Moto X phone specifications
motorola.com
motorola.com
Particularly cringeworthy:
* "Your socks, your watch, your bike say so much about you" * "Play Goldilocks and choose the right size for you: 16 or 32 MB" Was Goldilocks really the best pick here--isn't this the male pitch, badger hair shaving brush, tortoise shell glasses and all? Didn't Goldilocks have three choices? * "you'll never miss those OMG-that-was-sick-did-you-see-that moments" Sick copy brah. * "Moto X responds to your voice, no touching necessary. (That's what she said.)" This doesn't even make sense as a joke.
I won't speak to the marketing copy here. I agree it certainly doesn't move me, but then I'm (and no doubt you're) hardly in the target demographic either.
Then again, I'm probably not their target audience either since I won't go for anything not a Nexus device and dislike preachy advertising for any brand.
I once wrote about Apple was losing their way in terms of their marketing writing, but it seems their competition is not even close to catching up.
As a lowly marketer it strikes me as unfair/frustrating that there are people out there getting paid triple what I get paid writing unconvincing drivel that treats the customer as a dumb internet meme.
Snapping in place a back plate doesn't change the reality that the device is 99% manufactured and assembled in China.
Disappointing from Motorola/Google.
Is that not the case?
If you want to buy a smartphone based on the fact that it has 4 ARM cores, you are buying on specs, not on actual delivered capability, and those extra cores may very well be eating up more power and more die space for no reason. (I'm not talking about Moto X's low-power DSP cores, I'm talking about having 4 Krait or ARM 15 cores)
GPU cores are different because GPU workloads are automatically parallelizable, but then again, you only need as many GPU cores as it takes to drive average workloads at the given pixel density. It makes no sense to include enough GPU to render a game at 250 frames per second. Developers are most likely not going to spend time optimizing a game for a high end GPU like it was some kind of console in a fragmented market like Android.
Point is, one should look at these phones from a practical standpoint and ignore the spec sheets. Does it take good pictures? Does it feel fast? Does the screen look good? Does the battery last long? Does it feel good to hold and lightweight? Does it do cool stuff that makes you more productive, etc.
If you buy phones on spec alone you may end up with a POS that looks good on paper but is irritating to use.
Take the Galaxy S4, sure, on paper and benchmarks (some of which are cheats), it looks great. But how often are those peak rates hit? How much Android software really takes advantage of the full power of the device? How much battery life is sacrificed, or size?
You could say that the screen or memory capacity might be objectively better, but again, how much of a price in battery life are you paying for those displays?
Also, on customization, consider that Motorola is going to build and ship, to you, a phone in 4 days. Maybe you don't care about any of the color options, but you have to admit, being able to assemble and ship a phone to you with a 4-day turnaround is impressive and is a manufacturing capability that is sure to useful for other things in the future.
The big problem I see with the Moto X is the price. A mid-range phone should not be 550 off-contract. I was seriously expecting a $299-349 price for this kind of device. Maybe we will see that with the Play edition? I doubt it though.
The high cost is a result of having it made in the USA, no doubt.
It's hard not to when it is often the only thing differentiating one Android phone from another.
http://www.droid-life.com/2013/08/01/moto-x-bootloader-is-lo...
So that's that. I was waiting for this reveal before deciding on a new phone purchase, but that's not remotely acceptable for me. Looks like a GS4 Google Edition is in my future instead.
But this phone still feels 90 percent Motorola, rather than 90 percent Google. Hopefully by next year they'll learn from all the criticism they're getting right now, and make a true Google phone.
The Nexus 7 seems like a much better product/value than Moto X, and that felt very much like a "Google device".
Maybe the companies aren't integrated enough for that, yet? You'd think Google would be more of a mind with its own company than with the competition, though!
That this version is not available right at launch sucks, but it's not like they can just dictate to carriers whatever they want.
They probably had to make some concessions (like the AT&T exclusive on the designs) to get the phone in the front of every store. They obviously want to go mainstream with that device, and for that you need the cooperation of all the big carriers. (and thats probably not so easy considering that it took Apple years to get its iPhone sold by most carriers)
Why not? Apple does. And because Apple has paved the way since 2007, it should be much easier for Googorola. All it has to do is make a phone that consumers want. That way the telcos won’t be able to ignore it.
Surprisingly meh across the board, even if the price were in Nexus 4 territory. At $200 on contract it is a sad and unfunny joke.
Between this and the fact that Google destroyed Navigation with Android Maps 7.0.2, I'm starting to doubt my next phone will be an Android device at all, which is an idea that would have been unfathomable to me a few months ago.
They certainly want the prefix to all voice commands to be a low incidence sequence of phonemes for any language so that you don't get spurious activations and drain battery and/or accidentally execute a command, but I would think "OK Google" is a rare enough phrase that it would suffice.
A five syllable "wake up" command just seems excessive.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/1/4578890/this-is-the-moto-x
Retconning "Google Now" into a voice assistant is weird because at IO they were saying how they wanted Google itself be the assistant, by modelling it after the Star Trek computer.
Also what happens when the actual, predictive Google Now comes out for Chrome?
http://i.imgur.com/npxvDcQ.png
There's a header element further down the page "Feminine mystique", not sure what that has to do with a phone.
And then near the bottom there's some cringeworthy copy:
"Never ever, ever, like never, miss a shot ... And you'll never miss those OMG-that-was-sick-did-you-see-that moments again either."
Like dude, that phone is so sick....what? Is it meant to be a caricature of US youth?
Ouch.
"TWSS" is still a pretty popular (but pretty over used) thing. So I don't really see the issue there.
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Battery-Charger-2100mAh-Includ...
+ bought an extra battery (for a total of 3 batteries for ~$30).
(though people who have samsung devices, given the market penetration that samsung has, are probably in better shape than others in this respect)
http://demandware.edgesuite.net/aahb_prd/on/demandware.stati...
to
hero-moto-x-08.jpg
EDIT: looks like they are using this jquery plugin https://github.com/danmillar/jquery-anystretch
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Very similar specs to my current
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Nexus
Wow, please no. Google, just relieve them from their pain already.
Edit: "People are skydiving out of space ships." [Citation needed]! What ship has gone to space and also let someone skydive?!
Old news, I know. :P
Back on topic, I'm still looking for the specs...
Wait, so you get more free cloud storage than what the phone actually supports? Interesting.