I hoped it is based on the X8 architecture, but is just "normal". So it makes not sense to compare it with Moto X, is a different phone, different target, is no "little brother", more like a distant "poor cousin".
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.
didn't work during previous 20+ years of PC era.
This might be my next. What's for sure is I'm never buying another $600 phone again.
So, unlocked, is this thing jail-breakable/cyanogenmodable or similar?
What's a reasonable expectation for how many years I could keep it security upgraded?
But yeah, $600-900... never again.
This is probably still too expensive for another billion people.
I think the most recent version of android is the most important part. really.
It's closer to the 2012 N7 Quad 1.3/1Gb RAM.
Still a hell of a lot of phone/screen for the money.
If this had been around when I bought my N4 I would have been very tempted (as I just want something that is a decent mobile web browser, I don't really use Apps at all).
That's running on a stock Galaxy Nexus.
I agree that a cheap performant phone is what is quite revolutionary. Google/Motorola does it right.