One of the most disappointing facts about the Moto X launch was that its launch market was basically limited to US. Not only was that bad for people all over the world who might’ve wanted one, but it was also bad for Motorola, because they can’t sell a ton of them just in US, where the competition is the most fierce, and the carriers aren’t exactly sympathetic to OEM’s. Instead they just want to squeeze as much money from them as possible, because if they don’t like it, there’s always another OEM waiting to get into the US market. It’s an unfortunate situation, but it is what it is.
The good news is that Motorola may finally launch the Moto X outside of US, too, in places like Europe, Middle East and Africa:
“The reception of Moto X has been fantastic and we’re continuously perusing opportunities in the EMEA region, so really watch this space,” Frost said.
Motorola’s Vice President for EMEA, Magnus Ahlqvist, said: “We are serious about Europe and we want to bring strong propositions to the market.”
The Moto X comes with a dual core 1.7 Ghz Qualcomm S4 Pro with Adreno 320, has a 720p resolution, a compact 4.7″ Super AMOLED screen, 2 GB of RAM and option for 16 or 32 GB of storage. It also comes with a co-processor for voice recognition, which makes touchless commands possible, and a contextual computing one.
The specs were pretty controversial for a high-end device that sold for $200 on contract, but it was most likely sold at that price because the carriers demanded a lot of money from Motorola for each devices, in order to allow them to sell the device on their networks.
We’ve seen later than Republic Wireless is selling it for $300 off-contract, and there were some rumors about Motorola selling it to the other carriers for $350. That makes me believe that when it does land in Europe, the phone will be more like 350 euro, rather than 600 euro, which is usually the price of a high-end device like HTC One or Galaxy S4.
If that’s the case, it would be a much more appealing device in Europe, even than the Nexus 5 which costs around 450 euro from most retailers (although it does have a much faster chip and a better screen). If it arrives with the case customization in Europe, Middle East and Africa, that would also make it stand out even more among other phones.