Motorola Mobility has had quite a history – first bought out by a US company, Google, then jettisoned to Chinese company, Lenovo – but they never stopped manufacturing great smartphones for every budget. The lowest priced Moto E and the mid-range Moto G kicked off a very successful campaign this year, followed by the new Moto X…the ‘Pure’ for the US market and the ‘Style’ for the international market…and the Moto X Play – a seemingly mid-range device with a huge battery. Like other manufacturers, Motorola would love to make a splash in the heavily populated and growing smartphone market in India and it seems that they have done just that.
The Moto E and Moto G paved the way into the Indian market and Motorola’s acceptance, and now the Moto Play has made its way at a price of Rs. 18,499 or about $280 US dollars. The Motorola models are sold exclusively through the e-commerce portal of Flipkart and during the past seven months, sales have reached 2.6 million devices. Motorola India General Manager Amit Boni told PTI, “We have received a fabulous response from the Indian market. It continues to be an important market for us. We have till date sold 5.6 million units, of which 2.6 million came in the February-August period. Without going into the exact distribution, just added that, “A bulk of the sales were Moto G and Moto E.”
According to the research firm IDC, there was an increase of smartphones shipped to India during the second quarter of 2015 of 44-percent to 26.5 million smartphones. The Lenovo Group, consisting of Lenovo and Motorola, captured 6-percent on the Indian smartphone during that period. Motorola stopped shipping phones to India during the period when Google acquired them in 2012, but returned after the Lenovo purchase and featured the new Moto G in February of last year. Since their re-entry, they have launched two generations of the Moto E, three generations of the Moto G, two of the Moto X and the Moto 360 smartwatch… all of these through Flipkart.
The new Moto Play should help bolster sales in India – Boni claims it will offer customers the best-in-class cameras, certainly all-day battery life with a 3630mAh battery and water repellency. The 5.5-inch FHD display offers a respectable 403 pixels-per-inch (PPI), a 64-bit Snapdragon 615 octa-core processor coupled with 2GB of RAM and 16GB or 32GB of internal storage that can be expanded via a microSD card. Very respectable specifications for the price and another winner for Motorola and India.