Motorola has officially teased the addition of a wood backing option for its Moto X smartphone. The option has long been rumored to debut at some point before year’s end, with the first estimates of Thanksgiving being a bit quick on the trigger. A revised, Q4 release date range for wood backs surfaced around then, […]
Did you read through our extensive review of the Moto X and decide “Yes – I’m a believer and would like to carry that smartphone around in my pocket for the rest of my life”? It looks like you won’t have to wait long until you’re able to have a Moto X of your very own as AT&T has just announced when they’ll be made available on its network.
AT&T To Begin Selling Moto X On August 23 Starting At $199 original content from Ubergizmo. 
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As if we didn’t already have enough Motorola phones to wait for, Verizon showed off a trio of new Motorola DROID smartphones at a (surprisingly cozy) event in New York City.
The flagship of the three is the DROID Ultra, which Motorola’s Rick Osterloh refers to as the thinnest 4G LTE smartphone out there with its and 7.18mm thick chassis. Motorola’s fascination with Kevlar is still in effect on the device’s rear (though the finish is glossy as opposed to matte like it usually is), and a 5-inch 720p display occupies most of the space on the device’s front.
Motorola is continuing the Maxx line of power-conscious devices — it’s functionally the same phone as the Ultra except it’s a little fatter at 8.5mm, a features a sealed battery capable of up to 48 hours of continued usage. Last (and certainly not least) is the DROID Mini, a slightly smaller take on the Ultra formula that’s eschews that giant 5-inch screen for a more manageable 4.3-inch 720p screen.
Putting industrial design aside though, perhaps the most interesting thing tucked away inside these new DROIDs is what Motorola calls its X8 mobile computing system — it’s a eight-core system that encompasses the dual-core CPU and uses additional cores to allocate computing power to graphics processing, language processing, and the like. The X8 system also enables touchless control for the device so users can make phone calls and ask for directions hands-free, and active display, which lights up just a portion of the screen to display notifications . Sound familiar? It should — those features were also prominently highlighted in a leaked Rogers demo video for the Moto X.
If those monikers seem to be missing a little something, you’d be right — that RAZR label that graced the nearly all the Motorola devices released on Verizon in the past year is gone. It’s DROID all the way now, and I have to wonder if Motorola is retiring one of its most famous mobile brands because it’s looking to reinvent itself with another release later this summer. Speaking of the summer, all three devices will officially go on sale on August 20: the Mini, Ultra, and Maxx will cost $99, $199, and $299 respectively with a 2-year contract.
We’re still waiting on confirmation from Motorola and Verizon on specs, but the representatives on have said they’re just not talking about them today. That is, for lack of a better term, pretty damned stupid. Overall Motorola is being very cagey about the hardware details, and about specifics around the X8 and its origins (though it seems to be based on a Qualcomm MSM8960 Pro), which is an odd way to launch a product.
I got plenty of hands on time with the new Droids and wrote about them at length, but here’s a truncated version in case you need some more meat.
First up is the Droid Mini, the smallest of the bunch. I was a bit of a sucker for the RAZR M, Motorola’s original pint-sized Droid — the package was quite handsome with its nearly edge-to-edge display and its tiny frame, but was it was no top-tier device when it came to performance. Motorola thankfully didn’t repeat its earlier mistake, as the Mini seems awfully snappy. Colors on the 4.3-inch OLED display running at 720p were bright without being lurid, and it’s a nice, dense little thing to hold on to. It’s not perfect though — the glossy Kevlar finish that Motorola ran with feels a little off-putting and picks up fingerprints like crazy, a trait it sadly shares with its flagship brother.
Speaking of the flagship, Motorola apparently focused on making it very thin, and they succeeded — it’s a scant 7.11mm thick, and sports a 5-inch 720p OLED screen. Fortunately, the Ultra has some nice heft to it, which helps give the whole package a more premium feel compared to other top-tier smartphones (I’m looking at you Galaxy S4).
To be quite honest, the Ultra is the hardest of the three to write about. Motorola seemed to make the Ultra the foundation that the other two Droids work off of — the Mini is the more pocketable Ultra, and the Maxx is the Ultra with a much better battery — and because of that the Ultra wound up being the least interesting of the three.
The most impressive device I mucked around with today was the DROID Maxx, for perhaps obvious reasons. Back in the day, the Maxx was always the chunky, more utilitarian version of whatever slim smartphone Motorola was touting at the time. Now it’s gotten to the point where it’s just not much larger than any other hot-selling smartphone out there. It’s great that the Ultra is so slim, but the Maxx is so much less of a lump than it used to be that it’s actually a little surprising.
Let’s put that in perspective a bit — my iPhone 5 usually lives inside a very slim case (this one, if you care), and it fits in my pocket as well as you would expect. The Maxx, with its ridiculous 3,300mAh battery, is just about as thick as that iPhone.
Yes, it may seem like a minor thing to get worked up over, but think about it. Companies like HTC and Samsung and Sony like to push the envelope in terms of raw computing power and graphical performance, and one could argue that they’re just trying to give some consumers what they want. But where’s the value in that for the companies who make the devices? It’s mostly in marketing. You get to crow about having the world’s [insert superlative here] phone for a few months until someone else one-ups you. But batteries are different — if smartphone companies started duking it out on battery life instead of screaming clock speeds all the time, we’d finally start getting phones that can keep up with all the seriously crazy things we ask of them.
Heads up, wearable tech aficionados: Motorola Mobility is looking to produce some new wearable gadgets and it wants some help. The Google-owned company quietly posted a job listing yesterday looking for someone to fill the role of senior director of industrial design for wearables — according to the post, that person will “provide strategic leadership, champion innovation and institute best practices to create a new world-class wearable’s [sic] design group within Motorola.”
At first glance, it seems like the sort of person the more business-centric Motorola Solutions would be looking for — after all, they’ve got plenty of experience in wearable computing as it is — but references in the listing to the company’s “future with Google” make it clear this isn’t just an instance of a post going up on the wrong career site. Then again, Motorola Mobility was responsible for devices like the ill-fated MOTOACTV (seen above), so they’re not exactly strangers to wearable tech either.
Of course, there’s very big question we need to address here: what exactly does Motorola mean when they use the word “wearables”? At this point it’s tough to say, but Regina Dugan, head of MM’s Advanced Technology and Research Group, gave us a bit of a hint when she took at the stage at AllThingsD’s D11 conference. At the time noted that she was “profoundly interested in wearables, and showed off an electronic authentication “tattoo” developed by MC10 — essentially an ultra-thin patch loaded up with very small antennas and sensors — that Motorola would be helping to advance in conjunction with the company.
That sounds pretty niche to be honest, but it may just be the tip of the iceberg if the language in the job listing is any indication. There are repeated references to the importance of consumer appeal: the person who lands the gig must “define design strategies that synthesize technology innovation and consumer desires” and “ensure creative direction for design is consumer focused”, which make it look like Motorola eventually wants to release a wearable device that’s meant for the masses. That jibes rather nicely with remarks made by Motorola consumer experience design SVP Jim Wicks last month at TechWeek in Chicago — he suggested in his keynote address that people won’t be hunched over their gadgets in the future, and that wearable tech will continue pick up steam.
Motorola definitely isn’t the only one tackling the wearable tech trend, as parent company Google has reportedly been working on a smartwatch for a while now, and Apple has reportedly been fleshing out its staff with health and sensor experts who may be working on fitness-friendly wrist-worn gadget.
This isn’t the first time that Motorola let an upcoming initiative slip thanks to a publicly available job posting — earlier this year the Google-owned company was caught trying to hire a senior director of product management for the “X-Phone”, a device we know now to be the Moto X. To absolutely no one’s surprise, that job listing disappeared shortly after it started getting media attention, but the proverbial damage was already done.
As it happens, Motorola is still looking for quite a few people — there are some 450 job openings listed on the Motorola Mobility careers page. Google revealed yesterday in its quarterly earnings release that between March and June of this year, Motorola Mobility lost more than half of its nearly 10,000 person workforce — some certainly moved on of their own volition, but the rest likely were given the boot to help streamline the company staunch the operational losses it’s reported regularly ever since Google acquired it last year.
UPDATE: Motorola has responded to say that the “vast majority” of those people worked in manufacturing in China and Brazil, and have been transferred to Flextronics.
Google I/O came and went with nary a word of that rumored X Phone, but according to Eric Schmidt’s recent comments at D: Dive Into Mobile, there are clearly some big, big plans for Moto that have yet to be fully realized. Dennis Woodside, CEO of Motorola Mobility will be joined by Dr. Regina E. Dugan, senior vice president of the same company, here on the D11 stage. We’re expecting plenty of questions surrounding market share, the interaction with the Android team and a vision for generating RAZR-type buzz once more. Join us after the break for the liveblog!
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Google
Google announced their latest quarterly earnings yesterday, and the company had another good three months in the black, earning a revenue of $14 billion, with $3.35 billion of that as cold, hard income. However, Google’s recently-acquired Motorola Mobility is struggling, losing $271 million, but Google CEO Larry Page seems to have big plans for the subsidiary, and teased some of the features we may see on upcoming devices.
During Google’s earnings call yesterday, Page discussed Motorola and mentioned that he has seen some of the company’s upcoming products, saying that he’s “really excited to see the potential there.” He discussed the problems with current hardware, such as short battery life, shattered screens, and phones breaking when users accidentally drop them.
Page notes that these things simply just shouldn’t happen, which means that Motorola’s upcoming devices could come with improvements to these three categories. We’ve heard a lot of rumors about a possible “X Phone,” which is said to currently be in the works over at Motorola, and it’s possible that the phone will come with a type of ruggedness unlike what we’ve seen before.
This means that the X Phone could be classified as a rugged smartphone, but it won’t be bulky and thick like most rugged phones are. Instead, it could come with a toughened exterior along with an unbreakable type of glass for the display, as well as large battery similar to what’s in the DROID RAZR MAXX HD. As far as when we might see a phone like this come to the public, it could be later this year in time for the holiday season, but we’re not counting on that 100% just yet.
Google’s Larry Page hints at upcoming rugged Motorola devices is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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The Federal Patent Court of Germany has invalidated all claims of Apple’s slide to unlock patent, and rules that none of the 14 amendments that Apple has suggested for salvaging the patent are valid. A bench of five judges, headed by Judge Vivian Sredl, made this ruling after a full day hearing. At least two of the judges on the bench are reported to have engineering backgrounds. It doesn’t end here though, Apple will be appealing this decision at the Federal Court of Justice. It is being reported that Apple, Samsung and Google knew that the Federal Patent Court was probably going to invalidate this patent.
This patent invalidation means a victory for Samsung and Motorola Mobility, though the final outcome can be changed if the appeal turns in Apple’s favor. For now, Apple’s patent EP 1964022 on “unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image” are invalid as granted. The court ruled that software such as the one described in the patent does not meet technicity requirement under European patent law, therefore Apple’s patent can not stand. Under U.S. patent law, there’s no such thing as a technicity requirement.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Cockroach Cam: Be Very Afraid, I/O Denim Jeans Loves Your Smartphone, 
Back in the summer of 2011, Google announced it would acquire Motorola Mobility for $12B. One year and a half later, Google plans to cut over 10% of Motorola’s workforce, essentially cutting 1,200 jobs.
This isn’t the first time Google decided to cut jobs at its acquired Motorola Mobility as a few months after its acquisition, Google already cut jobs at the company. The outcome of this round of job cuts is in order to reduce Motorola’s workforce to fewer than 10,000. (more…)
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Field Trip Helps iOS Users Learn More About Their World, AT&T Reminds Its Customers They Can Unlock Devices For You,
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