Today, Motorola’s design chief Jim Wicks had a conversation with PCMag about the future of Motorola’s products and most importantly, those products influenced by the newly formed Google exec team. It sounds like Motorola isn’t looking to compete with the other manufacturers on specs. Which is kinda hard at this point since everyone is throwing higher spec’ed phones together that probably run better than your desktop. Wicks sounds like Motorola isn’t using that mantra with their devices. Instead Motorola is looking at stock Android devices that are updated pretty quickly, and phones that are the right size instead of oversized, and phones that will hit all carriers. Sounds like a geeks dream right?
Jim Wicks said that Motorola has spent about 8 months working on their next generation of phones that will arrive in the second half of 2013. Now that can be anytime from July to December. So that’s still a pretty big time frame. Wicks really stressed that if you like the smaller form factor or stock Android, you are going to be truly excited for these new devices. Also when Wicks says “smaller” he means “just right” in terms of size. Think of phones in the 4-4.5″ range. Sort of like the Motorola Droid Razr M on Verizon. Which is something a lot of people will like. I actually hear people now saying that the 4.7-inch devices are too big. Motorola is also said to be working on slimming down the bezels, so we may see an extremely thin bezel like the Razr M had.
Wicks talked a bit more about how consumers “love what the Android OS can do for them” in regards to stock Android phones. He also said that customers want the most recent version of Android faster. Finally an OEM that listens! Motorola’s new strategy is to embrace Android and make it the “best expression of Android and Google on the market”. Motorola is going to make it an “unadulterated” version of Android with as little bloatware as possible.
Finally, Motorola has had success with the DROID brand. But that brand isn’t specific to Motorola. Of course they have the most “DROID’s” but there are some made by HTC and Samsung. Motorola is going to attempt to mimic what Samsung has done with the Galaxy brand and what HTC is attempting to do with the One branding.
We already heard this morning that Eric Schmidt is calling Motorola’s newest handsets “phenomenal”, this is gotta get you excited for Q3 and Q4 of 2013. Especially if you’re a stock Android fan, or a Nexus fan.