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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

#11

Post by ccozan »

melling wrote: post #3
ccozan wrote: post #2

I hoped it is based on the X8 architecture, but is just "normal". So it makes not sense to compare it with Moto X, is a different phone, different target, is no "little brother", more like a distant "poor cousin".

I don't follow Android that closely. How is the performance of this phone? Cheap phones like this will help get Android into the hands of another billion people. It's probably more important to have a more recent version of Android than the fastest CPU.

It is not about a faster processor, but the architecture, X8 in this case. This is what makes the Moto X very interesting, like the always on and some other quirks.

I agree that a cheap performant phone is what is quite revolutionary. Google/Motorola does it right.

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

#12

Post by a3n »

Touche wrote: post #4
melling wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow Android that closely. How is the performance of this phone? Cheap phones like this will help get Android into the hands of another billion people. It's probably more important to have a more recent version of Android than the fastest CPU.

It's quad core. Looks like an excellent phone for the price. Interesting that Motorola is one-uping the Nexus to some degree here (the Nexus is closer to being a flagship, but this is significantly cheaper). This might be my next. What's for sure is I'm never buying another $600 phone again.

I'll never buy one of those again either, subsidized or not. One reason beyond the cost is being at the mercy of the telco for upgrades.

So, unlocked, is this thing jail-breakable/cyanogenmodable or similar?

What's a reasonable expectation for how many years I could keep it security upgraded?

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

#13

Post by eitally »

YeahKIA wrote: post #10
freehunter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woodside said that the average worldwide is more around the $200 mark. They say their target research shows that people are spending $200 on poor quality phones. If that's the target they're going for and that's what they research shows, I don't think they missed the mark.

Nokia has been making great windows phones for cheap like the 521 that routinely available for as little as 70 bucks. The hardware is lower spec as compared to this one but windows phone is known to run well on slower hardware. It will be interesting to see how well Android runs on this.

I have recently returned from business trips to China and India and it's a fair statement to say that people are either spending a whole bunch of money on flagship phones ($1000 for a Galaxy Note 3 in India), they're sticking with dumb phones, or they're reluctantly forking over $200-400 for entry level smart phones. Karbonn, Oppo, Meizu and others are all trying to crack this market, but until now they're spent more time trying to compete at the "cheaper flagships than Samsung/HTC/LG/Sony" than than the "accessible decent smartphone" market.

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

#16

Post by pacofvf »

It's an excellent price for Latin America, I don't know other parts of the world, at $200 USD it will kill other smartphone vendors (Samsung and other Android mostly http://qz.com/145704/slides-mobile-is-eating-the-world/). Also note that latam region already have the same amount of smartphone sales than Europe or US/Canada.

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

#18

Post by Zigurd »

ccozan wrote: post #2

I hoped it is based on the X8 architecture, but is just "normal". So it makes not sense to compare it with Moto X, is a different phone, different target, is no "little brother", more like a distant "poor cousin".

I would claim that "flagship" Android smartphones are an unsustainable business model.

At first, Android needed faster phones that it was getting from OEMs, but they went way overboard. Samsung soaks up a lot of that excess horsepower with bloatware.

Here is a $200 phone with 4(!!!) cores and a very robust GPU. Even that is probably a bit more than neccessary. Android 4.4 got some performance tuning. Once ART is the default VM for typical OEM builds, it should be even less apparent why you need a monster CPU chip.

The only thing a thumping CPU gives you is the ability to ignore what your bad apps and OEM bloatware are doing to performance longer than otherwise. Disable the boatware and clear out the sketchy apps you don't use and that Tegra 3 is just fine.

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

#19

Post by ansible »

darrenkopp wrote: post #17

This is great, I was ready to buy a MotoX until I saw it was $750 unlocked, when at the same time the Nexus 4 was only $350. I'm not surprised that they didn't sell that many of them.

I was in the market for a phone at that time. Google then dropped the price of the Nexus 4 to $200 (8GB storage) and $250 (16GB). That was way too good a deal for me to pass up.

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

#20

Post by thewarrior »

tsunamifury wrote: post #5

A competitive globally accessible phone price would be $50, not $200. This feels more like a cheap 1st world phone than a global one. ZTE and other have already made 50 dollar phones using Android and Windows + Asha won't be far behind at $60. Motorola has a long ways to go (4x price reduction) to truly get their android devices into India, China And other poorer regions of South America and Africa.

I'm from India and I've been looking to buy a smartphone in this price range for sometime. The Lumia 520 seemed really attractive as it was the only phone in the $200 price range that wasn't crap.

The Moto G looks really compelling and if its available for this price in India I would buy it in a heartbeat. If this phone is as good as claimed (and thats a big if) then Samsung and Nokia stand to lose a lot of ground.

And as for the $50 price point I'm not sure you can provide a true smartphone experience at that price.

There is a lack of usable smartphones in this price range and the longer it goes unaddressed the more ground Android will lose to phones like the Lumia 520.

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