A special edition of Motorola‘s Moto X4 featuring 6GB of RAM and running Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box launched in India earlier this week, having debuted as a Flipkart exclusive. The handset is available in Super Black and Sterling Blue color options, both of which were the official variants of the regular Moto X4. The Lenovo-owned original equipment manufacturer is offering the smartphone for Rs. 24,999 ($389), with that price tag being only somewhat higher than the Rs. 22,999 ($358) one attached to the model with 4GB of RAM. The base edition of the Moto X4 is still available for purchase in the South Asian country, priced at Rs. 20,999 ($327).
The phone maker often partners with Flipkart in order to launch new offerings exclusively through the e-commerce platform in India and the newly unveiled Moto X4 is unlikely to eventually be carried by other local retailers, as suggested by those previous partnerships. Likewise, the chances that the most powerful variant of the handset eventually makes its way to other countries remain somewhat slim but should that end up happening, Motorola is likely to only offer it in select ultra-competitive markets such as China. The regular Moto X4 is still widely regarded as one of the best mid-range (Android) smartphones released over the course of 2017 and the inclusion of extra RAM should make the device even more capable and future-proof.
The fact that the smartphone ships with Android 8.0 Oreo should also guarantee it supports Project Treble, Google’s reworked operating system framework that makes developing minor software upgrades such as monthly security patches significantly easier and faster for OEMs. The Alphabet-owned company doesn’t require Project Treble support for devices that get updated to Android 8.0 Oreo post-release, as was the case with the previously launched variants of the Moto X4, but the new model should take advantage of that functionality, as per Google’s Android guidelines. It’s presently unclear whether Motorola will eventually implement Project Treble into other versions of Moto X4 if it already has a working framework for the new India-exclusive model, though that seems like a probable scenario. The latest revision of the mid-ranger doesn’t boast any other new features or improvements compared to its counterparts.