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Motorola’s heavily rumoured Moto X phone is real and it’s coming this summer, the mobile maker’s CEO Dennis Woodside has revealed.
Woodside, who claimed to have the Android-powered blower in his pocket, “but I can’t show it to you” — yeah, chinny reckon, Dennis — was talking at the AllThingsD conference in California.
The Moto X is contextually aware of what’s going on around it, he promised, acting differently if it senses it’s travelling fast, or automatically starting the camera when you take it out of your pocket. “It allows you to interact with it in very different ways than you can with other devices,” he said.
“Motorola has come up with two processors that allow you to do those things” without knackering your battery life, Woodside boasted.
The phone will be built in Texas, employing 2,000 people, in contrast to the Chinese-made iPhone. It won’t be the only one either — “We’ll launch a handful of smart phones that aren’t the end, but show where the company is heading,” he promised.
The Moto X has been rumoured to feature a 4.8-inch screen made of virtually indestructible sapphire glass, and a back crafted from carbon fibre. One of those two processors seem certain to be quad-core, while because Motorola is owned by Google, it’ll surely run on Android 4.3, the next version of Google’s mobile OS.
But Woodside made sure to point out that Motorola is separate to Android, and managed like any other Android manufacturer. Other phone makers have wondered if Google would give its subsidiary some edge, which would make Android less attractive to them. Woodside attempted to assuage those fears. “We are treated as a separate company,” he said.
Google wants Motorola to recapture some of its old confidence, after a string of Android flops.
“I sat down with [Google CEO] Larry Page about what we are going to do,” Woodside said. “We will take it back to the roots of innovation and build devices that have the potential to change people’s lives.”
Do you think the Moto X can be the smash hit that takes Motorola back to the big time? Or has Google wasted billions of dollars? Make your mark in the comments below, or over on our contextually aware Facebook page.
