad in Gmail in years. I wouldn't even know what ads in Android they are referring to.
Okay. I guess I should be more accurate, the messages are from Google plus telling me I should start to use it and treat it like Farcebook and complete my profile etc, this to my outlook account that I have not registered only accessed since it is unsolicited from someone I have not directly contacted I class it as spam.
So you see I am not whining about ads for Viagra,casinos etc.
As for Ad block, I don't care, I never see the ads because I am not looking for them, it is just non functional space on the page as far as I am concerned.
Aren't all Android smartphones from China? Or at least 90% f them.
"MS doesn't care - they just keep learning (slowly) and coming after you."
I think you mean they keep bankrolling failed products with Office/server money until they get it right. Throw enough money at any problem and you will get it right eventually. Money is a powerful tool that MS are very comfortable using.
true, but in Google, I think Microsoft have an adversary with equally bountiful pools of cash and engineers. Commiting to burning money and playing creeping death I think mainly works when you're bigger than anyone in the market you're trying to enter. I just can't see MS enticing much of anyone to their platform.
"...$200+ phones are not affordable for most people. "
That implies that a mobile data plan including any non-insignificant quantity (>GB) of data is not affordable for most people. So we have another generation of poor folks with their affordable Androids wandering around looking for free wifi. They end up a StarBucks every day and pay $12 for a cup of coffee.
Let's review the relative costs using a graphic covering 2 years, each $ = $100 (linear):
An affordable Phone $$
An 'unaffordable' Phone $$$ to $$$$$$$$
Data Service $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Daily coffee at Starbucks to access free wifi
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
I'm not saying that the average (or mean) person is really bad with numbers, but if they were really bad with numbers then what would be different?
Not everyone knows, why don't they have an SD card slot?
I'd guess cost myself, which might be the case with this phone, but that wouldn't explain the Nexus 5 not having one.
I'd guess the iPhone doesn't have one because Apple prefer to keep things as simple as possible, after all, selling smartphones that the average person could use is how they got such a big chunk of the market in the first place.
@CAPS LOCK
The Googorola and Android worlds are 2 different things in my book.
@phuzz
From what I've heard the space needed for an microSD card slot and chippery to go with it (even though they are incredibly small) are valuable space on the circuit board that some manufacturers would rather not take up.
The claimed speed advantage versus the Galaxy S4 looks very fishy. My S3 (yes, I am a cheap bastard) starts the browser about ... instantaneously (newly booted phone, so it was not cached). How you can shave off half a second from that is hard to imagine.
Or is the S4 so much slower than the S3?
No SD Card and non replaceable battery kills it for me, over to JiyaYu or Faea, or Oppo I go. You can see where the corners are cut 5 Mp camera, etc. Still it will suit many who would otherwise have had to go for a Galaxy Ace or something with 256 Mb RAM from Carpphone Warehouse sim free for £150
There are a handful of phones using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 series of processors, but the Moto G appears to be a rarity in that it thrusts a quad-core chipset at the masses
If you look at the Snapdragon 400 specs that the dual core versions come with dual Kraits @ ~1.7GHz while the quads are quad A7 @ ~1.2GHz. Given that the Krait is A15 class then I'd say the dual Krait version would be preferrable to a quad A7 ... though for the masses the "my phone has more cores than your phone" argument probably wins
Brazil, Mexico and the UK, huh? Makes perfect choice to a Windows Phone developer, assuming their stats are similar to mine: for most of my games these three regions are in the top five download locations.
Now, I don't know what market shares are like for each of the ecosystems in South America, but from what I recall, WinPhone was up around the 10% mark in the UK, according to some.
Google's acquisition of Motorola makes perfect sense: by having a hardware manufacturer under their control, they can directly target places where their competitors are starting to gain traction.
Good business practice or anti-competitive behaviour? That's just a matter of opinion.
"As Dennis Woodside, CEO Motorola Mobility, said: “Most people in the world can’t afford a $500, $600 phone. In fact, the average price of a smartphone today, in the world, is close to $200. The problem is that experience that smartphones in this class provide is really, really bad… they’re slow, they’re buggy, their screens are too small.”"
Just a random example: http://www.fastcardtech.com/ZTE%20N986
$150 for a quad core phone with a 5 inch screen.
Same grab blackberry tried to make in their last hours, so this phone from Moto will launch in 2014 and have a 720p screen, quad core and single sim no sd storage, 8GB storage, 1GB of ram.
"In fact, the average price of a smartphone today, in the world, is close to $200. The problem is that experience that smartphones in this class provide is really, really bad… they’re slow, they’re buggy, their screens are too small.”"
So I can buy a 4.7 inch screen 720p, quad core 1.2Ghz, with 8GB storage, 1GB of ram,.2 sim slots and sd card for about $200 4 months ago. on the street in China, yet somehow that is a slow buggy phone with a small screen, it even has a GPU that runs stress tests at 30fps. Why is this worse than Moto phone, why would I buy it in 2014 for the same price.
I would buy a moto phone in mid 2013 for $200, in 2014 i'd want 1080 screen, 1Gb ram and 16GB storage , sd card 64GB , 6290 MTk chipeset
The MTK MT6290 is really the 28nm Cortex-A7 architecture with LTE and once again the idea people abroad are using slow buggy phones is, just , stupid. So I can get a better screen, better data, more storage, sd slot, dual sims, and even FM radio and I will buy a Moto. lol
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
