Motorola’s Punit Soni on the Moto X and bootloaders:
Moto X on the Sprint, US Cellular, Rogers and T-Mobile networks will have an unlockable bootloader, and in addition, we will be offering a Verizon Wireless Developer Edition and a general North American Developer Edition.
Good.
It would be nice to give a shit about the rest of the world. Moto X will most likely be US only, and the lovely Google Editions of One and S4 are restricted as well, while the rest of the world still has to stick with the Nexus 4.
This phone in particular might be hard to sell anywhere else. There’s a factory here in the US so that iDiots can get theirs in wood (or whatever) with their names engraved on it, and have it shipped to them in 4 days. Unless they built factories everywhere it was sold, this would probably greatly increase the delivery times in other parts of the world.
As a european I don’t care in which factory half around the globe this phone is built, whether it’s china, korea or USA. I just want a current phone (N4 is already 9 months old, which is a long time in the phone business) with a sane update cycle. Actually I’d be satisfied with the two standard colors that will be the only available options for all US carriers that are not AT&T.
I’d hardly call this a current phone, or at least flagship – it is mid-range at best. No way I’d take this over the Nexus 4 (which I own).
In which regard is the Moto X worse than N4? It’s got no quadcore, right, but I don’t even manage to get all four cores of my notebook saturated. I’d rather take two fast Krait 300 cores than four cores of anything, that’ll idle most of the time anyway. I actually take that as an advantage.
They have to test the waters somewhere. If they can do well here that should mean global production will follow.
And the plant in Texas is a former Nokia factory. There should be some of those available since the collapse of phone sales resulted in sales of production facilities as cost cutting measures. And FedEx isn’t all that slow. Say 6 days instead of 4 until non-U.S. plants can come online.
But they might not choose to sell the phones cheaper in the U.S. than in places like China and India like Nokia is doing with their Lumias.
Moto too has lost a lot of market share in the last few years but they have two phones in the top 10 list for customer satisfaction.
I hope it won’t take them over 3 years to turn that around like is happening with Nokia who is still losing sales and share.
Motorola generally retreated, during their hardships, from most markets & is focusing on few “core” ones…
The Chinese ships products to consumers almost anywhere in the world. Watch and learn.
is this small fact a news worth, really?
for example i’ve a sony tablet_z with official support to unlock the bootloader (easy manual @ sony-website) like many other devices. btw motorola/google don’t say that the moto_x is unlocked by default. so what?
Edited 2013-08-03 17:44 UTC
Wrong thread.
Edited 2013-08-04 08:24 UTC