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Hands On With Motorola's Moto X
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."
So a Google subsidiary can't use Google's latest OS? Lame... I rather get a Nexus instead.
"Also since the phone features an active display..." - as opposed to all the phones with inactive displays? Nice slashvertisement, with almost no technical details.
How unlockable (if at all) is the bootloader?
It's a fully locked device. This is not a Nexus successor.
How conventional. Google could have thrown a grenade into the portable world. Instead they make a Samsung wannabe, complete with bloated marketing budget.
Not interested.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Hiding is not the same as removing.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What, exactly, does this mean, and how is it different from my current Android phone and widgets to show me these things on the lockscreen?
It uses the screen instead of a notification LED, but only powers the portion of the screen necessary for the alert instead of turning the whole display on. I'm not sure how this works, but that's what they're claiming. It's not at all like a lock screen.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
My Nokia C6-01 does this. It has an oled display, so presumably it only uses power for the illuminated pixes, with little power drain (as opposed to backlighting an entire LCD screen). So it always has a clock and other notifications on-screen all the time, without needing to press anything.
It's $575 for the 16GB ($630 for the 32GB which is AT&T only at present) and no microSD so you're locked to that size. The customizations options are similarly on the worst-rated carrier in the US, AT&T. T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon get a black or white 16GB version. That's it. It's $199 for the 16GB one on a 2 year contract, which is the same as you'd pay for a top-tier phone like the HTC One 32GB or the Samsung Galaxy S4 16GB (with microSD so you can add up to 64GB more space on the cheap).
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
it still takes up space. and does hiding it mean disabling it? or does it still use up the battery if it runs in the background?
That is really cool. With the advent of 4K TVs, it has occurred to me that it will be awesome to watch video games, sports, or movies on a 70" 4K display with surround sound and a big subwoofer, but that's way too much for watching news, or kids shows, or anything that should be background for at least some of the people nearby. It would dominate the whole living area and waste a lot of power. So it would be nice to just use 1/4 of the area in the middle for a non-upscaled 1080p display.
Engadget's preview claims that any custom Moto X ordered from their Moto Maker site comes with an unlocked bootloader. I'm guessing carrier-sold phones would have a locked one.
And then your 1080p stream can be surrounded by 3 more 1080p's worth of adverts
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No.. but it does listen to you 24/7. That's a nice feature.. don't worry about the NSA or anybody else snooping on your conversations.
I'm tired of excuses from people like GP. If a binary still exists on the storage medium. It is not hidden, uninstalled, or anything else. It is still prone to being executed. This is basic IT folks.
What does "prone to being executed" mean? You can't launch it. The OS won't launch it. I suppose you could root the phone and launch it from the debug shell?
Apple makes both the OS and the phone
In this case, the same is true of Google. They wholly own Motorola and designed and produced the X.
Nexus phones are different.
Yes they are - they are re-badged phones made by someone else!!! They are not AS close to Google as the X phone and yet they always get the latest release.
What you want is for Moto to crawl up inside the Android team
Do you really mean to say the Motorola team was not working hand in hand with coreOS developers? No way is Google that stupid.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> 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.
Yes, but does Motorola know it yet?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Yes. Motorola is the reason why Google's evil bit got set to 1.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Likely better than most other phones. You'll have a much better chance to be able to run both ingress and either a G+ chat or something like ITTC mobile/Ingress intel map. All other non-nexus 4 phones, as far as I am aware of, have the Android 4.2.2+ dual app feature restricted to using only about 12 apps, non of them worthwhile to ever run two of them at the same time. Unless of course you really enjoy being in a G+ chat while watching youtube or looking at google maps while chatting or watching youtube...
This could be a good phone, we will just have to wait until people have more time to play with it, break it down, and develop for its unique features.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Not on a device without expandable storage its not.
And really not even then.
Yes it is, because it sits on /system which is a fixed size partition. Actually deleting the APK would get you exactly 0 bytes more storage *and* would break the factory reset option *and* breaks incremental OTAs.
The Moto X ships with an unlocked bootloader. Take that as you want, but to me it is a sign of change. I know, personally, I swore off of Moto after one particularly bad experience, but this might change my mind.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
ERMAGERD LESS CPU CORES SUCKS!!! I RUN 4 CPU INTENSIVE TASKS AT ONCE, ONE WITH EACH OF MY INDEX FINGERS, AND ONE WITH EACH OF MY NIPPLES.
I LIKE TO KEEP 1BAJILLION MOVIES ON MY PHONE IN HIGHER RESOLUTION THAN THE SCREEN! I NEED A 1TB SD CARD.
I CAN TELL BETWEEN 1080p AND 720p AT NORMAL VIEWING DISTANCES ON A 4.7" SCREEN!
I NEVER EVEN USE MY PHONE, I JUST DROOL AT THE SPEC SHEET!
Yep, that pretty much summarises all the complaints I've seen.
If you look at the benchmarks, it does better than or equal to a Galaxy S4 on everything except GeekBench, where it still ties for memory speed. So I wouldn't call the CPU/GPU 'mid-range', like everybody seems to be saying.
People want 1080p on a 4.7" screen - are they crazy? I really don't understand where that sentiment comes from. It's just more pixels for the GPU to push around, and it means your games will run worse.
So, they have 'just' 2 cores and a 720p screen, this gives better battery life without making the phone massive. I can totally live with that. I really like what they've done here. They've looked at the system as a whole, and instead of loading it with pointless shit like Samsung, or going with massive bezels on something that's meant to fit in your pocket like HTC, they've made almost the entire front of the phone a screen, make it fit in your hand nicely, given it great battery life, and great performance. And it's customisable and made in the USA. It even has 802.11ac.
What else do you want? And be reasonable, this is today's tech we're talking about.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!