Motorola has introduced a keenly-anticipated Moto X smartphone in a move aimed at reviving the withered mobile device maker bought by Google for $12.5 billion.
The Android-powered phone is the first Motorola smartphone created in collaboration with Google since the Internet titan completed its purchase of Motorola Mobility in May of last year.
The Moto X, due for US release in late August, could be a formidable foe in a global market dominated by Samsung, the leading maker of smartphones built with the Google-backed software.
It will also be available at that time in Canada and Latin America
Moto X will have a starting price of $199 in the United States if bought along with a two-year service contract with a telecom service company.
“At Motorola our roots are deep in mobile hardware — we invented mobile communications,” Motorola Mobility Canada general manager Odile Guinot said in a release.
“Now, as a Google company, we’ve become the kind of company that can build a smartphone like Moto X,” Guinot added. “It fuses our history of mobile innovation with the best of Google mobile services.”
People can visit an online Moto Maker studio to customize colors, accents, memory capacity and other aspects of handsets, which will be assembled in the United States and delivered free of charge within four days, according to Motorola.
Moto X smartphones are powered by Google’s Android software and features include sophisticated voice controls and anticipating what users might want from the Internet at any given moment.
Motorola also streamlined the ease with which smartphone pictures can be taken.
“Moto X promises to be unlike any device we’ve offered before,” said Jeff Bradley, senior vice president of devices at US telecom giant AT&T.
Motorola Moto X at a glance
- General: Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, quad-band UMTS/HSPA, 100 Mbps LTE with a second LTE antenna
- Form factor: Touchscreen bar phone
- Dimensions: 129.3 x 65.3 x 10.4, 130 g
- Display: 4.7″ 16M-color 720p (1280 x 720 pixels) capacitive touchscreen RGB AMOLED display with curved Gorilla Glass and ~316 ppi
- CPU: Dual-core 1.7 GHz Krait
- GPU: Adreno 320
- Chipset: A custom-built Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System, based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset
- RAM: 2GB
- OS: Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
- Memory: 16/32GB storage
- Cameras: Primary 10 megapixel auto-focus Clear Pixel camera with 1.4 µm-sized pixels, f/2.4 aperture, native 16:9 aspect ratio, face detection, HDR mode, panorama, geo-tagging; Full HD (1080p) video recording at 30fps with HDR, Secondary 2MP front-facing camera with FullHD video capture; Quick capture allows you to activate the camera with a double twist of your wrist;
- Connectivity: Dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, standard microUSB port with MHL and USB host, GPS receiver with A-GPS, GLONASS, 3.5mm audio jack, NFC, wireless screen sharing (Miracast protocol)
- Misc: Composite plastic materials – surrounding back panel and curved edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass front; dual-mic setup for noise cancellation; water-repellent coating on electrical components for trouble-free operation in the rain; some 50 GB worth of extra free Google Drive storage for 2 years (on top of the usual 15GB); Active Display system, showing notifications on a fraction of the screen size when the screen is off; Touchless control – voice control capabilities in standby (with the screen off).
- Battery capacity: 2200mAh.
