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Hands On With Motorola's Moto X

Posted by timothy on from the variable-names-never-change dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "After months of speculation, leaks, and cryptic tweets, Motorola's new flagship smartphone is upon us. The Moto X runs Android 4.2.2 and is powered by the new Motorola X8 mobile computing system that includes several chips: a 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, as well as a natural language processor and a contextual computing processor that handles the sensors. The phone carries a 4.7-inch, 1,280-by-720 display with 316 pixels per inch. Also since the phone features an active display, time and other selected alerts — text messages, missed calls, etc. — are shown without having to wake up your phone. Among the other features that Motorola talked up was the touchless control. Once activated, you can talk to your Moto X from up to 15 feet away. The Moto X differentiates itself from the other droid phones with customization options, and since Motorola is assembling the Moto X in Fort Worth, Texas, the company expects users to have their customized Moto X within four days of placing an order."

1 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re:yes but.... by Miamicanes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > I suppose you could root the phone and launch it from the debug shell?

    This is Motorola we're talking about. I'd strongly advise NOT taking that for granted if it's a factor in your purchasing decision.

    Motorola has a long, sordid history of locking down bootloaders, then abandoning once-flagship phones less than a year later. Did I mention that the Photon & Electrify have the nearly-exclusive notoriety of being just about the only known modern Android phones with a real risk of getting bricked while rooting?

    Personally, I'd buy a pocket hostpot and haul around a wifi phablet for the rest of my life before I'll *ever* willingly buy another Motorola Android device with a locked bootloader. I totally bought into the mass delusion at XDA that Google would somehow clean house at Motorola, make them non-Evil, and turn our phones into de-facto (if officially-unsupported) Nexi. Obviously, we were wrong.

    Motorola (with Google's blessing) didn't just abandon us... they chained us up first, then shoved us face-first onto an anthill just to make sure we were *really* fucked.

    Don't buy a Motorola phone unless you're 100% cool with buying a dead-end phone that you'll never be allowed to fix when it ends up sucking.