Motorola has been making waves in the smartphone market overseas of late. At IFA, the company took the wraps off of a new flagship smartphone, the Moto X, as well as a mid-range phone, the Moto G, before making the Moto 360 smartwatch officially available for sale in the US.
Currently Motorola’s phones are only available in South Africa through the Orange online store, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to remain that way forever. Lenovo is in the process of buying Motorola from Google and when we last spoke to them about bringing Motorola into South Africa they hinted that it could be sooner, rather than later, when the iconic cellphone manufacturer returned to South African shores.
Motorola Moto X
First up was an update to one of the most highly praised smartphones of last year, the Moto X, which keeps its name but finds itself improved in almost every area. The design has been given a major overhaul in a premium direction eschewing the budget plastic frame for a, now fashionable, metal one while adding a selection of leather backing plates to the plastic and wood ones of the previous generation Moto X.
The display, still a Super AMOLED unit, has been upgraded from a 720p resolution to full HD while also growing in size from 4.7 inches to 5.2 inches. The increase in display size has increased the size of the overall phone but at the same time the edges have been slimmed down and the back of the Moto X has been rounded to make it feel smaller in hand.
Gone is the custom-built Qualcomm processor from the original Moto X replaced now with the industry standard Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor with four cores humming along at 2.5GHz supported by the same 2GB of RAM. Storage-wise, there will be either 16GB or 32GB of storage which is set in stone with no microSD card slot to speak of.
The camera gets a resolution bump from 10 megapixels to 13 and gets new, fancy ring flash which uses two flashes buried inside a circular diffuser which Motorola claims will make for much better pics in low light conditions.
All in all it looks like a sold update to the phone and we hope that we’ll be able to get one this time around to play with.
Motorola Moto G
Motorola’s Moto G has been a massive success for the company in market like India and Brazil, even in South Africa the smartphone has done exceedingly well according to the guys at Orange. So when it came time to upgrade it the approach seems to have been, if it ‘aint broke, don’t fix it.
The same Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor along with 1GB of RAM and a 720p resolution display are all back again to do duty a second time around. The display has grown from 4.5 inches to 5 inches which Motorola have said was one of the most popular requested changes from users of the original Moto G.
The only other notable change is the addition of front-facing stereo speakers, and an upgraded 8 megapixel camera from the 5 megapixel in the original. Once again if the price when it gets to South Africa is under R3 000 then we can’t imagine too many phones being a better buy for the money.
