So, I woke up today hearing about the just announced Motorola Moto G. Yet another mid range phone from Motorola I thought. I quickly lost interest because I “knew” this one wasn’t coming home to India. Yawn. Then for some reason, I went ahead and read the entire blog post only to see India listed in the countries where the mid range Moto will land sometime in early 2014. Now this is quite a departure from Motorola’s earlier stance of “stepping out” of markets where they were not really profitable. Motorola made a very vocal exit from India and Korea back in December 2012. It also closed down its factory at Chennai. In fact, if you look at Motorola India’s website, you will tend to get nostalgic as it lists only service related stuff for all your old Motorolas. And then you hear about The Moto G. Looks like someone at Motorola’s headquarters has had a rethink. A serious one at that. Is the Moto G such a good product that Motorola couldn’t help but sell it to us Indians amongst other emerging economies? Let’s see.
What’s the big deal?
The Moto G is a very serious attempt at making an expensive looking phone at an afordable price. It features a 4.5 inch 720p display, packs in the Snapdragon 400 Chipset that houses a 1.2 Ghz quad core CPU with Adreno 305 graphics. At this point, it runs Android 4.3 JellyBean and being a Motorola, we can expect it to get the KitKat treatment without much delays. The Moto G like its elder brother the Moto X – will feature a bunch of customization options – 19 to be precise. These include interchangeable Motorola Shells and Flip Shells in seven colors as well as Grip Shells in five colors.
The Moto G gets a 5 MP, 2592*1944 pixels, autofocus, LED flash laden camera with support for Geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection, HDR and panorama. Video capture is restricted to 720p@30fps. There is a secondary 1.3 MP front camera thrown in as well. It will come in two memory variants 8GB and 16 GB and no, there is no external memory card slot. Sigh! There are talks of a dual SIM version as well.
What’s the big deal, again?
You might have gone through all those features only to note that there is nothing “great” about the phone features wise. The big deal however is its price. The Moto G will sell in the US unlocked, without contract for $179 for the 8GB version and $199 for the 16 GB variant. That translates to around Rs.11,300 and Rs.12,600 here in India – before taxes and extras.
Would you buy the Moto G if it launches for a sub 15k price next year?
