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Recent years have seen the major smartphone manufacturers each develop a consistent brand under which to launch their Android handsets. The latest X Phone rumor says Motorola could be next. In order to compete with the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy line, HTC’s One, and LG’s Optimus, it is being put forth that Moto’s ‘X’ won’t be a single device, but rather a line of devices.
This would be Motorola’s flagship brand moving forward. The closest the company has to such a brand currently is their RAZR line, though those devices remain largely exclusive to a single carrier (Verizon). The ‘X’ lineup would be introduced with a single device said to launch in June and be followed down the line by other models.
Speaking specifically about that first device, rumors persist that it will be available at a highly reduced cost via a singular online retailer. The handset will not launch through other retailers or via carriers. While the rumors don’t mention a specific outlet, that sure sounds like Google Play, to us.
Furthermore, the first X Phone will feature a customizable hardware set centered around an octo-core CPU with a full core dedicated to human language processing. With a lack of octo-core chipsets on the horizon, this bit of info should be taken with a grain of salt. Otherwise, it is being said that customers will be able to configure their phone’s color, RAM, and internal storage at checkout, much like has been the case in the PC industry. They can even preload all of their content out of the factory so the device is ready to run out of the box.
The last little bit to this rumor states that Motorola will guarantee an upgrade to at least one full Android version beyond what X-branded devices initially ship with. Moto would handle the process independent of carriers. With most major market phones already seeing at least one new Android version in their lifetime, perhaps this is the easiest part of this rumor to believe.
If we haven’t said it enough, this is all rumor for now. Speculation around the X Phone (or phones) will surely start to fly as summer approaches. With Samsung’s announcement of the Galaxy S4 yesterday, all eyes are now turned squarely to Motorola and Google.
[via Android and Me]
They will most likely have a fixed hardware variety and you choose from that if this is even true. To simply choose whatever you want and then build it is simply to perfect.
And it wouldn’t be cost effective to manufacturer and could you imagine how difficult it would be to develop for (roms, kernels). It would be nice to see top of the line specs with different screen size options though, 4″, 4.5″, 5″, and 5.5″. Same device but perfect size for anyone, and minor tweaks to get roms running on each one.
to keep things easier for everyone i think they would keep screen and processor the same. But everything else you can customize
If that’s true, then what’s the point? It’ll just be a bunch of devices ranging from low-end to high-end
And now we have to get through the rest of this month and April before any of this is shown off..
Yea, but…does it have the headphone jack at the bottom? Mind blown!
you had me at highly reduced cost!! I really hope google gets this affordable-unlocked-phone trend going. I love Sony, but 6-800 bucks is difficult to part with… Especially when you don’t have it to begin with lol
Now that Mobile side of Motorola is owned by Google, I hope the X phones are half the price from other flagships!
Apart from half the price, give it removable battery and microSD card slot. Throw HD display in and 3000+mAh battery! All this with a fast octo-core and 2GB (or more) RAM and I’m in!
Oh, and please, latest vanilla android!
I’d like to see it get SD just so people would stop whining about not getting a crappy SD slot. SD is garbage… There’s no way google or moto are gonna put it on their first flagship device.
Swappable battery, maybe. But it’s a Google device so just forget about removable storage.
It’s also a Motorola device, who has been including SD slots on all their latest flagships.
All of which were designed and in the pipeline before the buyout.
If it has a 64 or (eventually maybe) a 128GB option of built in storage then I’m fine with never using a SD card again.
Where are you guys getting 3000+mAh battery ideas from ? we are at least a year or 2 away from that.
Um… maybe because Motorola’s *existing* flagship phone has a 3,300 mAh battery *already?*
Maybe it’s at least a year away for the *other* makers…
My RAZR MAXX (well over a year old, and not even the current HD version of the MAXX) has a 3300mAh battery. I can go two days with moderate use and well over a day with heavy use. No need for a removable battery if they can give users over a day of heavy use.
Sounds good until the vanilla android part. TouchWiz FTW!
have you ever heard SOMETHING about revenues/margins and profits?
Google-Motorola are NOT going to become a $399 smartphone manufacturer.
And I want to pay premium for a truly premium WOW smartphone.
made in China Apple iphone 5(4SS) for $650-$850,
(supposedly made in USA) WOW Motorola Xphone for $399?
LOLNO.
I’d like to introduce to you Google Nexus 4. Starting price $299. Made by third party (LG). That’s some revenues/margins and profits for you.
If they remove the third party, in theory their manufacturing costs will go down. While keeping the revenues/margins and profits the same, they should have room (from the lowered device costs) to add extra stuff or more powerful stuff.
P.S. I never want to pay premium for anything, unless I really have to!
If this means customizable hardware, or truly personalized hardware… This. Is. A. Game. Changer.
Imagine being able to choose:
Dual, Quad, or Octa Core
Device Color
Display Size
Display Resolution
Display Type
Battery Size
Removable Battery (or not)
RAM
Internal Storage
SD Card (or not)
Metal or Plastic Construction
Camera Quality
Carrier
LTE or HSPA
CDMA or GSM
Wireless Charging (or not)
NFC (or not)
… and more!
It would be simply amazing.
But every phone usually has a choice of color and choice of amount of internal storage.
.
storage yes, color not often. And when they do its between 2 colors, often times with the second color being released 6 months later.
OK but I don’t think colors is what people have been waiting for all this time. People wouldn’t mind just one kind of Motorola phone if they made it look good.
yeah i generally dont care about colors as long as it comes in black. If it came in only yellow and white then i might have a problem.
I can think of 2 good configurations: a high end phone with choice of qwerty and choice of screen size. There are plenty of budget phones out there but there are no qwerty or smaller screen phones with the same specs as the larger screen versions. Otherwise, I don’t think we are lacking in options. I mean, who is going to want a plastic phone with no NFC but with 64 gig of storage? I mean it’s not like a PC where you might have the option of RAID and SSD
to be quite frank. I couldnt give 2 craps about nfc in its current state. I have yet to use it, nor do i plan on using it any time soon. i’d like a 3,000+ mah battery, screen size of my choice, and a decent camera.
I use it daily for home automation (locks, lights) and for payments. No NFC is a deal breaker for me.
How about yellow or brown? Which would you choose?
In general I don’t care about colors as long as it comes in white. If it only came in black or yellow then I might have a problem.
My sister is still rocking a LG Vortex because its the only purple phone she can find. I guarantee at least half the women who want a smartphone would seriously look at this if it meant they could pick their own color. Probably a lot of guys would too.
Htc rhyme?
That’s why god made phone cases in different colors.
In the US we rarely get choice of storage, meaning Android phones of course.
Huh? We have for years now.
Even laptops don’t get this many options, and they wouldn’t be able to support different chipsets. I imagine it will be one super powerful chipset, so no one wants a better one, then maybe 2 or 3 bodies for different screen sizes. likely 4.3″ and 5″ and maybe 5.5 or 5.7″ or something. Then pick diffferent storage capacities and colors. Picking wireless charging or nfc or other things won’t be an option, no be necessary, samsung has already shown a big battery and everything can fit in a single thin device. They also likely won’t do removable batteries sadly, but if they did, that would be cool.
Even if they gave us two or three choices (Maybe screen size, battery size, & camera or color) that would be totally different than anything any company is doing right now.
Didn’t one Moto executive mention something to the lines of “we are trying something very different to the way this are currently”?
This would be so great.
I wonder how much more it would cost to add in all that hardware separately though.
That would be awesome, but I’d expect in reality (at least in the short term) we’d get to choose from only 3 or 4 custom options…perhaps color, display size, storage capacity and carrier.
After the way Google handled rollout of N7, N4 and Google I/O tickets ?
That would be a HUGE employment opportunity. Oh how I wish the Note II was like that. Give me a 5.5 incher with the works……
thanks, 650 you say?
Black
4.5
720
AMOLED
2800mAH
Yes
2 GB
Yes – at least 32 GB
Don’t care
Don’t care
VZW
LTE
CMDA
No
No
…. PLEASE!
I just hope that you don’t get crushed when not getting some kind of monstrous beast of a phone. I still find the most desirable experience of a device to be the Galaxy Nexus. I work in mobile tech support and handle (and troubleshoot) VZW devices daily. I’d be more excited if they just offered to sell me a DEVICE and cut the phone part out of it. My Katana was 10 times the phone these “phones” are. I’d rock a glorified Android-powered iPod wannabe.
As the owner of an accessory retailer, this would be a nightmare for us. As a consumer however it would be quite fun.
This would be amazing!
the rumor states that the phones would revolve around an octo core processor, probably 1 screen size, ..cuz if everyone got what they wanted the app dev community would go crazy!? fragmentation all over the place.
Fully customize-able would be insane! I’d like to see SDCard as an Option (I wouldn’t get it as I use my tablet for media, games etc..) and extended battery (likely thicker casing) as another option.
maybe that’s big news for HTC and Nexus fans but not exactly a gamechanger for the rest of the market
just give it to us! >_<
Google’s own hardware company only guarantee one update. How underwhelming.
And when will marketing morons learn that people don’t want a ‘line’, full of products with confusing names that do nothing to indicate their release order. If this turns out to be the Motorola Google Razor Droid X Maxx HD+ 4G, I am out.
well as of right now today you get ZERO guarantees from anyone. There is no negative to the guarantee only an upside. Maybe not the kind of guarantee you like but something is better than nothing. Its like buying a crappy stock at $0/share.
Razor and Droid are Verizon, and Maxx probably is too so it should just be Motorola X.
One full update does not mean one update, could be 20 incremental updates too. Personally I never have a device long enough for two full updates to be released anyway.
Have you read the article?
***IT’S RUMORS***
It’s NOT news, a statemen, a press release or an official information.
Well it is expected to come pre-loaded with Key Lime Pie, so it will already be one full release ahead of every other phone on the market. An addition full update will take it to whatever the “L” version of Android will be. That I think is far better than you hear from any other manufacturer.
Great, Google can’t even churn out enough phones in a single configuration (Nexus 4). Now they are going to allow customization?? Good luck with that one.
LG makes the N4.
Come on, Google and Motorola! The S4 and One are official and will be here soon. I need to know what you’re bringing to the table, before the upgrade itch gets to me!
The s4 is on sale in april with an octa how is that that unfeasibile?
the US won’t see an octa, it’ll only be a quad :-(
(if you can’t tell I’m still sore about Samsung pullin’ the ole’ chip switcheroo for the U.S., if they can build an hspa+ chip that’s octa, dangit, if they want my money, they need to shove an LTE modem in that octa as well!!!!… but I’m not bitter… no…. :-P)
If you’re on AT&T you can import the international one.
I thought AT&T were ditching HSPA+ in favor of LTE, was I told wrong? :-
They’re not really releasing any new phones that have hspa+ and no LTE, but their hspa+ network will be up for quite awhile I’m sure. At least two years if not more.
Dear lord, let the rumor mills fly!!! I cant wait to see what Google has in store. Contract is up in August and will need to figure out the direction to go in.
Man, I hope one of the options is to have a sliding qwerty. I don’t know why no one has ever made a qwerty slider that was hardware identical to a flagship phone other than the keyboard and could run the same ROM.
The few qwerty sliders I have seen recently have all been obscure devices that you know will never get updates or any dev love.
Yeah. Another choice I haven’t seen is a phone with a smaller screen but with the same specs as the other high end big screen phones. Whoopdedo if I just get it in blue.
If Apple did that but in reverse I’d potentially jump. I don’t have little girl hands, 4in is just too small (sorry to our asian readers lol) Been saying for years they should release two sizes.
too many choices will simply lead to customers not choosing anything.
Really? Is that how you feel when you walk in to wal-mart, or sit down at a restaurant?
lol well said.
A low cost phone (no SD, no removable battery) and available independent of the carrier? No way this is coming to Verizon.
Looks like it is the GS4 for me.
Its almost a guarantee that Verizon won’t have it. Any android phone that Verizon doesn’t have direct access to load up their bloatware and controll the upgrade cycle will never be on Verizon. They even forced Google to bend to their will when they released the Galaxy Nexus.
Iphone. Plain and simple, OEMs allow ALL major carriers to do what they want due to subsidies. Blame the OEMs and subsidies… Not the carriers like sprint, tfumble, att or vzw for bloatware or lack of updates. Apple didnt allow it. OEMs need to take pride in their devices beyond release. No derps required.
Yeah I wonder what needs to be done to make this happen for Android devices.
A mass stand taken by all OEMs. Otherwise if Moto won’t bend they always have others. With Apple they don’t have a choice. Sammy has enough sway now they could possibly pull this off.
If it has the Tegra 4i which was also rumored instead of the octo-core processor then it would theoretically work with any carrier and support GSM/CDMA/LTE, even VoLTE. It makes more sense to me and moves wireless more toward how ISPs are, meaning it shouldn’t matter if my computer is a desktop or a smart phone… I should be able to subscribe to the best provider in the area.
What ISP is like that? That would be awesome.
cool concept
I’m confused. If this will be sold through the Play Store, does that mean X will be replacing the Nexus line?
Doubtful considering the screenshots show the motorola UI. I doubt they would ditch having a vanilla android test phone. Especially since the Nexus 4 finally sold semi-decent in comparison to past versions.
The screenshots have nothing to do with the X phone, those are just Motorola phones used for purposes of this article.
I was under the impression X phone was going to ship with stock Android. That is why I thought maybe it would replace the Nexus.
no, you’re right, I think I saw that somewhere too, that it would be vanilla android… and I hope it is. You know, I’d even settle for motoogle making it so you can choose vanilla, or blurry android if that’s to your liking, I could see them giving you THAT option (and I’d love to have the choice of stock android, then I wouldn’t be forced to root it and turn to cyanogen just to get a stock experience.) You know, I do think it’s really sad, if you don’t have a nexus phone, nearly all phones from the major manufacturers all have custom UI’s, if you want something that acts, and looks like vanilla android, you pretty much have to go with cyanogenmod!
nope, I believe the Nexus line is sort of for developers, as well as what Google thinks phones should be, secondly the X is a Motorola brand, not a Google one, so it in no way would replace the nexus line, that would upset the other Android manufacturers too much. Google would never do that.
One full update……..wow……Get a Nexus.
I find the “one” update thing silly, however I DO like the idea of receiving the updates directly from Motorola rather than Verizon getting their dirty little hands on my operating system, slowing down the whole process, and putting their own bloatware in it. I’d be all for that part of it!
it’s weird RUMORS. Motorola hasn’t announced that.
I have been saying this for years, if a manufacture gave you the option to build your phone with predetermined hardware (such as dual core, quad core, etc it would change everything
Please, please, please do this. Accessory manufacturers could finally make a slew of accessories for an Android phone.
I love this idea..You don’t really an Octo core processors anyway. If the device is capable of LTE with all carries and HSPA+ 42 this would be the go to device. They are guarantying 1 more upgrade, I think 2 would be better but I will one. This device could be your last device if it is compatible with any carrier at least in the US. I would definitely buy it if 5″ display with 32 GB ram and RAZR MAXX equivalent or better battery, HD 12 MP or better camera that truly eliminates the need for point and shoot.
Hope this is true. This is a nice way of innovating without technical innovation that people would absolutely care about. The part about update without carrier…simply awesome because we all know how much they suck. *looking at you VZ*
I know these are rumors and to be taken with a grain of salt but I knew the X phone wasn’t gonna be the phone all the die hard android users including myself would hope it would be ie. Nexus device like. Will still have Blur or whatever Moto is calling their skin these days.
Interesting news. However, I really only look forward to Nexus brand phones. Hopefully that won’t go away.
BRING IT.
So this would be like when you configure a computer online? Awesome! I can dig that!
I knew I should wait for the X phones :D
Time to re-post the “Are you buying the Galaxy S4” poll.
Wonder if the X phones will make their way to big red? I’ll LOL if they call it the Motorola Droid X
If it’s sold directly from Motorola I doubt it’ll have any Verizon specific branding, though they might require that for them to work on their network. Ugh my hatred knows no bounds!
This is going to make custom ROMs a nightmare
Ummm, whyzat?
Maybe, that`s the phone Motorola mentioned almost two ago. This phone it might comes out with 2.0 GHZ that`s what Motorola mentioned.
This phone has been rumored for over a year now, and the specs seem like something a Phandroid like me would come up with, with all that said IMO it just seems to good to be true. More like a wish list of features.
I hope this phone will be a game changer!
Ah!! I can get a Qwerty phone!! Please bring this too me!! My soul is ready for possession.
Sounds pretty cool, but unless I can make a Sprint CDMA version then this is useless for me.
This would really make my life complete. Sticking it to the US carriers is top priority right now for Android IMO. They are what keeps people from getting the newest versions of Android moreso than the OEMs and they’re a huge reason we have devices that don’t work optimally due to bloatware. The sales model from the Nexus 4 (sans the stock issues etc) would really work toward accomplishing this. I hope they can make CDMA models to the Sprint and Verizon people and have those carriers allow them on their network, though that’s the toughest part I think.
YOU might not want NFC but I’ve found it Quite useful with Google Wallet. Choice.Is.Good.
Customizable hardware?
So the user can choose to have or not have the camera, micro SD slot and removable battery?
Or will users be able to buy hardware modules to upgrade their phones when budget provides?
Sell second hand hardware modules for some cash :P
Have to see how this turns out.
Highly REDUCED cost = NO.
Let’s keep it real:
1) Google is a high-margin SERVICE BUSINESS that doesn’t need a low-margin hardware business.
2) there are too MANY companies that create generic low-margin low-quality products.
3) Motorola Xphone made in USA (like NEXUS Q and Chromebook Pixel) will be an expensive hi-end product BY DEFAULT, it will not “half” anything, it’s NOT supposed to be low-margin low-end product.
4) Google has spent $7.2B (minus $3B of Motorola’s own cash and minus $2.35B of sold Motorola’s HOME division) on 82-year-old tech pioneer with the #2 largest industry patent portfolio after SAMSUNG. It needs to use it EFFICIENTLY and return the money.
5) We need a design+hardware+software WOW for Android. Google is capable to create it.
6) I will pay premium (not less then $850 iphone 5 64Gb) for a hi-end made in USA (OR designed in Mountain View, California and assembled in China TOO) Motorola Xphone. Period.
if people pay $850 for MEH iphone 5 64Gb (1,440mAh battery, 4″ LG display, 1GB RAM) manufactured in People’s Republic of China by slave laborers, why does WOW (really WOW) Motorola Xphone 128Gb should cost even $599?
+ if Xphone will be manufactured in the US?
+ if Xphone will have 6.4″ YOUM Full HD display?
+ if Xphone will have a 3,500mAh?
I don’t see WOW Xphone 128Gb for less than $850.
The only customizable option this rumor really brings is the RAM. We can already choose color and storage. I can see them selling variants with lower ram and smaller screen size.