The 2013 Motorola Moto X was, and is, a fine Android device. It’s not designed to amaze people with high end specifications or an eyeball burning screen, but instead it’s the Android flagship for people who just want to use a ‘phone. Motorola made relatively few changes to Android under the skin and also included some additional utilities or third party applications around the notifications, voice command and Moto Assist as three easy to use examples. Because the software on the Moto X is very close to stock, it appears that Motorola does not need to do much to the code when a new version of Android is released. And when Google released Android Kit Kat last summer, the Moto X was receiving it before my Nexus 4. This shows that when manufacturers keep the device software close to stock, they are able to get significant software updates released very, very quickly.
Our pals over at Android Central have gotten wind that the 2014 Moto G has a soak test in preparation. Now it’s no secret that Android 5.0 Lollipop is to be released this week, but even given how close Motorola’s software is to stock, surely Motorola aren’t planning on getting Lollipop out there into the wild quicker than most Nexus products? Surely?! It’s perhaps more likely that this is a little maintenance update, but at the back of my mind perhaps Motorola just have to tweak a few bits of code and get Lollipop out there? Perhaps that’s wishful thinking but we don’t know the timescale of Motorola’s soak test… if it’s not out until the middle of the week… then this might be Android 5.0 Lollipop!
We know that the 2014 version of the Motorola Moto G is more than capable of running Android 5.0 Lollipop. It uses the tried-and-trusted Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, here a quad core 1.2 GHz unit and paired up with the Adreno 305 GPU. It has a 720p resolution 5.0-inch screen, 1 GB of RAM and then either 8 GB or 16 GB of internal storage plus a MicroSD card. These specifications are largely the same as the 2013 version, which has a smaller screen. There are two versions of the 2013 Moto G, one that is 3G only and doesn’t have a MicroSD card slot, and the 4G version (which does have the MicroSD card slot). There’s only one 2014 Moto G available, which confusingly is 3G-only but does have a MicroSD slot. I suspect Motorola will be releasing a 4G version in due course.