Gadgetory

welcome to the verge live i'm ross miller i'm david pierce this is the Moto X so is this that's also the Moto X because it's got a lot of no excess this is really nice one we've got a cool video we're going to show you and when we come back from that will be answering all your questions about the Moto X tweeted us hashtag verge QA and up six minutes give or take we'll be back answering all that so stay tuned google bought motorola 14 months ago and today in new york city we're getting our first look at first device they built together this is the Moto X and it's 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 it's 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 nestles 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 in grade + 7 for the access which are the ring around the camera lens and the buttons the colors look and feel different from a woven black to a mat 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 feedback loop 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 build a mid-range phone it is 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 what the 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 it would just suck battery and no one would know the difference right because we saw that 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 knocked processor but 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 email that display is that we can selectively illuminate one portion of the display which gives us a very kind of energy efficient way to 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 point2 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 influence it doesn't help us per se upgrade any faster there's no difference in operation there than any other OEM 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 which we think is evolved to a great place it has unlocked an opportunity for us to pursue a path that before we thought about but really wasn't wasn't really going to 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 in 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 two SKUs is second there 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 a hundred ninety nine dollars on contract and available on all four major US carriers we're going to find out if simple can win Motorola's taking on the galaxy s4 the HTC One the I phone 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 glow sticks close to those dicks David I know you're exhausted you haven't slept much you wrote that huge piece it's on the verge calm if you want to look at it after you watch this of course but I want to get your thoughts you've been playing as a lot lately what do you think the Moto X so for me that's this whole thing kind of comes out of what I felt about the HTC One and the galaxy s4 where it was it was really design versus things it does right and this kind of takes that to a totally new level where it's it's not about what it does and to some extent that's sort of a hedge for motorola for not putting great specs into this phone but they're focusing on design they're focusing on how it feels they're focusing on all this stuff that I think actually matters in a way that the difference between dual-core and quad-core really doesn't matter and I think that's fascinating I think this phone in some ways is not perfect the more i use this AMOLED screen the more I don't really like it let's talk about what is actually on this right now I mean or motorola been a big deal about saying specs do not matter but here are the specs that are there is 4.3 and 4.4 points74 points an inch and can't this goes good i can't under i can't overestimate i guess how small this thing feels for a 4.7 i felt like we didn't believe that spec when we first saw it it just feels really good and you can actually legitimately use it in one hand unlike basically every other phone this size I've ever seen right which is a big deal it is it is like this is this feels good they're like it's a nice weight too yeah and like when I heard that I was doing this like customized plastic bags I thought I was gonna feel cheap but test- motorola actually is pretty sturdy yeah no thank you I mean well it's really think so is it the event this morning right and they were showing off you know you can customize the back there are all these different options and then they're like we also have these cases and I was literally all he said he was like hey I don't wanted we make cases it was basically please for the love of God do not buy them that was it it was great and then I talked for like 30 minutes about headphones but they're clearly that's you know that way they're trying to discover that buzz so what school is they're partnering with Sol Republic who's like they're sort of the hipster cool kid of the headphone industry and what they're doing is making headphones that are the same color as your phone right so when you go on the Moto maker thing it'll suggest a pair of headphones that look just like your phone and you can get any color you want but it suggests it so that's cool and so republic makes good headphones so that's kind of neat but the sort of the point is they it's it feels good you don't have to you know the galaxy s4 you either have to buy a new back or put on a case to make it feel decent and this just comes out of the box and feels good and works well right but they made a bunch of sacrifices to get to that place which is it looks I don't know let's talk about sacrifice and like to me i'm actually very happy with this i mean going back and forth we've argued probably three the last 10 hours over this non-stop i know you've been writing sorry about that but what are the sacrifices have been made to make what essentially Motorola's flagship albeit mid-range phone sure so the big argument that i think you can make for really high-end specs is that every Android phone kind of becomes terrible over the course of its life and a new sign Oh to your contract to get this phone you want it to be good and really only Apple has a reputation for continuing to be good over the course of its entire lifespan but and so the the counter to that is basically just buy the best specs you possibly can and hope they last the longest right this doesn't have that this is already sort of behind the times it's a Snapdragon s4 pro which is a good processor it's a very good processor but it's you know two steps below the best ones that are out there and it god only knows where we'll be two years from now like how many steps back that'll be it's also it's a 720p screen instead of 1080p which the argument is essentially that it's really diminishing returns and I tend to agree with that but it's also you know who knows what we're going to be able to do with more pixels and more resolution two years and the trade-off that he kept saying for it was battery like that i'm actually the theme 8d sacrifice processor in like screamers whichever better life if they actually get what they're claiming is about 24 24 hours that was really exciting so we everybody says we're totally right that's the everybody says right we'll get a full day of battery life and almost everybody's lying and when you ask them they're like well a full days eight hours because that's your workday rights like well that's that's not it that's not it that's like otay tars idle not browsing right listening to music locally on Spotify right but so but then Rick gets up this morning at the event and says a full day and somebody meeting goes well how long is a full day he says 24 hours and then sort of gets this smirky smile on his face because everybody was everybody sort of was taken aback by it but that's huge and that's another thing where it's it's like that matters way more to most people than the cores in their processor for me it's like if you give me a phone that lasts as long as I needed to I will make lots and lots of sacrifices to get there and the question is do you make the right ones and I don't know with this honestly I need to spend more time with it right and i need to you know i really want to see where this is in a year but for right now they're thinking very much the right way which is what do people need and it's i need a phone that isn't bed at six pm and i need a phone that feels good and works well and like this is all of those things right that's the thing that scares me the most about this we have been going back and forth i like this phone and there's reasons i don't forget to especially price and things like that but if in a year from now this still feels like it does now i'll be happy like we're getting apart like their 99 maybe 100 of the apps i want will work just as well on this as a world es for make the process provided me that extra developers are making for you know this dual core processor right now because that's what everyone's going to have and by that being said we thought the nexus 7 the original would be better for a while sure we were wrong well that would have turned out to be a weird software thing in a lot of ways because 1.3 noe old Nexus 7 faster right which is sort of remarkable and that's um you know the guys at Monroe let didn't use that as an example yesterday but they might as well have and they were saying you know our hardware is already beyond what we need from it and now it's about making the software to catch up and we can use the software to better our hardware and I don't have a ton of evidence that that's true but it seems to be I mean we have some a little bit of evidence that that's true and I think you can build on top of good hardware a lot better than you can build on top of bad hardware and this is good hardware but it's not great but it's just this weird balance a game that I'd say it's a figure out a question like are we at the point like we're hardware specs or plateauing to the point we're getting what we need but before we get into the specs I do want to talk about the obvious thing here which is the colors now this phone is assembled in America designed engineered in a simple in America that's step one two and four step 3 of courses parts are being made outside the camp which is everywhere and just label to be super clear that's only four people in America so you live in America your phone is assembled in America otherwise all hell breaks loose I don't know what they were they were oddly unclear about that they just he basically kept for saying America is they're not stopping America is those it I was like okay all right yeah apologies to every non American person interested in stone look it's not me it's motorola they're not apologize for you what's how i am a little bit but let's let's talk about the back so there's sure 18 bags yeah does that include cuz i know we saw i was with you a little bit before it was does that include the wooden back it doesn't so there's 18 available at day one and wood is there testing would they're testing or testing would they don't have wood there they're thinking about having would you please buy another way of saying that so what would they were saying and I thought this actually really interesting is that wood is it completely different I've got a kind of material to use just move on just moving okay moving on it's a totally different kind of material especially for things like RF frequencies and some of the cellular stuff and so they're uh Milicic ntt docomo at least 23 years ago we're in Tokyo for the trade shows and like they were showing off wooden phones right like the same issues there's frequency concern right all that and so what they've been doing is testing a bunch of different kinds of wood and I think the challenge that they're having is figuring out which one works best so it's coming out the fourth quarter of this year and it'll be wood and we saw a prototype of it yesterday I really liked it I don't know what you thought it felt she wasn't I liked it I just wonder what its gonna be like in the rain yeah I'm going to get the phone got in the your phone shrinks a little bit a little bit it starts growing moss that would be amazing i would i would pay extra for that I have no problem it's a cheap at widget on the back of the phone no so we've got 18 colors at launch you have any care exclusively talked about is it just a team well this is the weird thing is all of the so black and white this is this is black and there's also white which looks like this but white but tech arms on black and white are always textured a little bit so there's there's a much sort of smoother matte black that doesn't have quite this look to it but it's always it's the same kind of rubbery grippy but those two are separate consider like right there's black and black texture yeah there's black and black and then a different light and white it's like paint swatches right it's like egg cream and cream egg and is that like dream agreement I hope not but so you can get either of those two when the phones come out on the carriers which is at the end of this month or early September but for now AT&T has an exclusive on the moto maker software which means if you want one of the crazy colors you can only buy it on AT&T which makes absolutely no sense to me so dighton it's so pretty like don't you want this phone I want that phone but you can't buy it unless you're on AT&T which struggles completely insane from now like everyone I asked would go up to me and be like it's an exclusive for now yeah it's a second ask you literally see that's right hop up next to the night like we're going to give a DTV first but just you was just like a big eye in the sky waking at me yeah exactly but uh no it's great so at launch 18 colors 7 accents and the accents are the Bob do you think is super cool right so as to what it's it's the the ring around the camera here right and there is sort of a ring around the buttons that's a little bit hard to see but it's it's really cool and it's a clever way for me like I'm not sure I'd want a pink phone forever mmm I want a pink phone for like a week and then I'd be over having a pink phone but but at the same time you can have like a little bit of sort of flair to it without because my problem with the with having an iphone is everyone I know was an iphone it's hopeless I give other people my phone I take other people's phone it's just it's a poor that's why you do cases too true just different shapes yeah so I like the idea that your phone even sort of very subtly can like your phone so was it 1818 backs yeah seven accents yep and two front two fronts black or white yep and 504 permutations basically that includes two storage options food salts and two more storage options 16 32 gig span so 504 choices for now and there's Henry hundred those are probably very ugly but they'll let you do those right yeah sure I know what they should and it was funny there they're doing Motorola's doing this big promotion with people on facebook where they're basically saying show us what else you want and sort of the sky's the limit people are just designing wacky things and they put up a bunch with the weirdest names ever one was called binary curious and it was just like ones and zeros I that's what they they're like is funny way to do that we're getting to the point where like I remember Del years ago like their big thing was by laptop right this it's kind of fat but design anything you want the back or we'll find some ours do a really good job and is that kind of where motor oil is going what's that that's the thing is is what it kind of is that's the that's the floor for motorola if this goes poorly that's what it is it's it's covering a crappy phone with not a nice-looking shell in that case like i could just buy a case for my good phone everybody wins uh but in this case it's i don't know i still I'm so torn about this and the part that really bums me out is this could have been the phone that changed everything right like if this was a nexus phone it if it came on all four carriers but was totally stock Android was gonna get the updates immediately was you know sold unlocked for 299 dollars like the nexus for the universe might have exploded my head would be somewhere else right now and everyone here would already be in line to buy one and that they do that it sucks and heres thing kills me we've argued back and forth on what this means motorola is proud very proud to say that we're an oem of google's like we're not giving any special preferential treatment at the same time it's almost like saying we know Google bottle for the patents and they don't care what we do so will make a good phone right which is great and so they have they have all this time to actually make good phones I was at the event this morning they were talking about how they went to they went to Google with a bunch of ideas so I guess they have I'm not totally sure of the setup but it sounds like they have basically update meetings with the Google leadership um and there was somebody at event this morning who was worried that Larry Page was going to call and be like so moto X really love the name let's change that but so so they said early on they went to the leadership team and you know laid out a bunch of prototypes and was like here's what we focus for grouped here's what we found and the immediate and overwhelming feedback was now any more data so they went back they went around the world they have this big archive of thousands of people's hand prints they did tons of focus groups and they really got to it seems like take their time and try to figure out what everybody wants out of a cell phone and at some level they kind of built the phone that everybody wants which is not necessarily a good thing in that you know you end up in this awkward middle where everything is pretty good and nothing is great right um because I see you see like I'm generalization sure broad generalization just three different design groups are designed by vision that's a large lake you're Steve Jobs and jony ive doing their thing they're designed by committee which is I'm just gonna say it's Samsung I mean or something it's like like they're kind of figure out as a big big group and this is designed by data models like right an incredible amount of data it sounds like we're a very thing to do to write their famous for having you know the 41 shades of blue on on the home screen there's that guy was I wound of reading it today his his letter quitting was like i went in and i had to argue three four or five pixels for a border like I'm sure they did that on message and i'm sure they focus grouped it and I'm sure they have tons of data and reasons why and usage response and like it's crazy I mean I say like this is uh this is form and function this is fashion actually sorry there's function it's functional enough that's what he said it's functional fashion let's control fashion yeah um we're gonna make something looks pretty and I will say this is this is the 18-team all right there's no AT&T logo on this oh no I'm sorry that one's not the 18-team also in love so yeah so if they will have logos on them and just little tiny ones back here and my my favorite promise that they maybe that's unlocked I think oh yeah your fancy like that but so there are little logos back here but the one thing they promised us over and over yesterday was we will not put anything on the front of the phone a verizon can't put anything on there we won't put anything on their Google can't put anything on there and in this case like I can live with this I can live with a little bit of a verizon logo and I get why they put it there and that's a course had minimal which what they call the batwing I don't know why I love the tiny little bat wings dimple is a sight just awesome I keep just sitting here and like rubbing this phone for some reason I don't totally understand while David on the phone if you have questions a hashtag verge clear on Twitter we will get to those questions very shortly right before we do though I do want to talk about the software just a bit yes android 4.3 android 4.2 point to knotts 4.3 again another reason no professor is on a nexus phone yeah right um honestly like I get the rationale behind not doing the not having it be a nexus phone and not getting any particular preferential treatment there why not they owned them like Samsung gives Samsung preferential treatment that's not a weird thing to do it's just I wish they would just own it and be like look you can all use this software but we're going to use it to for our phones so beat us that's how you beat the ecosystem is google saying we're gonna build killer hardware and killer software you beat us right anything that uh i want to get the software i want to get to this after that but real quick like the thing that I'm surprised they're not doing at lodge a very googley thing to do is the Play edition yes there's no bone stock Android at large there will be a google play edition they're not saying when but it's not at launch right now it's again 18 to exclusive locked exclusive but before you get to that android 4.2 point to yes it's not stalking android there's new additions in fact we kinda like a half dozen verizon apps here that are just making me sad we do a few motorola things they're not bad what we've seen them what last week yeah that's a lot of the droid features yeah a lot of this like which is very strange and they uh they didn't really have a good answer for why we asked this morning why they announced the droids last week and then the phone that's supposedly way better than the droids this week and all he said was basically we finished them at the same time it's like I guess that is actually the answer all right uh but there doesn't seem to be any particular strategy to it they just you know verizon columns like we want droids so they made droids and then they've made the motor it's very strange but I think that they're increasingly okay with droids being a big name for a particular segment of the market and I think that segment of the market is not the person who's going to buy this that segment of the market is people who say holy crap battery life and by monster phones that have big battery life or say look at all of the GPUs and like that and that's that's great and that's there's a market that deserves to be served of that but this is for like my mom who's never heard of a GPU but once a phone that works well and it feels good but your mom is on rice i got my mama droid she would hate it she would cry it's funny because it might kill it or not I don't terribly different from this like in terms of software like you've got a touchless which is it knows when I say okay Google now it does stuff yep it sure knows knees hands you gotta train yours I got trained mine later but the thing about droid to me and people are going to yell at me percentile talking to moto PR earlier like Libby just let me just give an example and see if this fits at all okay I told this to the droid para guys like all right Hollywood makes blockbusters shitty summer blockbusters that do very well right so they can make 10 arthouse films is this art house and has droid your shitty summer blockbuster right I didn't say ease that many times mostly not that many times yeah and they laugh they wouldn't say anything really great PR people of course but I don't know that's my feeling like it d makes so much money with the droid right I don't know if they're actually proud of it at all though no but I don't think it necessarily matters that's like the what is that that's the movie you let Johnny Depp make so that he makes parts the Caribbean for you but it's I feel like the weird thing about this is it's such a big play they're launching on so many carriers it's coming to lots of other countries there's going to be a google play edition this is this is the play like this is how they get into AT&T stores and try to really make noise so i don't know i'm not sure i sense is just that droid is so powerful and so well known that they'd be stupid to stop selling it but that they also want to go in a very different direction so they can basically make this phone and i would not be surprised if they do this forever is make the moto x slap a bunch of kevlar on give a better processor call it a droid charge honor dollars more for it when I kind of thought the war for a little bit but actually technically they're charging our dollars more for this I felt like well depends on which droid there yes there's any time with the old sugar than any all of them oh it doesn't matter this is better we're going to get into these questions in just a minute I just wanna get to the last bit yeah because you're talking with carrier so I'm about pricing and availability in everyone's course asking about that AT&T exclusive 199 dollars on contract carrier locked there is no off contract price yet correct and it's not ATT include exclusive it's on all four carriers but all the customization is all right it's just eighteen t ah this is it's weird they don't it seems like they don't know does this phone is coming honestly that's coming out at a very bizarre time where they don't have a firm release date it's either coming out later this month or at the beginning of September it's they think it's going to be hundred ninety nine dollars but it's up to the carrier's they think there's gonna be Google Play version but they don't know when they think they're gonna use would but they don't know when and all this stuff it's like is it a just ran out of time they're like a half restore some order this fall because I thing is it Eve not actually or is it like a week we don't I honestly think they don't know because they were so candid about everything else that you know saying how much it costs on tmobile doesn't seem like it would be that much extra work but i think i would say it's safe to assume that it will be the one thing they said for sure is that it will be priced competitively with high end phones right so it'll be as expensive as all the other expensive phones like whatever the iphone costs this will probably cost like that and i think and my conspiracy theory is like they know it's a mid-range phone but there was one other phone very recently tried to sell mid-range at a price HTC right first a facebook phone and it was nine dollars in contract right it felt like a piece it looked like it was i loved it i really did like sewage so nice little as I he's really fast like yesterday I was doing using it um well with that I mean but they priced it to look like you should look at this right next to the one that goes for it next the iphone right well yeah one bomb because it was nine dollars he knew was mid range okay I almost feel like the charge 200 for this you know it was probably hunted on contract worth of it but they wanted this to say this is our flagship flagship 200 specs be damned we want to make it look just like that I agree and I think you can't the argument that they're trying to make which is that specs don't matter without charging as much for the iphone right because if you come out and say well we have you know all these great things and also it's a hundred dollars cheaper people like oh well it's a hundred other shoe because the processor is worse like it then that's you know they lose that argument so i think i think you're right i think they they came out and did that because it's impossible to make the we are as good as the iphone argument without being expensive as expensive as the iphone exactly which is a weird thing about our cell phone market but it's sort of how it is what whatever 24 hour left yes anyway right we're good start taking questions again if you are on twitter hashtag verge QA we're going to start answering everything we've got here not everything a lot of things first we've got tech aholic 11 sorry 1 through 10 uh he he or she asks how was the camera the Moto X go to a battery so there's this gesture where you go like this and nothing happens in my case okay I just supposedly oh there we go I guys worked okay so then it opens up the camera just by doing that gesture and it'll you know and then you just tap anywhere on the screen and it takes pictures so that's neat it's cool for selfies because you just be like what's uh uh and I was talking to a gym wex earlier name it's like i was like what if you're drunk he's like that's why it's tap anywhere cuz ever how drunk you are sure you can take a picture are you but the problem at this camera I think and I'm curious to know what you think yeah the problem the problem with it for me is they got rid of everything so it's cool because it's super simple and you can just you know tap and take a picture but if you want to do anything other than tap and take a picture but it's a lot of work so you have to you know you get into the settings and there's a way you can tap to focus which is neat but then it's still once it's focused it just fires you can you know you can enable a couple of things but there's just not that much to do here and one of things they said was that nobody ever goes into the camera settings that was one of things that they found in all of this message is fair I get that sure but for someone like me who's you know paying two hundred dollars for a phone that I expect to do all the things I wanted to do like simplicity is great but only when it's masking complexity like when you can do a lot of things and make it look they simple that's when you've succeeded but in this case all they did is pull out a bunch of features and say hey there's only one thing you can do right simple it's almost like oh I don't know that counts when they design Mike here's like no one goes in the settings it's not because they don't want settings is because it's terrible to use so instead of designing a simpler interface what look my doll that's it it does have to take pretty good pictures I haven't had nearly enough time to spend with it to say for sure but it does seem to take pretty good picture to take the counter I do think this is a good enough no it's average in ariz I said is if you come from the iphone you're used to tap to focus i like that feature but you're also used to tap to exposure I like nothing not working on yeah you'll get to it no I agree Association and that's the big thing to me is I take I found myself yesterday I guess it was you taking this picture right where it was the guy standing in front of a really bright window right and no matter what you did you couldn't he was just pitch dark and everything outside was in focus and exposed and bright that there's also this this hallway there has to be a way to figure that and if you don't give that to me you blew it there was also this uh this hallway we're like what kind of walking to that room there's a dark hallway and it was kind of bright over the Sun was hitting it and also like staring it's the dumbest picture tap does it change the exposure and try to like compensate for the dark area did none of that so you're just gonna have to hope pointing it up is it getting the right exposure I want or you just gonna shake it a little bit over the best right that bother me but the other thing I usually say is I've never liked him up until very recently I've never liked a good Android camera like I've never thought there was a good one fair enough until this new crop of phones and that's the one the s4 you know not and drove with the Lumia 1020 we're gonna talk about flagship devices sure I mean if we're going to move past the spec war and then all that argument front fine but the things people care about then is design they nailed it right battery life they nailed it and camera which the tried right one and the Lumia 1020 is actually really interesting example of this whole thing because you can you can say all you want that you know 41 megapixels is useless and nobody needs it but what 41 megapixels does is enable a whole different kind of using your photos and your camera where you know you can zoom and you can rotate and you can make these different photos out of the photos that you take and that's cool and that's that is purely a spec thing and that's specs for a purpose which I'm a big fan of but and Motorola is sort of explicitly not playing that game it's it's a 10 megapixel camera which is plenty for most cases but that's you know specs can be meaningful and good and important if they're used properly I think right so we got another question this is a question we've kind of talked a little bit over and let's just kind of revisit it sir i'm going to call out Joe to live over to labor sorry sorry dude thanks for watching we love you but sorry anyway Joe hey that a question Joe wanted to note would you pick the x over the HTC One or s4 and this is just comes back to sure is this actually a flagship phone worth buying we're spending money on so again we we have not spent nearly enough time with this phone to be able to say for sure so all of this is with the monstrous grain of salt that is the fact that I've had this in my hand for not very long um but I think for right now it's it's just gonna depend on who you are if this is every bit as good as motorola says it is let's just grant that sure then yes probably on my end because i think what i want is a phone that feels good and is like I haven't put this down since we've been sitting here it and it just feels nice I like holding this phone and I felt the same way about the one which is why all I liked it a lot more than the s4 but the exception and this is playing devil's advocate this is not my own opinion because playing devil's advocate the screen I know when we are shooting this features and networking everything ready uh you know one of our directors John lagomarsino he's actually in the control room John and Neil I by the way yelling people yelling at me my ear I know angry screams go Adam go out over the screen I wanna do it John you're welcome the screen is not pentile but it's not great either right so it's it's amylin demo which uh and this is this is challenging because I get why they detect amyloid in the s4 know the one and the s4 both have much better screens in the rice like much better screens there's no question about that I like their their logic for it makes senses which is that you get the notifications that I still for the life of me can't figure how to actually make come up the phone like if you have it down on a desk or a table upside down okay and then you pick it up it comes right on and that's cool but there's like no way to actually activate it when you want it to seem as though turn your phone on but so with that that's enabled by AMOLED which lets you light each pixel individually so they can do that without drawing power from having to light the whole screen but it means you know scrolling is kind of janky and ugly and the colors are over saturated and I've complained about this on samsung phones many many times and you know it to hear Motorola say it people don't care but I cannot care and I know John cares right and so it's it's it's a challenge it's trade-off and here's like this phone I'd like using this more than either of the others but those are ultimately probably better phones and that's really the question is thing which is which without screen better cameras better specs essentially like that's the s4 that's the one but for here you're getting better battery life and with our design yeah hopefully no I will say if battery life is what Motorola promises this is going to be an unbelievably compelling phone right because it even if it's not the best out there all I have to do is walk into a store with you know not to keep bringing my mom into this book with my mom and say mom this is a smartphone it does everything you needed to do it has a pretty good camera and it will last you all day and all night right and that's you know sold beyond that like I don't need to walk in and be like well it has an extra notes 8 processor and a 5-inch 1080p square like my mom's asleep by the time I finished that but if I say it's powerful and has a pretty good camera and lasts all day and is pretty that's the ballgame for her oh and and the challenge I think is going to be competing with the one on that front because the one is so similar in that respect or the one mini right well and then Samsung has all of the branding on its side where everybody knows what it is the s4 active the export passes the x4 whatever I mean you put any adjective or superlative after that right there is a samsung phone of some inch size sure next to it well in same time makes great phones like they don't give Samsung a lot not without sign but they make great phones it's just it's weird I don't know quite where motorola fits into that but killer battery life would go a long long way right a couple of questions in the course if you have courses will be in comments and forms answering this there's a huge review coming out and I'm sorry we didn't get to your question but I'm hoping to god they're all answer at some point a couple more we'll get to them we've got one do you think that the kind of customization is important for people also Decius has a plastic iPhone competitor I mean this is like talk like this looks I'm guessing team on a competitor to the plastic iPhone or a plastic iPhone let's talk about both okay um but i will say i'm sending people who are looking at this from the video from this live show it probably looks cheaper than it is this deals i already yeah it does this feels surprisingly yes dirty it's there is plastic it's very much made of plastic but it doesn't feel like a cheap plastic phone by any stretch right on yeah i don't know i think it's too good to be a competitor to the plastic iPhone assuming it's what we think it is and definitely not a plastic iPhone competitor no no which we don't know what that's good ready but I mean but it is speak to like that generations coming up sure and this has to lasted two years you're buying crude contract course or upgrading you've got this locked in unless your tmobile or he's doing the really bad ATT plan really where you guys a bunch of money to pay a bunch of money for phones which brings us to of course this next question trying to do really good transitions yes learning skill uh we've got what is motorola betting on the carrier version of the Moto X or the google play edition what's the difference what's better obvious the difference is somewhat more stock Android which is pretty clean as is no you know the difference is people are gonna buy the carrier version yes uh the the google play editions are wonderful and they're gonna make a very core set of nerdy people very happy and a lot of that core set of dirty people who are very happy hour in this office right now um but I mean it's you only make a play across all four carriers if you're really buying in and we've heard rumors about how much money google is putting into marketing this phone and if they wanted to just throw it in the play store and see what happens they would have done that this is a very different play this is this is them trying to be that fourth I mean I think for all intents and purposes there are three phones right now there's and really only two there's the iphone the gs4 and then slightly below the one and this is trying to be that fourth phone in every sense in the realm with that and it's competing on sort of different terms which i think is smart I don't know if it's going to work but I think it's smart but it's it's yeah it's the carriers the carriers will ultimately be what makes or breaks this device which brings me to the other end just one last point the facet verizon loves motorola could be a huge win for this phone well could be honest went for the droid are there gonna be selling this to right and the question then becomes you know people are gonna walk in and they're gonna say hey you should check out our droids and they're like it's kind of big and bulky and expensive and there if if they can get them to be like hey come check out this other phone before you look at the iphone that's a huge win for motorola that's going to happen but that's a huge win that is true and that that does bring the questions like it's into the carrier's hands first question that why not do both why not just give it unlocked no star carries gonna be pissed that you're offered a power much fun to be clear they've not announced how much the play dish is gonna be but if i'm gonna guess 600 bucks so this may be five yeah i mean if they can come out and make it to 99 then you know okay i'm gonna be so yes that I Spit 199 on contract for this uh no but I think I don't know that's a really good question I don't know the answer to that I wonder I wonder why they're doing it that way because the you know there I guess on one hand sort of philosophically getting away from the people who buy those phones but on the other hand like if the people who buy those phones buy that phone that seems like a win for everybody I don't know it's very it's I'm sort of confused by that strategy to but I'm hoping when they say soon they actually mean soon and it's things like October as opposed to you know sometimes when they say soon they mean twenty thirty six right although to your point earlier I have ATT I'm still grandfathered into that unlimited data as dumb as it sounds I'm never let it go so ever leave your eyes yeah so i'm going to i'm paying for that contract for you a ring no matter what so i'm gonna buy on contract and probably gonna buy this i've been waiting for a while to buy a phone yes and why why this as opposed to any other option waiting so damn long no um truth of the matter is and to come too far a little it comes down to almost a fashion thank like this to me all the android phones are good enough for what i want what i need to do with it gmail twitter foursquare sometimes things like that instagram like it does everything i need I just want a camera and I want a bright lights got last I want notifications that aren't bad no offense to the iphone but like no these new gmail app is great despite this is best notification experience I've ever had and I might be the only one the office who hates the one design I do hate the HTC one's lime it looks go ahead to me Ross you're dead it's it's the same thing that Sony argue with like bells and whistles when you get any never use it again if you want borgeous yeah I think it looks gorgeous until i play with it for more than a day in the back scratched up or anything oh my prized by how many people added here that have gotten danger yeah or i have it on my desk like this in that hole wavy back it buzzes its metal on metal in books like I don't want that i really i texted this phone like five times rauf like an hour day going does this bother me does this piss me off no national buzz happy that it's an experiencing like we're talking qualitative or quantitative which unfortunately for us is like basically going to what Motorola wants sure but the right and this is kind of what I want yeah no I mean I I I kind of agree again I need to you know see if everything that they claim is true is actually true right but if it is i think you know i'd rather have a phone that works all day and does everything else well instead of a phone that lasts six hours and does everything else really well right like that's the chime happy to make that trade-off and I think I mean if Motorola's data is right a lot of other people are too but one final question and then we're going to switch gears get to the verge cast maybe take a small break we've gray here hours like just preparing for this where does motorola go from here and the reason i ask cuz like this is the thing bother me so much motorola keeps saying we're past the specs we're done playing the specs game and i'm not entirely sure we're at the point where the specs have plateaued enough to say that I agree but like it's just almost there too like they're making compelling case but where do they go from your mobile is a company who's making a carrot thing it's not really what Google does Google's mantras screw the carriers will do our own right motors like let's just do everything because my OLB bless price what's next so I think and I'm curious to know what you think about this too but i think the pc industry is really instructive here where we had sort of the same spec race where everything up better everything got faster everything got uglier everything got cheaper everything got sort of dumber and overwrought and unnecessary and then we sort of pulled back which is not to say they stopped getting faster they stopped getting better but we started paying attention to design and battery life and how things feel and how they work but i think what what's going to happen here again is that we're going to have sort of a Haswell moment where i hope this is my hope for like the next two years is that somebody's going to come out with a new chip that it's not it's better as as well as better but it enables different things like Haswell has graphics built into the chip so you get better game support from even an ultrabook or like a macbook air right it has unbelievable battery life so you from the same machine you always had just proved better battery life and I think in that sense I think specs are going to start to go away from being objectively faster like by the time you're doing you know billions and billions of calculations every second there's real diminishing returns so the focus is on other things and and I don't think you know I'd love to do 3d CAD modeling on my phone but I don't nobody needs to do that that's not that's not where we all got even a good hypothetical you'd never do kadmo know what anything and that's where you know we can build towards that in a spec race but we can also you know find a way to make our hardware do better things and I think if Motorola can be in a place where it can get some whatever the phone version of some like as well is where it's it's better without being you know the absolute bleeding edge but it enables things like graphics and things like battery life and all this other stuff I think that could get really exciting because motor role is in a lot of ways ahead of the game when it comes to design and manufacturing and they're doing a number of things really well they have the size down they've figured out some of the software and services and now it's just a matter of they've sort of builds a shell that they can fill with better specs this time goes on and that's a pretty good place to be right i mean i don't know i mean we try and figure this out and like this strategy felt very similar to how HTC was positioning itself early on with like the HTC one the one device that matters just the flagship phone and then as time went on an agency was doing worse almost like they're getting better reviews but the quarterly is laying out and they just started releasing other phones acquit did heads are best before there was the windows 8 X Windows Phone a dexterous did okay from Windows Phone sure it's the one man yeah weird number of them in the wild really way more than I see you're you and I thought wanting is there anything like that windows stores mostly not only yes still mostly samsung android devices no but uh no III agree but um but and whatnots practice not know making a good device and selling a ton of them are not necessarily correlated and if Samsung's really good at one thing its marketing everybody else out of the market so yeah it's gonna be insane but what do you think like what what a year from now what do you what should this look like and I can't really disagree the light set but I will say that the specs have to get better because it has to last longer I think 24 hour battery life that's enough like yeah I'm happy like when we talk about ebooks like you and I very long we first met one of the first things he did was like eating nook event it was like a look easy glow like yeah glowlight sorry sorry barnes noble your septa another easy glow light is the next one thank you yeah but we into the event and like oh we've got 48 36 hours of battery life I'm like or no it's two months right and like even for an e-book I'm like that's that's enough I don't care right right very much coming be like a year yeah well I guess that's better and for laptops if you can have a laptop last a day or two right that's enough and we're pretty much there with the house well uh this is 24 hours the you know droid maxx's 48 hours we're proving that we're getting to that point you were hitting this kind of plateau where keep better life is work on efficiency but you can also increase the performance right now camera right which I yeah I need something better than this yeah i agree and that's great the other thing I think is fashion they've got the design done you're happy with this I think motorola though needs to sell it and i don't know if they're gonna do it i like this phone i don't know if people don't walk in the store and go well I don't like the droid is it only the droid could probably get the iphone right i think i agree that's the brandon my great hope is that people know about this phone and i think that's true this is we're talking about its earlier i think this is the third most hyped phone I've ever seen in my life behind the iphone 5 and a galaxy s4 this is i have people who don't know anything about phones being a quince that that new the new x phone coming out i kind of want to get that and i hope i hope to god that motorola can ride that into something for their own sake but yeah i agree i don't i don't know and cameras I've sort of lost hope the cameras are we gonna get like really good but maybe they will those hips well this is my goodbye to the Moto X's at this point I have to give it back to Motorola you're keeping yours review this is mine forever and i am going to flee the country you mean you're keeping a two-week review yeah basic thank you um that this one wrap up because there's like nothing else say we actually have to play with a device more yeah get a good feel your review is coming up yes you just finish this giant future peace literally the minute we're going live dave was still writing it out i'm sorry i think that's why we went live at 302 because i had yeah I thanks you were still correcting things that it's great three or four but we're gonna wrap up here your question is hashtag versione will continue to answer them the road Twitter accounts as much as we can if we don't answer it should be there in the review which is coming shortly we've got to play with it more really figure out the spire life is even close to what they're talking about yeah everyone thanks for joining us go to verse calm for more information we're gonna take a quick break uh get out of this suit I don't know what I was thinking I'm gonna get on to a suit getting you into Julie go relax and it simply set down set back up we'll be back for the verge cast so keep it locked stay tuned and thank you thank you very much for joining us bye