This morning, Lenovo and Motorola announced their new lineup of Moto G devices. The Moto G has been Motorola’s mid-range smartphone, that has sold extremely well for the company. In fact, it’s been their best selling smartphone ever. While the Moto G4, Moto G4 Plus and Moto G Play were announced this morning. There’s no word on their new flagships, which we started hearing rumors about in the past few weeks. If you were thinking that we’d be seeing the Moto X4 coming soon, you’d be wrong. At least if this report out of VentureBeat is anything to go by.
According to the report, Lenovo is switching up the branding for their flagship line from Moto X to Moto Z. That’s not the only change either. The report also notes that Droid devices that the company builds for Verizon will be named “Droid Edition”. So we will see something like “Moto Z Play Droid Edition”, which is quite the mouthful, to say the least. This means no more Droid Turbo or Droid Maxx, and a more uniformed naming scheme across the markets in which their devices are sold.
The reasoning for the change in branding here could tie into the fact that Lenovo is now going the modular route with their new flagship under the Moto brand. As we’ve reported on already, Moto and Lenovo are working on a modular smartphone as their next flagship. Which will allow you to replace the backplate with different materials, and even room for new accessories. These accessories were rumored as “Amps” last week, now this report is stating that they are being referred to as “MotoMods”. This is similar to the LG G5 that was released earlier this year. The new Moto Z is expected to debut at Lenovo’s Tech World event which is taking place on June 9th in San Francisco, CA. We’re also expecting to see the company’s Project Tango smartphone again, which they debuted at CES in January.
If this report holds true, it would be a pretty big departure for Lenovo and the Moto brand, and the start of something new for Moto. Seeing as the Moto X was their flagship brand after being acquired by Google. We’ll have to wait and see what Lenovo has in store for Moto this year, but it’s looking like some big changes are coming.