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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."
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!
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.
Believe it or not, validation testing for carriers takes a long time- months. Switch a major piece of the software and you have to restart from scratch. This device probably entered testing before 4.3 was announced.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I don't understand.
If Nexus and iOS devices can be updated without carrier interference, why can't everything else be similarly updated.
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
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.'"
> 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.