Gadgetory

Google bought Motorola 14 months ago and today in New York City we're getting our first look at its first device they've built together this is the Moto X and its really what happens when Google becomes a hardware manufacturer but this story really goes back a week to Verizon's announcement of a lineup of new droids Motorola made clear to us that Moto X is the future of the company that it's where Motorola is headed but it's hedging that future a little bit droids have a special place there they go after people who are looking for a lot of power top-end hardware specs they're looking for phones that have a unique design character to them new phone isn't quite as angry as your average droid I still don't know if it's called the X or the Moto X but whatever you call it the phone is beautiful its curved glass and plastic front has tiny bezels and a big bright display and the back curves from flat edges to a slightly convex center that Nestle's perfectly in your palm nearly everything else about the phone is negotiable you can choose how much storage you get your Moto X you can also choose the front panel either black or white there are 18 options to the back panel which you can also engrave plus seven for the accents which are the ring around the camera lens and the buttons the colours look and feel different from a woven black to a matte and rubbery grey and if you don't like the one you pick just send it back within two weeks and get another assembling phones to order like this is complicated and it takes time so Motorola moved its operations to Fort Worth Texas in a huge factory where it assembles all its phones we realized that it was really critical to be able to deliver phones to people in less than five days and so that's why we moved manufacturing we took all of our supply chain and we made it based in Fort Worth and there's approximately 2,000 employees that put the phones together it's a very it's a complicated assembly process and and they're working at our partner Flextronics who we do our manufacturing with we also course have most of our designers engineers most of our employees at Motorola are in America as well and so putting our manufacturing close to our engineering is a really really nice feed Loup for us buyers get to help decide what their phone looks like but the specs themselves are left up to Google and Motorola the two companies made a big bet they essentially built a mid-range phone it has a 4.7 inch 720p OLED screen in an era of 5-inch 1080p panels and we had a lot of debates about what the right was the other density of display 1080 versus 720 what the right size is so started with size to really find the sweet spot and then we decided the resolution to be what we thought was ideal we could go and make you know a higher resolution screen but they would just suck battery and no one would go the difference right because we saw that and we knew that the screens a little pink to our eyes but otherwise looks really good the Moto X has Motorola's x8 chip which really is little more than an off-the-shelf Snapdragon processor plus a couple of additional cores it's not a bleeding edge or even necessarily top-notch processor when it goes back to the simple message of the Moto X it's not about what your phone can do theoretically it's about what it does do and what you do with it one of the things we found is a little bit of a curious behavior was people turning their phones off and on about 60 times a day and so so we developed something we think is really cool and very useful which we call active display it lets the user know that real basic information and it shows it sort of right on the screen in this case like it comes on and I can just go right up to the text message it'll take me right to the message so it's really fast part of the reason we use the AMOLED display is that we can selectively illuminate one portion of the display which gives us a very kind of energy efficient way to to show this the Moto X knows when you're in a car and jumps into driving mode automatically it knows your voice and only your voice just say okay Google now and command your phone as you please you can make an end calls get directions or look up almost anything without ever needing to touch your phone or even turn it on the phone runs nearly pure stock Android version 4.2.2 somehow even though it's owned by Google Motorola still can't get the latest version of its software there is a clear separation between Motorola and Android but we also of course have quite a bit of Google influenced it doesn't help us per se upgrade any faster there's no difference in operation there than any other but our strategy does motorola strategy does which is to remove a lot of the customizations that have plagued Android phones for a long time and really just focus right on the core Android user experience if we think has evolved to a great place it has unlocked an opportunity for us to pursue a path that before we thought about that really wasn't wasn't really gonna work for us at Motorola given what our products were what we stood for it allowed us to design in a different way Google's been involved with the Moto X design throughout and there's even a program for sharing employees between the two companies it's almost like Motorola hasn't figured out what to do with Google yet and Google hasn't figured out how to use its new hardware arm either it may not be a Google Play edition phone unlocked and an Android purists dream but the Moto X is fast smooth and powerful the only thing that didn't work very well was the quick launch camera you wiggle your wrists like you're jimmying a lock and it'll jump straight to the camera no matter what it was doing before it's great it just doesn't always work the camera takes good pictures too but it has very few features it might be too simple but Motorola believes it's simple in making phones that fit our lives perfectly without changing them it believes we want phones that do what we want them to do and they look the way we want them to look and everything else from spec sheets to SKUs is secondary I think three years ago the company made 45 phones we're we're obviously down to a much smaller set and we think it's critical to do a smaller number of things much better at $199 on contract and available on all four major US carriers we're gonna find out if simple can win Motorola's taking on the galaxy s4 the HTC One the iPhone 5 and even its own line of droids those phones all have more power and more features Motorola's fighting fire with glow sticks here but it's glow stick is pretty it's really easy to use and it doesn't go out so quickly maybe there's something to be said for glow sticks you