Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 126 posts

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

#21

Post by neya »

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.

>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.

Sorry if I sound a bit rude, but it's easy to sit on an armchair and comment about stuff like the company's CEO and decide on what's best for a company without actually having access to the company's internal data, but with all due respect, I think this phone is priced pretty competitively and I think Motorola would have done their fair share of research before claiming this to be a 'globally accessible' phone. Also, your idea that smartphones should be priced around $60 to be 'globally accessible' seems pretty skewed without any data provided to justify it.

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

#22

Post by MetaCosm »

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.

Not sure how the new OS performance is -- but all the requirements were significantly lowered as they push for cheaper & faster phones.

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

#24

Post by bsimpson »

noir_lord wrote: post #7
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.

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.

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

#26

Post by rtpg »

I've never understood why the good cell phones (unlocked) always cost something like 500, 600 euros. Glad to see someone trying to push the prices down, especially if it's not Samsung or Apple, to help keep some variety in presence.

Seeing Motorola as "a Google company" is really weird to me.(https://www.moto-g.com/ ), for some reason it makes me feel like Google is going to become the next GE or something.

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

#27

Post by Cowen »

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 think most smartphone consumers value unlocked phones enough that they would pay a similar amount for one as they would pay for a subsidized iPhone 5S. A subsidized 5C would still be even cheaper than the unlocked Moto G.

A subsidized $50 Moto G vs. a subsidized $100 iPhone 5C though? I could definitely see that taking off.

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

#29

Post by InclinedPlane »

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.

The Moto G is a very high quality phone for only $200. The $50 phones out there are extremely low quality in comparison.

However, you're ignoring a key factor, over time manufacturing efficiencies will bring the cost of the Moto G down, while the quality remains the same. In a year or 2 it will still be a good phone, in 5 years it will still be a decent phone at the low end of the market. But by then the cost could be $100 or even as low as $50.

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

#30

Post by ek »

rtpg wrote: post #26

I've never understood why the good cell phones (unlocked) always cost something like 500, 600 euros. Glad to see someone trying to push the prices down, especially if it's not Samsung or Apple, to help keep some variety in presence. Seeing Motorola as "a Google company" is really weird to me.( https://www.moto-g.com/ ), for some reason it makes me feel like Google is going to become the next GE or something.

Regarding the latter part of your comment, it's actually interesting to compare GE to Google for several reasons.

When GE was founded, it was a new kind of company for the time, and in the same way, Google is a new kind of company for our time, together with companies like Amazon -- their business model is built around leveraging the Internet, in the same way that GE was built around leveraging America's burgeoning industry.

Furthermore, Google manages to bring in a third of the revenue of GE with a sixth of the employees, and their net incomes are remarkably close. Think about how many products and services Google already offers, and how many more we already know are in the works. Because it's software, you don't as readily perceive these facets of this admittedly very large organization as you might with a company like GE, whose primary business is to produce a diverse array of physical objects.

Post reply on HN