At the All Things D conference, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside finally gave up the ghost on the long-rumored “X” phone. The phone is set to be the new lead device for an equally “new” Motorola. According to Woodside, who said he had the phone in his pocket but couldn’t show anyone, the new Moto X is made in the USA and uses all the new APIs shown off at Google I/O. He also said that, while Motorola was all set to build and release new devices that focus on high quality for a low cost, the X will not be in that category. The X will be “more contextually aware” than those devices, and you “can interact with it in different ways”.
While the aforementioned ramblings are exciting, they don’t tell us much of anything. We don’t know which carriers will have the device (although it seemed to pass through the FCC for AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint earlier that month), what hardware will come on the device, or — let’s be perfectly honest — if it’ll live up to the hype being set up for it. There was one particular detail, however, that was briefly discussed, concerning battery life. One person asked, “How can you fix it, [battery life] when everyone else has struggled with it so much? There are ways to improve it, but can you solve the underlying problem? How do you go about doing that?” To which Woodside replied:
I’ll save the more detailed discussion for later. But your question about how you understand the change in state and optimize the battery — we have some of the best engineers, and they’ve created a system where there are two processors that are more aware.
The Moto X launched that summer, assembled in Fort Worth, Texas, making it the first smartphone assembled domestically in the USA. Motorola confirmed at the time that every unit sold in the US would be built at that facility.
via The Verge
