Moto Maker, Motorola’s competitive advantage against other smartphones in the market, is finally arriving on the largest carrier in US, Verizon, according to @evleaks. This should make the Moto X a lot more appealing to Verizon customers, because they’ll be able to get it in many more color combinations, instead of just white and black. There’s still no word yet on when the wood backs for the Moto X will be available, though, which are some of the more interesting customizations promised by Motorola, yet unfulfilled so far.
The Moto X doesn’t have the highest end hardware out there, especially now with the LG G2, Galaxy Note 3 and the upcoming Nexus phone all having a Snapdragon 800 processor with a much faster Adreno 330 GPU, so Motorola may have a hard time continuing to sell the phone at the $200 price point, on contract. Dropping it down to $100 by Black Friday, and then for Christmas, and leaving it there, would probably be a good move for Motorola.
I also hope it will be a lesson to be learned for the Moto X2 next year. I’m not saying specs are all that matters, and there are plenty of reports that say the Moto X is even faster than the Galaxy S4, or even LG G2/Note 3, which wouldn’t surprise me considering all the extra software those 2 companies have added on top of stock Android, that may slow down the system.
However, I don’t think that’s a good enough excuse for Motorola to not offer the best hardware it can, so it can be even more ahead of the competition by utilizing stock Android. Plus, new hardware doesn’t mean just faster system operations. It also means faster or more efficient browsing, faster picture processing or better pictures, higher resolution or higher FPS video recording, better voice recognition, and so on.
So even if the software is super optimized, that doesn’t mean Motorola gets a pass on not having to have the bet hardware specs, too. If they would’ve done that this year, the Moto X would’ve been a lot less controversial, and a lot more popular than it already is.
What’s done is done, though, and Google and Motorola can only learn from this, and release a much better Moto X2 in 2014, based on stock Android 5.0, with a 64-bit ARMv8 processor, 4 GB of RAM, better AMOLED or LCD display, bigger battery, and much better 13MP (sweet spot resolution) camera with great OIS, Xenon flash (motion-freezing), MEMS-based auto-focus, 4k@30fps video recording (based on VP9 codec, to cut storage usage in half), 1080p@120fps slow-motion, and much better live HDR. Now, that would be a Motorola phone everyone would want to get.