Those are brilliant specs for the price point. I have a feeling Motorola could make a killing if they just market this thing right. It could be like the 3210 of the smartphone age - it even has interchangeable covers.
Hmm. It's similar to a 2013 Nexus 7 on the inside, clocked lower, half the RAM and quarter the screen reso, but not that dissimilar. I do wish they'd at least included NFC and Miracast. LTE is a mixed bag because of the lack of standardization on bands, but I guess that's not the target market.
I'm just gonna assume that's straight trolling... that website's totally useless, most of the specs listed completely irrelevant for a tablet vs smartphone comparison :-)
The Moto G's lower clocked A7 performs well below the 2012 Nexus 7's Tegra 3, let alone the current Nexus 7's processor.
Woah, if the general quality holds up as well as the X, that's a very appealing price point. Cortex A7s aren't the greatest but the majority of non-high end users won't be left wanting for CPU performance with four of them I would assume.
Adreno 305 is roughly same performance as Adreno 225 (HTC One X/GS3), but using the new unified shader architecture, or about half the performance of Adreno 305. It's good enough for 720p. It helps that Cortex A7 is very efficient.
I feel that a lot of vendors, as they position their low-end devices, end up stripping too much away relative to their flagships. It just looks like Motorola went through every spec of the X and downgraded it, even down to making the thing thicker and heavier, even though there is less in the device and a smaller battery. The overall package is unappealing.
It just strikes me that the company is not picking a price point and trying to cram as much in as it can. Second user flagships from the previous generation look like better value (or Nexus 4).
Also, Motorola X is pretty much unavailable ex USA, yet now the G is being released in Europe and LatAm, which is puzzling.
I guess you missed the price. It costs only 200 dollars. Nexus 4? Stop joking. It costs over 400 dollars here in India. The world consists of more than just Europe and America.
Correction mate, the nexus 4 is available at roughly 325 USD at most online resellers in India. I think nexus 4 would be better bet as it has more RAM, better processor & GPU. However if Moto could sneak in with TD- LTE support chip for India, it has an ace up its sleeve as even the nexus 5 doesn't support Indian LTE bands. Reliance Gio is expected to launch LTE services shortly on 2300Mhz on band 40 TD- LTE
Carriers (especially Verizon) DON'T WANT CHEAP OFF CONTRACT PHONES - it doesn't allow them to lock in their customers. T-Mobile is working to change this but they are not big enough to actually present Verizon/ATT with a true competitive threat. If you are outside TMo's major metropolitan areas you quickly drop to 2G/no cell coverage. I am lucky enough to have a relatively inexpensive, grandfathered Verizon plan (my costs would go up by 50% if I was forced onto a mobile share plan) but the only option for me is ATT because I live in a small town and need good coverage when I travel and neither Sprint or TMo is an option and ATT is just as expensive as Verizon. Verizon has said they will pick this up on prepaid which works for them as this is a 3G/HSPA+ 21 phone only.
Stupid Indian Markets will still sell it more than $200 In indian markets we dont see any price drops only Indian vendors tend to monopolize n charge premium for phones Almost every vendor does the same way Its a shame to see no kind of competition to drop the prices down :(
Nobody got the $200 Nexus 4's outside of the US, and even if they did, I doubt they would lower their initial prices, since the $200 Nexus 4 was available for so little time anyway.
What you got was the original price of the Nexus 4 at retailers. Here Nexus 5 is around $600, too. My guess is Moto G will be around $250 here, which is still much better price than a Nexus 5 or other flagships. That's what's important, not that it's a little more than what's in US. You'll never get the US prices in other countries.
This means almost nothing unless you're on verizon: in which case it's perhaps the most exciting phone story in years. It's too soon to say which US carriers will get it and if there will be LTE but man this is great to see.
Those are impressive specs for a $200 phone. 4.5" 720p is a great selling point and most customers will be okay with 4 A7s. Single core performance is about on par with a 1ghz A9 which is still workable and with 4.3 it should support trim which is what I found was what was slowing down my device after about a year of use. I know plenty of people that don't need CPU speed out of their phones and yet still want a reasonably sized display.
I'm surprised people like this phone based on the specs and the price point. Quad A7 is nothing to phone home about, in fact if you are content with those measly specs there're plenty of China shops around offering nothing better at an even cheaper price...
Would you really go with a cheap chinese knockoff over a fully supported phone from google itself? And a quad A7 isn't a performance monster, but it isn't half bad either. The best thing about the phone is the 4.5" 720p display and android 4.3
Qualcomm has four families of cortex-a7 based SoCs: dual-core MSM8x10 and quad-core MSM8x12, MSM8x26, MSM8x28. LTE-enabled "sku" has MSM8x28-line only.
another win for google and android. delivering a cheap smartphone with a pleasant display resolution is just the win companies like nokia have missed (although windows phone just made it up recently to support decent display resolutions).
Moto makes the same dumb mistakes as everybody else and adds to that. The SoC is passable for the price this year but 5MP cam is not good enough and people don't like features that are not good enough. No microSD is just ridiculous, you have to be dropped on your head multiple times to think you can go after developing markets without a SD slot. Free wifi is not all that easy to find outside of the developed world and in the end any company that cripples it's products out of greed (like Google does here, like Apple...always) doesn't deserve our money or any respect. If Moto G had an 8MP cam and a microSD slot at 200$ , it could sell twice as many units so it's quite a pity that it's flawed.
You are free to buy Chinese Clones that don't have good enough build quality or camera optimizations or decent app support or bug-free software. And good luck dealing with their customer service.
These extra services cost, my friend. I haven't bought a Chinese clone yet. But from the horrible "user reviews" I have read all around the Internet I had better be safe than sorry.
The drop to 1gig of RAM is a real problem when the baseline for most phones today is 2gig. Living with today's Apps on a Droid X2 which only has 512MB of memory is painful. Say i have an pod cast playing while i'm tracking my run. Chances of one or the other getting clobbered by Android are extremely high. And it's getting worse. Now maybe Microsoft phone or Apple have better behaved memory management. But Android doesn't, and the O/S expects to be able to do things that sometimes doesn't have the memory to do. Then my phone reboots. My contract with Verizon can not end soon enough.
You're forgetting it's getting KitKat soon, which should run well even on 512 MB. The flagship iPhone this year also has only 1 GB of RAM, and it uses 64-bit apps, so they use 30 percent more memory than usual.
The RAM won't be the bottleneck. If anything, it's the CPU. But for the price, it's good enough.
Will they make a serious international play here? It will at least be available in Europe now, but it was sad to see Motorola Mobility come back to the market just to fade out again when Google took over, you can't really buy a Motorola phone at the moment in Sweden, neither has there been much of products from them, they actually hasn't capitalized on tablets at all either, neither is any sold today. Mind you here Nexus 5 as sold through LG will cost ~635 dollars with sales tax, over 500 USD without, that's for the 349 dollar version. At least it's fun to see that it's more of a high-end device now, with LTE, 11 AC and NFC, and while they skimp out on the camera at least the pixel size has gone up. Screen is really on par with the competition now too. Their website kinda reminds me of Palm now, they have very little to show. There are certainly enterprise and consumer niches they could go after if they wanted to.
At least it is fairly cheap, it's £135 in the UK, that would be about 220 USD for the 8GB. Now when it comes to tablet, there is really only the choice of Nexus 7 and iPads in my country. Samsung devices sell, but there is not a lot choice plus it's not like it would be hard to compete against low end HP, Lenovo, Asus and Acer devices.
For those complaining about MicroSD, it's an unlocked device (bootloader) check if there will be any custom roms that has mass storage support first as that's at least a way to add storage.
When I say there isn't much tablet choice, I mean it btw. There is no Nook, Kindle (well they can ship them from the UK, but you don't really get access to much content or services) or Kobo. Just the ordinary Sony, LG, Huawei, Apple, Asus, Acer, Samsung etc bunch. Which basically mean Nexus 7 is the Android choice and there really isn't any competition in retail.
If they released an almost identical phone with a little more RAM and a top quartile camera (possibly a better CPU) for $75-$100 extra, not only would Google sweep up the budget market, I think they would grab a lot of middle to high cost sales in Europe. Aside from aesthetics, photo quality is one of the most visible differences between phones at the moment.
>not only would Google sweep up the budget market, I think they would grab a lot of middle to >high cost sales in Europe.
Actually I suspect they wouldn't because $100 more and you start running into subsidised / contract phones in Europe. And in that case you are suddenly up against a $400 phone which is "free" on contract.
Where they are now is right at the sweet spot for unsubsidised PAYG. Actually it might be pushing the more expensive end of it - recall the Lumia 520 was £109 and sold like hotcakes and the Lumia 620 was £149 and didn't (smaller screen didn't help though, IMHO).
Well yeah, subsidized phones on contract typically cost the same no matter if they are 450 or 650 USD equivalent. That is part of the reason iPhone, Galaxy and other high-end devices are doing so well.
As for payg, it's at least 135 - 160 GBP contract free in the UK, I'm elsewhere but that is surely above bargain payg-devices. It's often twice the amount. So it's not exactly a replacement for the Defy Mini.
It's at least something that can compete with previous generation stuff, but not more than so basically. It falls into the same price as HTC One V or Desire X, or Sony Xperia J and that class any how. Sure it's better than something like the Galaxy S3 mini too.
Hard to believe people don't see the value in this $179/199 phone off contract and available at that price from carriers. This is like Nexus 5 value at a even smaller price point and personally I would be fine with the specs for this price. Looks great too.
I'm curious about where this is made. I prefer iOS > Windows Phone > Android, but among android devices I'd consider this, Nvidia's devices, and the Nexus lines, and obviously being made in the U.S. would be a nice selling point.
Specs seem okay, though I wonder how the A7 really performs. My understanding is even though it's smaller, it supposedly is within spitting distance of the A9, like it's much better than A8?
Oh well, at worst it's got to be one of the better phones for the price.
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chrone - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Awesome!aakash_sin - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Waiting for it to come to India :) Awesome value for Money..blanarahul - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Ugh. I just bought a Xperia L for Rs. 16,500. I should have waited. Damn it!!!shwetshkla - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
though xperia l is awesome too. :) I like sony's new line up alot, be it xperia m or z1.Krysto - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Yeah, I was considering Xperia T, Xperia SP or L. I'm going to get Moto G now.Boissez - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Those are brilliant specs for the price point. I have a feeling Motorola could make a killing if they just market this thing right. It could be like the 3210 of the smartphone age - it even has interchangeable covers.vnangia - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Hmm. It's similar to a 2013 Nexus 7 on the inside, clocked lower, half the RAM and quarter the screen reso, but not that dissimilar. I do wish they'd at least included NFC and Miracast. LTE is a mixed bag because of the lack of standardization on bands, but I guess that's not the target market.usama_ah - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Just a small correction: the quad core in the Nexus 7 2013 is Krait based whereas these are Cortex A7 based.jjj - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
No it's not ,it's quad A7 so less than the old Nexus.HenriSauvage - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
http://versus.com/en/motorola-moto-g-vs-asus-googl...Agreed... Looks a damn sight better than the Nexus 7 on comparison of the specs!
themossie - Friday, November 15, 2013 - link
I'm just gonna assume that's straight trolling... that website's totally useless, most of the specs listed completely irrelevant for a tablet vs smartphone comparison :-)The Moto G's lower clocked A7 performs well below the 2012 Nexus 7's Tegra 3, let alone the current Nexus 7's processor.
tipoo - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Woah, if the general quality holds up as well as the X, that's a very appealing price point. Cortex A7s aren't the greatest but the majority of non-high end users won't be left wanting for CPU performance with four of them I would assume.I wonder how that Adreno 305 does?
Krysto - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Adreno 305 is roughly same performance as Adreno 225 (HTC One X/GS3), but using the new unified shader architecture, or about half the performance of Adreno 305. It's good enough for 720p. It helps that Cortex A7 is very efficient.Krysto - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Err. "about half the performance of Adreno 320.Klug4Pres - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
I feel that a lot of vendors, as they position their low-end devices, end up stripping too much away relative to their flagships. It just looks like Motorola went through every spec of the X and downgraded it, even down to making the thing thicker and heavier, even though there is less in the device and a smaller battery. The overall package is unappealing.It just strikes me that the company is not picking a price point and trying to cram as much in as it can. Second user flagships from the previous generation look like better value (or Nexus 4).
Also, Motorola X is pretty much unavailable ex USA, yet now the G is being released in Europe and LatAm, which is puzzling.
blanarahul - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
I guess you missed the price. It costs only 200 dollars.Nexus 4? Stop joking. It costs over 400 dollars here in India. The world consists of more than just Europe and America.
Klug4Pres - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
OK, fair enough on Nexus 4 outside Play Store countries. What about second user flagships? I don't know the Indian market.nerd1 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Imagine the price of SECOND HANDED moto G. :D $100 maybe?blanarahul - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
People don't buy second hand phones here.sudipt123 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Correction mate, the nexus 4 is available at roughly 325 USD at most online resellers in India. I think nexus 4 would be better bet as it has more RAM, better processor & GPU. However if Moto could sneak in with TD- LTE support chip for India, it has an ace up its sleeve as even the nexus 5 doesn't support Indian LTE bands.Reliance Gio is expected to launch LTE services shortly on 2300Mhz on band 40 TD- LTE
blanarahul - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
363.42 USD. According to Google Calculator.trivor - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
Carriers (especially Verizon) DON'T WANT CHEAP OFF CONTRACT PHONES - it doesn't allow them to lock in their customers. T-Mobile is working to change this but they are not big enough to actually present Verizon/ATT with a true competitive threat. If you are outside TMo's major metropolitan areas you quickly drop to 2G/no cell coverage. I am lucky enough to have a relatively inexpensive, grandfathered Verizon plan (my costs would go up by 50% if I was forced onto a mobile share plan) but the only option for me is ATT because I live in a small town and need good coverage when I travel and neither Sprint or TMo is an option and ATT is just as expensive as Verizon. Verizon has said they will pick this up on prepaid which works for them as this is a 3G/HSPA+ 21 phone only.stirredo - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
I take it no microSD slot?If its going to release the phone in third world country where internet is a luxury microSD should have been an option.
nerd1 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Truely remarkable phone, especially compared to $549 iphone 5C. :DSo you can switch backplate just like galaxy phones - then can you SWAP battery?
kishorshack - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Stupid Indian Markets will still sell it more than $200In indian markets we dont see any price drops only
Indian vendors tend to monopolize n charge premium for phones
Almost every vendor does the same way
Its a shame to see no kind of competition to drop the prices down :(
kishorshack - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Nexus 4 could be available for $200 in USStill we get the device for Rs 29000
That around $600
Krysto - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Nobody got the $200 Nexus 4's outside of the US, and even if they did, I doubt they would lower their initial prices, since the $200 Nexus 4 was available for so little time anyway.What you got was the original price of the Nexus 4 at retailers. Here Nexus 5 is around $600, too. My guess is Moto G will be around $250 here, which is still much better price than a Nexus 5 or other flagships. That's what's important, not that it's a little more than what's in US. You'll never get the US prices in other countries.
blanarahul - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Which country do you live in?willis936 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
This means almost nothing unless you're on verizon: in which case it's perhaps the most exciting phone story in years. It's too soon to say which US carriers will get it and if there will be LTE but man this is great to see.Hubb1e - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Those are impressive specs for a $200 phone. 4.5" 720p is a great selling point and most customers will be okay with 4 A7s. Single core performance is about on par with a 1ghz A9 which is still workable and with 4.3 it should support trim which is what I found was what was slowing down my device after about a year of use. I know plenty of people that don't need CPU speed out of their phones and yet still want a reasonably sized display.Conficio - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Congratulations to Motorola for having a reasonable price step for more memory & off-contract prices!Daniel Egger - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
I'm surprised people like this phone based on the specs and the price point. Quad A7 is nothing to phone home about, in fact if you are content with those measly specs there're plenty of China shops around offering nothing better at an even cheaper price...Hubb1e - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Would you really go with a cheap chinese knockoff over a fully supported phone from google itself? And a quad A7 isn't a performance monster, but it isn't half bad either. The best thing about the phone is the 4.5" 720p display and android 4.3blanarahul - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
I think you don't know how poor Mediatek's SoCs are in terms of GPU horsepower, power efficiency, and app support.aakash_sin - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
+1En1gma - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Qualcomm has four families of cortex-a7 based SoCs: dual-core MSM8x10 and quad-core MSM8x12, MSM8x26, MSM8x28.LTE-enabled "sku" has MSM8x28-line only.
stefstef - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
another win for google and android. delivering a cheap smartphone with a pleasant display resolution is just the win companies like nokia have missed (although windows phone just made it up recently to support decent display resolutions).jjj - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Moto makes the same dumb mistakes as everybody else and adds to that.The SoC is passable for the price this year but 5MP cam is not good enough and people don't like features that are not good enough.
No microSD is just ridiculous, you have to be dropped on your head multiple times to think you can go after developing markets without a SD slot. Free wifi is not all that easy to find outside of the developed world and in the end any company that cripples it's products out of greed (like Google does here, like Apple...always) doesn't deserve our money or any respect.
If Moto G had an 8MP cam and a microSD slot at 200$ , it could sell twice as many units so it's quite a pity that it's flawed.
nerd1 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
You are complaining at $179 smartphone?blanarahul - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
You are free to buy Chinese Clones that don't have good enough build quality or camera optimizations or decent app support or bug-free software. And good luck dealing with their customer service.These extra services cost, my friend. I haven't bought a Chinese clone yet. But from the horrible "user reviews" I have read all around the Internet I had better be safe than sorry.
mike8675309 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
The drop to 1gig of RAM is a real problem when the baseline for most phones today is 2gig. Living with today's Apps on a Droid X2 which only has 512MB of memory is painful. Say i have an pod cast playing while i'm tracking my run. Chances of one or the other getting clobbered by Android are extremely high. And it's getting worse. Now maybe Microsoft phone or Apple have better behaved memory management. But Android doesn't, and the O/S expects to be able to do things that sometimes doesn't have the memory to do. Then my phone reboots. My contract with Verizon can not end soon enough.Krysto - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
You're forgetting it's getting KitKat soon, which should run well even on 512 MB. The flagship iPhone this year also has only 1 GB of RAM, and it uses 64-bit apps, so they use 30 percent more memory than usual.The RAM won't be the bottleneck. If anything, it's the CPU. But for the price, it's good enough.
Penti - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Will they make a serious international play here? It will at least be available in Europe now, but it was sad to see Motorola Mobility come back to the market just to fade out again when Google took over, you can't really buy a Motorola phone at the moment in Sweden, neither has there been much of products from them, they actually hasn't capitalized on tablets at all either, neither is any sold today. Mind you here Nexus 5 as sold through LG will cost ~635 dollars with sales tax, over 500 USD without, that's for the 349 dollar version. At least it's fun to see that it's more of a high-end device now, with LTE, 11 AC and NFC, and while they skimp out on the camera at least the pixel size has gone up. Screen is really on par with the competition now too. Their website kinda reminds me of Palm now, they have very little to show. There are certainly enterprise and consumer niches they could go after if they wanted to.At least it is fairly cheap, it's £135 in the UK, that would be about 220 USD for the 8GB. Now when it comes to tablet, there is really only the choice of Nexus 7 and iPads in my country. Samsung devices sell, but there is not a lot choice plus it's not like it would be hard to compete against low end HP, Lenovo, Asus and Acer devices.
For those complaining about MicroSD, it's an unlocked device (bootloader) check if there will be any custom roms that has mass storage support first as that's at least a way to add storage.
Penti - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
When I say there isn't much tablet choice, I mean it btw. There is no Nook, Kindle (well they can ship them from the UK, but you don't really get access to much content or services) or Kobo. Just the ordinary Sony, LG, Huawei, Apple, Asus, Acer, Samsung etc bunch. Which basically mean Nexus 7 is the Android choice and there really isn't any competition in retail.snax001 - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
If they released an almost identical phone with a little more RAM and a top quartile camera (possibly a better CPU) for $75-$100 extra, not only would Google sweep up the budget market, I think they would grab a lot of middle to high cost sales in Europe. Aside from aesthetics, photo quality is one of the most visible differences between phones at the moment.Jon Tseng - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
>not only would Google sweep up the budget market, I think they would grab a lot of middle to>high cost sales in Europe.
Actually I suspect they wouldn't because $100 more and you start running into subsidised / contract phones in Europe. And in that case you are suddenly up against a $400 phone which is "free" on contract.
Where they are now is right at the sweet spot for unsubsidised PAYG. Actually it might be pushing the more expensive end of it - recall the Lumia 520 was £109 and sold like hotcakes and the Lumia 620 was £149 and didn't (smaller screen didn't help though, IMHO).
Penti - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
Well yeah, subsidized phones on contract typically cost the same no matter if they are 450 or 650 USD equivalent. That is part of the reason iPhone, Galaxy and other high-end devices are doing so well.As for payg, it's at least 135 - 160 GBP contract free in the UK, I'm elsewhere but that is surely above bargain payg-devices. It's often twice the amount. So it's not exactly a replacement for the Defy Mini.
It's at least something that can compete with previous generation stuff, but not more than so basically. It falls into the same price as HTC One V or Desire X, or Sony Xperia J and that class any how. Sure it's better than something like the Galaxy S3 mini too.
blzd - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link
Hard to believe people don't see the value in this $179/199 phone off contract and available at that price from carriers. This is like Nexus 5 value at a even smaller price point and personally I would be fine with the specs for this price. Looks great too.soullforged - Monday, December 2, 2013 - link
In Brazil, the Moto X costs significantly more than the Moto G...Wolfpup - Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - link
I'm curious about where this is made. I prefer iOS > Windows Phone > Android, but among android devices I'd consider this, Nvidia's devices, and the Nexus lines, and obviously being made in the U.S. would be a nice selling point.Specs seem okay, though I wonder how the A7 really performs. My understanding is even though it's smaller, it supposedly is within spitting distance of the A9, like it's much better than A8?
Oh well, at worst it's got to be one of the better phones for the price.