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I feel sad. My first cell phone was Motorolla Razr. It was great apart from the crappy J2ME OS but it was sturdy, long battery, could only use it to answer phon
by curiousjorge 11y ago
I feel sad. My first cell phone was Motorolla Razr. It was great apart from the crappy J2ME OS but it was sturdy, long battery, could only use it to answer phones and type text messages.
I feel lucky to have bought this motorola moto g smart phone. It was way more value for the money it offered at. Everything works, much better than my old Galaxy Nexus.
It's kind unfair and harsh that the industry's early innovators could fall so quickly, as such is the case for Nokia.
I think that in this constantly cannabalizing industry, the lowest cost producer selling at cheapest prices will always end up driving incumbents out. Samsung is feeling the heat from Chinese companies because it failed to rebrand itself as an exclusive luxury product like Apple. Unfortunately the Android brand doesn't carry that brand premium, despite the fact that Galaxy phones are excellent in quality. But for Samsung, they are so big that even if they lost this smartphone market, they could continue to feed Korea from their numerous other industries. For Nokia and Motorola, they did not have the same luxury.
- haddr 11y agoThe Moto G smartphone is probably the best android you can get at the price they sell it. It is really sometimes better than other android phones that are priced double.
- zanny 11y agoI have my mother on a Moto G on freedompop, since she rarely uses her phone. So it was about $55 all things considered to get her on a $0 a month phone plan with a great Android device. Insane value.
- ams6110 11y agoI have a Moto G on Republic Wireless, on the Talk/Text+WiFi plan. For $10/month I can't imagine why I paid Verizon close to 10x that for years.
- marincounty 11y agoThis company deserves more recognition.
- curiousjorge 11y agoWow, good to know I'm not the only one appreciating the moto g. If it had slightly longer battery life it would be perfect but I'm not complaining for how much I paid which was roughly $199 CAD. Everything is butter smooth, durable & tough, I almost gave up on Android after my last Nexus phone but this one restored my faith. Pains me that all of the Motorolla services like tracking my phone in case it gets stolen and such will probably be shut down.
- jon-wood 11y agoInstall Device Manager from the Play store. It's Google's official solution for the same thing (which also has the advantage of probably being on other people's phones when you lose yours).
- rhaps0dy 11y agoI really don't know how it has such good value, did they sell it at a loss? The only problem I've found on it is its lack of a gyroscope, and subsequent lack of ability to use the Cardboard.
- Pluizer 11y agoThe 2nd-generation Moto G does have a gyroscope, and a micro sd-card slot.
- sliverstorm 11y agoThey cut all the right corners, did minimal custom software, and still built it as a quality piece of hardware. Instead of keeping all the features but sacrificing quality
- awjr 11y agoI bought a Moto G 2nd gen for my daughter last year. I dropped my phone recently and am desperately holding off for the Moto G 3rd gen being released in the next couple of weeks.
- danieldk 11y agoIt used to be, but the 1GB RAM is really becoming a bottleneck, especially after the Lollipop update. The rumors are that the 2015 model will also have 1GB, which would be a capital mistake. Anyway, you can nowadays get an Asus ZenFone 5 with 2GB RAM and 16 GB storage for nearly the same price as a Moto G in Europe. Of course, no near-vanilla Android ;).
- jfroma 11y agoNever tried a G model but Moto X is the best phone I ever had. The 1gen is about 140 usd unlocked in amazon and it runs lollipop flawless and in some specs is superior to current iPhone not to mention that the software feels quite better. I also think that the apps bundled by Motorola to android where all excellent. The first time I actually didn't want to uninstall these kind of thing. I hope Motorola continue to produce things with this quality level.
- soylentcola 11y agoI've got the second gen (bought to replace my Nexus 5 when I broke it). It cost me $200+ less than the equivalent iPhone or Galaxy, came with minimal OEM customizations and the ones it did have were actually useful, and the hardware customization options were a very nice touch in a world of black slabs. The 2014 Moto X was basically the Nexus 5 successor that could've been. It's visually just a more reasonably sized and reasonably priced version of the Nexus 6 and was my first foray away from the Nexus line in several years. My Moto 360 has also been mostly good as well. It flaked out at one point and I swapped it under warranty but the experience with customer service was a troubling sign of the state of the company. Their website had a lot of issues and I couldn't follow the normal process for requesting a warranty exchange until I managed to get hold of someone who knew what they were doing on the phone. I really hope they don't start to go downhill now that they've left the Google umbrella because it seemed that they were really turning it around after years of poorly designed and annoyingly branded "DROID" phones.
- magicalist 11y agoThis ignores years of terrible phones between the Razr and the Moto G/X. For a while they even had the advantage that a large portion of the market treated Android and the Droid brand as synonymous. Not every mistake was entirely of their own making (their partnership with Verizon has seemed and still seems intent on ruining every bit of their reputation), but a large part of it was. It had almost nothing to do with cheaper Android devices undercutting them.
- lern_too_spel 11y agoThe Droid brand is Verizon's. It just so happens that the most famous Droid branded phones, including the original, were manufactured by Motorola. I'm of the opinion that all Android phones on Verizon are terrible, Droid or otherwise, and have learned to stay away despite their superior network.
- tbrock 11y agoEveryone always says that but I find Verizon's data network to be a joke. Drop down to 1x multiple times daily and you want to die. Also non GSM based phones/networks are a losing battle. At least AT&T and T-Mobile give you HSDPA when LTE isn't available.
- magicalist 11y agoAh, ha, shows what I know. Totally agreed on Verizon, though.
- kolanos 11y agoThe Motorola Droid was an excellent entry into the Android phone market. I switched from the original Android phone, the HTC G1 and pretty much everything about the Droid was better. I hope Motorola survives as a smartphone manufacturer if only because I can't stand HTC/Samsung hardware.
- david-given 11y agoI was working onsite at the late, unlamented SEMC on some mobile phone software, and I was talking to someone about my PEBL. Lovely hardware, I said. Terrible software, I said. Painful-to-use UI where nothing is findable, it's slow, functionality is poor and it looks ugly, I said. Compare it with the Nokia 6310i, I said. I may have ranted a little. Yes, he said. He had headed the team who wrote the software for the RAZR/PEBL line. He cut me off after I started apologising, saying that he agreed with everything I had said. Motorola had subcontracted out development to the company he'd worked for, and had provided a detail specification as to exactly what they wanted. What they wanted was simply bad: every UI design misfeature was deliberately designed in. The team would raise bugs along the lines of 'navigating menus takes ages. There needs to be a way to jump directly to a menu item --- you know, like Nokia has' or 'even after weeks of using the product our testing team still get lost inside the settings menu', and they'd always be closed as Works As Intended. Nobody cared. But the hardware was beautiful. Robust, excellent battery life, felt good in the hand, well made, lots of nice attention to detail --- the PEBL's magnetic latch was a masterpiece. If only they'd put the same care into the software stack.
- gcb0 11y agothe disconnection between hardware and software quality is what hold everyone back on mobile. we need the PC revolution on mobile. badly.
- nitrogen 11y agoIndeed. The ability to run whatever software we want on phones would decouple the hardware choice from the software choice. We would just need to figure out how to fund the development of unbundled mobile OSes.
- gcb0 11y agolinux already runs fine. people even run it chrooted from the vendor original kernel/OS. to run natively, i think only the cameras and radios fimrwares are the problem.
- 11y ago
- on_and_off 11y ago>Unfortunately the Android brand doesn't carry that brand premium, despite the fact that Galaxy phones are excellent in quality The hardware is good (although it never really had a premium feel, even in the last version) but the software has always been Samsung's weak point. Samsung has been obsessed with crazy differentiation and putting in as many features as they could. They never tried to build a cohesive UX with their phones or even just to mitigate the performance impact of their customization. So it is hard for me to really feel bad about Samsung.