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

I think it's probably a smart play for Moto/Goog to target this space, but "high end" it ain't.

Doubt US carriers are going to let that happen, I haven't seen many negative prices except on feature phones.

Only Tmobile seems to be willing to let the consumer take advantage of lower handset prices. Also, wonder how much Motorola makes(or loses) per Moto G at these prices.

Anyway I hope the Moto G does better than the Moto X. Even with the massive hype and the continuing ad blitz on TV(I see around 3 to 4 Moto X ads in about 2 hours TV viewing) about customization and the always-on voice features, it doesn't seem to be selling well[1].

Starting from the 500K sales figure in the 3rd quarter and generously adding, say, a million more in Q4, the rumored ad budget of $500M [2] would mean Google is spending ~$333 per handset in advertisements.

That would probably add more to the already heavy Motorola losses[3] and Google shareholders would soon be questioning the merits of subsidizing Motorola's losses.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/11/motorola-plans-low-co...

[2] http://androidandme.com/2013/07/news/wsj-google-to-promote-m...

[3] http://mobilenewsblog.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Sc...

Other than "find my phone" features, I can't help you with losing it, however.

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.

If I had to choose between G a S4 and both costed $200, I would immediately go for the G.

That sounds much more likely than some digital class nonsense.

Edit: Also the assumption that people with smartphones are going to be better behaved than normal is... not based in reality. It's not like taxis are stopping for e.g. homeless people that camp out inside the taxi all day.

It would be an incredible effort for little usage in a world where the smart phone is becoming the default phone world wide. It's the same reasoning why they don't have have a windows phone app either. The amount of work it would be to create a J2ME app that works on many dumbphone models would probably be 10x, not to mention the difficulty in finding people who would even work in such a dead end platform.

It's Verizon which has decided explicitly not to be compatible with phones which works everywhere else in the world.

It's like an ISP which decides that it doesn't want to use TCP/IP, but instead goes off and makes their own network-protocol, which requires its own custom OS preloaded on customer-computers.

You can hardly blame phone-vendors for not being on that ship. It's much more profitable to make one model which works everywhere.

At first, Android needed faster phones that it was getting from OEMs, but they went way overboard. Samsung soaks up a lot of that excess horsepower with bloatware.

Here is a $200 phone with 4(!!!) cores and a very robust GPU. Even that is probably a bit more than neccessary. Android 4.4 got some performance tuning. Once ART is the default VM for typical OEM builds, it should be even less apparent why you need a monster CPU chip.

The only thing a thumping CPU gives you is the ability to ignore what your bad apps and OEM bloatware are doing to performance longer than otherwise. Disable the boatware and clear out the sketchy apps you don't use and that Tegra 3 is just fine.

Motorola still hasn't posted a profit since Google's purchase. I don't see how this product is going to turn those tables.

It could be they will simply become Google's hardware R&D arm and effectively a cost-center.

They say their target research shows that people are spending $200 on poor quality phones. If that's the target they're going for and that's what they research shows, I don't think they missed the mark.

The Moto G looks really compelling and if its available for this price in India I would buy it in a heartbeat. If this phone is as good as claimed (and thats a big if) then Samsung and Nokia stand to lose a lot of ground.

And as for the $50 price point I'm not sure you can provide a true smartphone experience at that price.

There is a lack of usable smartphones in this price range and the longer it goes unaddressed the more ground Android will lose to phones like the Lumia 520.

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.

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.