Introducing Moto G: An Exceptional Phone At An Exceptional Price | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Moto G: An Exceptional Phone At An Exceptional Price

motorola-blog.blogspot.com

123 pointsmikeevans85 comments

"All day battery" - that really is the top selling point! Imagine that, a phone that works all day, no babysitting needed! People will flock in vast hordes to buy this baby, and just for this one feature.

'web' rather than 'mobile' version of page:

http://motorola-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/introducing-moto...

Wait. What? I thought this problem was already solved. My Lumia 920 easily lasts through the day without requiring a charge and is already almost a year old.

Lower-end and mid-range phones get this right more often than higher-end phones, I think. My Galaxy Light will easily last for a few days with light to moderate usage.

Mine runs two days on a charge. Ofcourse the downside of the 920 is that it's one of the heaviest phones out there. Still, i'm really happy with it.

My Nexus 5 sat at 80% battery remaining after 26 hours off the charger this morning. This with regular checking of emails, a couple of Facebook forays, some quick tests of a web app, and all of the services and background apps such entails. And despite my office/business being in a rural area with very sketchy cell coverage (thus the phone has to work much harder).

Of course if I used much more screen on time my duration would be single digit hours instead. But such is the problem with comparing battery times when we all do different things with our devices, and use them in significantly different conditions.

That's interesting, for my nexus 5 (granted it's only a few days old so perhaps there is some break-in) seems to go down to 80-85% in 10-15 minutes of morning web surfing/reading.

Perhaps I have a bad device or something?

With high brightness and a lot of active, screen-on use, it will absolutely chew through the battery (though 20% in 15 minutes is extremely excessive: For wifi browsing Anandtech found it to be among the top devices, actually beating the benchmark iPhone devices. They then removed that result from the listing pending the full review release). What impressed me most from it is the standby time which is extremely impressive, even in difficult conditions.

Yeah, my Galaxy Nexus went 24 hours without charging this past weekend and is about the same age, IIRC.

To be honest, I don't understand why manufacturers are still optimizing CPU performance instead of battery life. Who really needs a 4 or even 8-core mobile device? Most people I know with a smartphone, barely make it through the day and I often see them charging their phones at work.

In my opinion, companies should follow Lenovo's lead and address battery life concerns. A phone like the P780, with a 4000mAh battery, is spec'd to last for 36 talking hours [1] and it can easily be used for 2-3 days without charging.

I don't believe it is directly commercialized in the US, but the price point is not far from this Motorola, as it can be acquired from China for around 230-250 USD (e.g. through aliexpress).

[1]: http://shop.lenovo.com/ae/en/smartphones/p-series/p780/

Who needs a 4 core device? Android users.

Try getting an Android 4 device with 4 cores and 2 cores and compare them. The performance difference is stark. The 2 core devices feel very sluggish on Android 4.

There's absolutely no performance difference whatsoever in normal usage. Really, none. Squat. Zilch. Zero.

GPU performance and memory bandwidth are waaaaaaay more important than an extra 2 cores that'll be turned off 99% of the time anyway.

Tell that to my garbage Motorola Photon which had a graphics chip

All phones have a graphics chip, that doesn't mean it's a GOOD graphics chip. It also very much doesn't mean that it's fast enough for the screen resolution.

In the case of your Photon it was also running Gingerbread which didn't have 2D hardware acceleration. Made especially worse by the fact that Tegra 2 doesn't have NEON, so the software painting was extra slow on that device AND it had a "high" resolution.

It was a badly designed device from top to bottom. A quad core wouldn't have done a damn thing to help its pitiful performance (especially as there's still only a single UI thread doing the painting)

No it was not running Gingerbread, the first thing I did was hack it. It was running Cyanogen based on Ice Cream Sandwich.

I would not be surprised by the fact that it was poorly designed, and it's the main reason I will did not nor will not consider another Motorola phone in the future.

I think one argument is that if you have multiple cores you can switch most of them into powersaving mode when they're unused, so you can have lower power use overall with more cores since max utilization won't be reached as often.

That works out, if individual cores are nice and low power. An 8-core 600MHz, for example, would really live up to that ideal. But a 1.2GHz 8-core?

"I don't understand why manufacturers are still optimizing CPU performance instead of battery life."

Maybe the simple answer is that they do not priorize processor power over battery life. Maybe they invest in both, but make more progress in the former than the latter.

Are sure that isn't a euphamism for "if you unplug at 9am you can probably make it until 5pm before it powers off due to dead battery"? Unless you're seeing something I"m not there's nothing really there that tells us anything solid about the actual battery life.

FM radio for 'free' music? Where's the business model in that?. Don't tell me it's going to be ad supported.

Interestingly, a music radio station might not necessarily need to be ad supported, except that payola was for some reason made illegal.

It's not illegal, you just have to announce that it's sponsored (and Wikipedia mentions that it doesn't count as a regular play, but I can't find a citation for that at the moment): http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/317

FM Radio support is very common in Europe and a lot of people use it.

Frequency Modulated radio stations are free in India. It comes with traditional broadcast ad.

BBC Radio One, Two, Three, and Four are transmitted on FM (and others). They are free to receive, and funded by the BBC licence fee. They do not carry ads.

So they are not really free.

The licence fee is payable by people in the UK who use a device to watch broadcast tv.

You don't need a licence for radios. Some people don't use a tv to watch broadcast TV, and so they don't need to pay a licence, and so to those people it is free.

Obviously, pretty much nothing is free, but at some point it becomes tedious to say "free at the point of delivery, but paid for by X".

Life lesson #1: Nothing is really free.

"Free at the point of need", as it were.

It's probably due to the regional/cultural diversity on HN, but I've noticed that tongue-in-cheek humor and sarcasm are inevitably followed with a handful of serious replies here.

Where is FM mentioned?

It's in the techcrunch article.[1]

  There’s also an FM receiver in the phone for “access to free music,”

Sorry I posted this on the wrong article.

[1]http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/motorola-makes-the-moto-g-o...

$199 for an unlocked (or unlockable), contract-free 16 gig device? That's really outstanding. This may even cut into Nexus 5 sales. This may be the adrenaline shot that Motorola needs to get back into the game.

I hope this leads to a whole slew of similarly priced medium-to-high performing handsets. And assembled in the U.S., too. Congratulations to Motorola!

Wow, this is sort of like the Lumia 520 of the Android world. Awesome.

Truly impressive specs/build for the price. Can anyone shed light on whether $179 off-contract is low enough to be successful in its target markets (Brazil, Europe, Asia)?

I think so. For example thl sells the w100(cheapest phone they make) at $154 and it offers lesser specs, and it's targeted for the Chinese market.

$179 is just a bit more expensive, with better specs, so it could succeed.

There are phones with similar specs on that price range in Asia. I got a Lenovo A820 about half a year ago from China for around 140$ (http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-A820-Android-core1-2GHz-Smartph...). It has very similar specs with 4.5" screen and 1.2Ghz quad-core. I think it all depends on how hood build quality Motorola manages to achieve.

This is the price for US. It actually starts at US$280 in Brazil.

Why is it more expensive in Brazil? Is it subsidized in the US because of expected add revenue?

Essentially all electronics are more expensive in Brazil, due to hefty import duties.

$179 in the US means that it'll probably sell for around $400 in Northern Europe. At least, someone in Norway wrote that the $350 Nexus 5 was marked up to $780 (the Swedish price seems to have gone down to $600 from $660).

I was very interested until I got to the part of no LTE support. That's a deal breaker for me. I had a Samsung S3 that I busted and opted for the Samsung S3 Mini at one point, and the lack of LTE cost me dearly. I literally couldn't browse the internet unless I was on Wifi.

You can't use 3g? It's plenty fast for internet browsing (Right now from my phone I get a ping in the range of 60/120ms, ~10mb down and ~1mb up).

Or there are other problems?

3G is spotty. I should preface this by stating that I use Straight Talk with an AT&T SIM which is likely the other half of the problem.

LTE has one killer momentum - extremely low latency. I have to go back (temporarily) to a phone without LTE support and it's a pain, actually.

Edit: I'm from Latvia. We currently have Band 3 only LTE with Band 7 and Band 20 coming next year. And even though actual speeds are not South-Korea-like, 20Mbps+ is a norm.

I'm curious - isn't 3G the fallback speed when LTE is unavailable or when your phone doesn't have LTE support? Or is LTE a separate band that may exist without 3G at all in some regions?

My wife's Nexus 4 (3G) seems to get internet just as often and approximately as fast as my Galaxy Nexus (LTE). Then again I don't stream videos that often over data networks, because it sucks to hit the limit and get choked back to 2G on T-Mo.

3G is a little better then dialup while 4G is more like WiFi-802.11G

I get 7.2MB/s on my 3G...

Looks like you are a lucky one, I was not getting much faster then that on 4G ( pcworld's test results for 4 companies: http://www.pcworld.com/article/253808/3g_and_4g_wireless_spe... )

I wonder if you'll be able to put Firefox OS on these. I've been wanting to play with that OS but the current devices offered for it are very underwhelming to try and push its limits.

It's an unlocked bootloader, assuming you can get the needed device drivers installed into FF OS I don't see why you wouldn't.

My guess is if that's the case, and this device will be widespread and popular overseas, they will specifically target it.

I have a ZTE Open and a Geeksphone.

The 1.1 release was a huge upgrade, but they still have some ways to go. There are problems with the HTML5 Canvas element and positioning DOM nodes/scrolling.

I have a ZTE Open as well. Did they release 1.1 for it? I thought they didn't.

In my experience, it's not straightforward. First you need to install an update from ZTE to unlock fastboot. Then you'll need to compile 1.1 on your own, and flash it yourself. I'm hoping ZTE releases an OTA update, but I'm not holding my breath.

How do you get the 1.1 update for the ZTE Open? Does it need to be downloaded over the air, i.e., won't work if you're using the Open with wifi only?

Exceptional?

How about "A decent phone at a decent price."

WANT. I think I just found my next phone.

I'm worried that Moto might find itself in HTC's shoes: Making truly great phones that nobody buys anyway.

I don't think customers soured on HTC because their phones weren't awesome but because of their shoddy support and updates. The HTC One is the best phone I've owned since their Nexus One (probably the best phone I EVER owned) but they are laggards in getting software updates out. They're smart enough now not to set deadlines they'll break but not setting deadlines is maybe not a great solution to the problem long term.

So.. what did they do to bring the price down? Take a hit and lose money on each phone sold to get gain relevance?

Cheaper SoC, cheaper cameras, no LTE, less RAM, less flash storage, etc.

They skimped on all the things I find underwhelming about my GNexus now. =(

Oh well. I'll just pick up an HTC One off Craigslist for $300.

Why not a Nexus 5? It didn't skimp on any of those things and is $349 unlocked on the Play store.

Better build quality and camera; similar specs and price

I wish I could do that. Unfortunately I'm on Verizon. :(

Quick comparison: http://versus.com/en/google-nexus-5-vs-motorola-moto-g

Think you might want to stick to the Nexus. I personally am perfectly happy with my Xiaomi Mi2s 16Gb, although I could have done with more space: http://versus.com/en/xiaomi-mi-2s-16gb-vs-motorola-moto-g

I just hope it has good speakers. Too many of the Nexus family of devices use speakers as a place to cut corners.

The Verge article claims that they still make a profit on each phone[1].

1. http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/13/5096680/motorola-moto-g-a...

I'm really impressed, this is exactly what Google should be working toward. I remember them saying they're looking toward the next billion phones, and putting products like this and the Nexus 5 in their respective price points definitely looks like a move in the right direction.

Interesting, but this review shows there's no SD card, so I won't be buying it. http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/motorola-moto-g/4505-645...

Motorola Brazil seems to be down right now, probably updating for this phone.

motorola.com.br

I'm very anxious to see how much they will charge. The Moto X goes for R$ 1499.00 unlocked or US$ 645.

Electronics arrive here at ridiculous prices unfortunately.

The Playstation 4 will be released at a US$2,000.00 price point.

Here are the prices for the Brazilian version.

    8GB single chip: R$649 (US$280)
    8GB dual-chip: R$699 (US$300)
    16GB dual-chip with 3 covers: R$799 (US$344)
    16GB dual-chip in a package that includes a headphone: R$999 (US$430)

For someone in the US it seems a lot, but it's actually very well priced IMO.

Source: http://www.techtudo.com.br/noticias/noticia/2013/11/moto-g-d...

Come on, big screen with low resolution, weak CPU/GPU, reduced RAM - Samsung's approach to sell cheap phones which look like Galaxy S III/IV.

Is this what is called innovations nowadays?)

I wonder why they skipped the Xmas launch in the USA? Either way, I'm happy to be Canadian for once, this is seriously tempting.

Probably not to undermine sales of the Nexus 5. Anyweay I'm waiting until January, this looks like a nice phone that does more than enough of what I want.

Anyone knows the soundtrack of the youtube video?

I wondered that myself, to my ear it sounds a bit like Blackalicious, one of my favorite underground hip-hop acts. Turns out it's Wax Tailor's Positively Inclined.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv44r3q6zgo

Dope!

How would this compare to an HTC One?

Half the specs, quarter of the price.

I have the nexus 4 right now, this might have to be my next phone.

Why? Isn't it equivalent or worse than the N4?

It depends on when he plans to get his next phone.

I would consider buying this if I accidentally dropped my N4 in a lake, so it could be my next phone.

Won't buy a phone that does not have an SD or microSD slot.

Unless Google is bundling this with an unlimited bandwidth cellular plan, 8GB/16GB are totally inadequate for anyone who hopes to create or consume audio/visual content.

this is low enough to buy one for the unused numbers on our company plan that are still in contract for whatever reason.

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