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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

A competitive globally accessible phone price would be $50, not $200. This feels more like a cheap 1st world phone than a global one.

ZTE and other have already made 50 dollar phones using Android and Windows + Asha won't be far behind at $60.

Motorola has a long ways to go (4x price reduction) to truly get their android devices into India, China And other poorer regions of South America and Africa.

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I'm from India and I've been looking to buy a smartphone in this price range for sometime. The Lumia 520 seemed really attractive as it was the only phone in the $200 price range that wasn't crap.

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.

> if its available for this price in India

The blog says it will be available in India in January.

>Motorola has a long ways to go (4x price reduction) to truly get their android devices into India, China And other poorer regions of South America and Africa.

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.

Woodside said that the average worldwide is more around the $200 mark.

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.

Nokia has been making great windows phones for cheap like the 521 that routinely available for as little as 70 bucks. The hardware is lower spec as compared to this one but windows phone is known to run well on slower hardware. It will be interesting to see how well Android runs on this.

I have recently returned from business trips to China and India and it's a fair statement to say that people are either spending a whole bunch of money on flagship phones ($1000 for a Galaxy Note 3 in India), they're sticking with dumb phones, or they're reluctantly forking over $200-400 for entry level smart phones. Karbonn, Oppo, Meizu and others are all trying to crack this market, but until now they're spent more time trying to compete at the "cheaper flagships than Samsung/HTC/LG/Sony" than than the "accessible decent smartphone" market.

It seems very similarly specced to the htc first, the "facebook" phone, which is just about the best deal as far as used handsets go. I got mine for $140 shipped from gazelle's ebay store, and it has been a delight to use.

The Moto G is a very high quality phone for only $200. The $50 phones out there are extremely low quality in comparison.

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.

> in 5 years it will still be a decent phone at the low end of the market

The original iPhone which started this market was only released 6 years ago. 5 years ago the flagship phone for android was the HTC Dream/T-mobile G1. That was top-end at the time and no way could it be considered "still a decent phone at the low-end" today. I think you're underestimating progress in this industry

You're wrong. The "cool in-crowd" of Nigeria can totally afford this phone(minus shipping costs that I don't know about). "Only" the poorest of the poor are left out. Like, people who can barely feed their families, which I guess is a lot in some areas of the world. But for anyone who has enough money in a 3rd world country to think about buying jeans, going to the movies, hanging out in an internet-cafe. A good amount of those folks can get a $200 phone. Might take a few months of saving up, but they can do it.

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