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Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

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Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#41

Post by peterwwillis »

I was talking to representatives from Lyft at a festival here in Baltimore, and I asked them if they had any plans to support non-smartphones like mine, or any other way to use their service. "No" was the answer.

I realized, this was genius! They could ensure only wealthy customers used their service, creating a vacuum in which the upper class could use transportation in style and comfort, without having to interface with "those kinds" of people. Also ensuring their customer base was (relatively) well-behaved and polite.

Hopefully cheaper phones like this can fuck with these digital social classes.

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#42

Post by JeremyNT »

cs702 wrote: post #33

This phone looks like a game changer to me, because it has the specs of a high-end smartphone but is priced like a crappy low-end one. The cost of an unlocked unit is $300 to $600 LESS than that of other devices with comparable specs, so mobile carriers should be able to offer the Moto G to the masses for hundreds of dollars less than any iPhone or high-end Android device by Samsung, LG, etc. Mobile carriers could of…

It seems capable, but calling it "high end" is quite... generous. No LTE, 1.2 GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 8GB storage - they made some obvious compromises to hit this price point.

I think it's probably a smart play for Moto/Goog to target this space, but "high end" it ain't.

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#43

Post by blinkingled »

bsimpson wrote: post #24
noir_lord wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This in the same league as the first generation N7 (very roughly) which is a hell of a lot of hardware for 200 bucks. If this had been around when I bought my N4 I would have been very tempted (as I just want something that is a decent mobile web browser, I don't really use Apps at all).

Chrome runs like crap in 1GB RAM. The keyboard frequently gets garbage collected while I'm typing on it, and the whole thing can crash if I rotate the screen. That's running on a stock Galaxy Nexus.

You might want to factory reset - after all those incremental upgrades it can be worthwhile. My wife's GNex is on 4.3 stock and it had some lag before I reset it via a fresh burn of 4.3 factory image. Chrome runs better than acceptably on it. (Or are you on < 4.3 - in that case root and download/run LagFix free app to force TRIM. Pre 4.3 it makes a difference.)

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#44

Post by redidas »

Cowen wrote: post #27

This sounds like a great offering for an unlocked smartphone. I'm personally in the market for a cheap, unlocked smartphone, and if this is as good as the reviews sound, I'll probably buy one straight away. But I think the real test for this phone's market share will be the subsidized price that carriers offer it at, which would have to be substantially lower than current subsidized flagship smartphones. I don't thin…

With such a low unlocked price, I wouldn't be surprised if this hits a subsidized price of $0.

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#45

Post by MichaelGG »

peterwwillis wrote: post #41

I was talking to representatives from Lyft at a festival here in Baltimore, and I asked them if they had any plans to support non-smartphones like mine, or any other way to use their service. "No" was the answer. I realized, this was genius! They could ensure only wealthy customers used their service, creating a vacuum in which the upper class could use transportation in style and comfort, without having to interface…

Or perhaps maybe they realised that most people, especially those that might use their app, are likely to have a smartphone or get one soon. That investing on making a service targeting other platforms is a waste of time and money?

That sounds much more likely than some digital class nonsense.

Edit: Also the assumption that people with smartphones are going to be better behaved than normal is... not based in reality. It's not like taxis are stopping for e.g. homeless people that camp out inside the taxi all day.

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#46

Post by homersapien »

redidas wrote: post #44
Cowen wrote: post #27

This sounds like a great offering for an unlocked smartphone. I'm personally in the market for a cheap, unlocked smartphone, and if this is as good as the reviews sound, I'll probably buy one straight away. But I think the real test for this phone's market share will be the subsidized price that carriers offer it at, which would have to be substantially lower than current subsidized flagship smartphones. I don't thin…

With such a low unlocked price, I wouldn't be surprised if this hits a subsidized price of $0.

At $0 subsidized you would be getting ripped off. You'd be better off buying a subsidized iPhone, selling it, then buying the G at full price (plus pocketing a bunch of $$ at the same time).

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#47

Post by mahyarm »

peterwwillis wrote: post #41

I was talking to representatives from Lyft at a festival here in Baltimore, and I asked them if they had any plans to support non-smartphones like mine, or any other way to use their service. "No" was the answer. I realized, this was genius! They could ensure only wealthy customers used their service, creating a vacuum in which the upper class could use transportation in style and comfort, without having to interface…

Actually I'm fairly certain that is not the thought process at all at lyft. There are many poor minimum wage workers and students with smartphones in the USA.

It would be an incredible effort for little usage in a world where the smart phone is becoming the default phone world wide. It's the same reasoning why they don't have have a windows phone app either. The amount of work it would be to create a J2ME app that works on many dumbphone models would probably be 10x, not to mention the difficulty in finding people who would even work in such a dead end platform.

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#48

Post by lnanek2 »

cs702 wrote: post #33

This phone looks like a game changer to me, because it has the specs of a high-end smartphone but is priced like a crappy low-end one. The cost of an unlocked unit is $300 to $600 LESS than that of other devices with comparable specs, so mobile carriers should be able to offer the Moto G to the masses for hundreds of dollars less than any iPhone or high-end Android device by Samsung, LG, etc. Mobile carriers could of…

It's basically the same thing as a Nexus 4 was. Modern hardware, priced under the competition, but no LTE out of the box. Some people were able to enable the LTE on some bands on that, so we'll see if this is a similar crippledware device that hackers can unlock.

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#49

Post by jimktrains2 »

josteink wrote: post #32
jimktrains2 wrote: post #28

I guess it's not CMDA (Verizon) compatible. It sure looks nice otherwise, AND it has an FM radio. I hate that most new models have dropped that. EDIT: Reformatting

You have that backwards. It's Verizon which has decided explicitly not to be compatible with phones which works everywhere else in the world. It's like an ISP which decides that it doesn't want to use TCP/IP, but instead goes off and makes their own network-protocol, which requires its own custom OS preloaded on customer-computers. You can hardly blame phone-vendors for not being on that ship. It's much more profitab…

As someone else pointed out, I was talking about an FM radio.

Also, you do realize that CDMA is much older than VZW and wasn't created just to create incompatibilities?

Re: Motorola Makes The Moto G Official, A “Premium” Phone Starting At $179 Unlocked

#50

Post by lnanek2 »

josteink wrote: post #32
jimktrains2 wrote: post #28

I guess it's not CMDA (Verizon) compatible. It sure looks nice otherwise, AND it has an FM radio. I hate that most new models have dropped that. EDIT: Reformatting

You have that backwards. It's Verizon which has decided explicitly not to be compatible with phones which works everywhere else in the world. It's like an ISP which decides that it doesn't want to use TCP/IP, but instead goes off and makes their own network-protocol, which requires its own custom OS preloaded on customer-computers. You can hardly blame phone-vendors for not being on that ship. It's much more profitab…

LTE is GSM based, so it isn't like they were able to keep it up at least, heh.
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