Motorola seems keen for the world to know it has a new flagship Android smartphone on the way, going as far as having CEO Dennis Woodside announce the phone’s existence at the recent D11 conference.
We’ve heard many a rumour about a Motorola X Phone being in the works, with images leaking recently depicting a device labelled ‘XFON’. Woodside confirmed the phone as ‘Moto X’ at the event, and although he didn’t whip a pre-production sample out of his pocket to show it off, he did let slip a few of the features.
Woodside says the phone will be ‘self-aware’ in that it will know its surroundings and know where and how you are using it. Examples he used were the phone knowing when you take it out of your pocket, knowing when you want to take a picture, and when you are driving.
The phone will use inbuilt sensors to do this, presumably with the accelerometer detecting motion when you take it out of your pocket and then unlocking itself or displaying the keypad to enter your unlock code or pattern. Similarly, we can envision the phone opening the camera app when you hold it in landscape mode, ready to take a picture.
After this information was revealed at D11, the idea of Google Now being integrated into Moto X seemed an obvious one. Google Now is self-aware in that it knows where you are, where you’re going and where you’ve been and offers useful information based on that – it would tie in nicely with the phone’s own ‘self-aware’ features, there’s no denying it.
Google of course owns Motorola and could use the Moto X as the perfect platform to boost Google Now, but it does however have other, larger, Android partners it would not wish to distance itself from by doing so, such as Samsung and HTC.
Right now we know that Moto X exists and we’re very excited about the prospect, but we know little else in terms of solid information, including any sort of time we can expect an announcement. The phone is rumoured to have a 5-inch Full HD display which runs edge to edge and will run the latest version of Android with very little skinning or bloatware.