Motorola Introduces the Moto E: The $129 Smartphone for Everyone

It doesn’t seem like it was long ago that everyone was excited by rumors of a new Motorola phone after Google’s short-lived acquisition of the company in May 2012. Motorola had long been known as a company that introduced their own custom interface onto Android which users felt offered little benefit in return for the performance impact it had on their devices. After their acquisition by Google it was hoped that Motorola would offer an experience closer to that of Google’s Nexus devices. Those wishes came true, and Motorola has since been creating devices that are very close to stock Android with only minor modifications which, for the most part, are generally seen as helpful. Motorola also made a move for the mid-end segment of the market with the Moto G which offered users a formidable smartphone relative to its price.

Today Motorola has continued along their new path by introducing the Moto E, the most inexpensive device in their new lineup of smartphones.

The Moto E sports a similar design to the other smartphones in Motorola’s lineup with a rounded plastic design and a lip at the top for the 3.5mm headphone jack. Similar to the Moto G, customers will be able to swap out the back cover for ones of many different colors which adds a level of customization to the phone’s design. I hope that Motorola has not compromised on the quality of construction to attain such a low price point; the Moto G felt exceptionally well crafted given its cost.

On the face of the device we have a 960×540 qHD display. Motorola isn’t being forthcoming with whether or not this is an IPS panel, although they do confirm that it is covered with Corning Gorilla Glass 3. To attain its low price point the Moto E does not come with a front facing camera. There is also a large front facing speaker along the bottom of the device. On the back we have the 5MP camera which is capable of FWVGA (854×480) video recording, and the indented Motorola logo that has become standard across Motorola’s new devices.

Inside the device we have Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 200 platform with two Cortex A7 cores running at 1.2GHz and an Adreno 302 GPU at 400MHz. On the cellular side the device supports 21.1Mbps HSDPA on bands 1, 2, 5, and 8 for the North American and European versions and bands 1, 2, 4, and 5 in Latin America. A special SKU with support for dual SIM cards will also be available in certain markets with support for dual SIM standby. The device packs a 7.52 Whr battery and Motorola is promising that it will be capable of lasting you the day on a single charge. The device ships with only 4GB of NAND (only 2.2GB of which is available to the user) but to compensate Motorola has included a MicroSD card slot for up to 32GB of storage expansion.

Motorola is marketing this as the smartphone to kill the dumbphone and they have set up a website which encourages users to tell their friends still using flip phones to make the switch. The website states “Life before mobile apps should be a thing of the past. Introducing the Moto E. Made to last. Priced for all.” It really is something to see such a capable device at a price accessable to the masses. It was only a few years ago that hardware of this capability was reserved for the fastest and most expensive of smartphones.

The Moto E comes with Android 4.4.2 out of the box. It is available now in the US and India for $129 USD and 6999 Rs respectively, with Motorola planning to launch in over 40 countries in the coming weeks.

Source: Official Motorola Blog

Huawei Launches Ascend P7 Based on Custom HiSilicon SoC

Today Huawei announced the Ascend P7, its new flagship smartphone. The P7 replaces last year’s Ascend P6 and brings significant improvements across the board. Huawei is positioning the device to compete better in the high-end market with improved specs across the board and an improved design which is reminiscent of Apple’s iPhone 4 with sheets of glass on both the front and back of the device and a metal band around the edge. The rest of the known specifications are laid out below.

Huawei continues to include their own SoC in their flagship devices. The HiSilicon KIRIN 910T is a quad-core Cortex A9 design with Mali-450 GPU built on a 28nm HPM process. The Cortex A9s are clocked at up to 1.8GHz, which is quite high for a A9 design. I’m curious to see how the high clocked A9s stack up to Qualcomm’s Krait 400. I suspect it’s a better perf/watt choice to use higher clocked A9s than a high frequency A15, however the driving factor here is probably performance/area and then perf/watt.

The KIRIN 910T features HiSilicon’s own integrated LTE modem. For a device aimed at the high-end market this is definitely something needed to be competitive. The P7 will launch with support for LTE Bands 1, 3, 7, 8 and 20. With the exception of Canadians in 2600MHz (Band 7) markets, North American users are out of luck with the international launch SKU. In terms of connectivity Huawei has moved to Bluetooth 4.0 and included support for NFC. The device’s battery capacity increased from 7.6Wh to 9.5Wh. Poor battery life was one of the major complaints about the Ascend P6 and it looks like Huawei doesn’t want to have the same issue this time around (although software tuning can be just as important as hardware/battery selection).

Like other recently launched devices, Huawei is putting big stress on the camera. The Sony-sourced 13MP sensor on the back is fairly standard for today’s high-end Android smartphones but the front camera is much more unique. Huawei has used an 8MP sensor for the device’s front facing camera. This is the next step in what appears to be a very rapid shift in front camera resolution. It was only a year ago that 2MP was the de-facto standard for the front facing camera on flagship smartphones. With the new front camera Huawei is promoting some new software features like front facing panoramas to fit in larger groups of people. In addition, both the front and back cameras are capable of 1080p30 video recording.

In terms of software the device runs Android 4.4.2 with Huawei’s emotion UI on top. Like many recently launched flagship devices, Huawei is touting a feature they call “super power-saving mode” which can dim the display and turn off everything except the basic functions of the phone when the battery is at ten percent or lower. Huawei has indicated that the device will launch in black, white, and pink finishes with a recommended retail price of 449 euros in China, Australia, and Europe sometime around Q3 2014 with other markets to follow later.

ARM Expects ~1B Entry Level Smartphones in 2018, $20 Smartphones Coming This Year

When we first started covering mobile, nearly every silicon vendor I spoke with issued the same statement: eventually, all phones are smartphones. Continued scaling on process technology, combined continued development of small/power efficient CPU cores, will ensure that even the lowest cost mobile devices will be smartphones.

At its second ever Tech Day, ARM shared some data about how the smartphone market is evolving. We often mention that the growth in the smartphone industry will shift from high-end devices to mid-range and entry level devices. The graph above shows just that. By 2018 ARM expects over a billion entry level (< $150) smartphone shipments per year, around 2x what it is today.

Two factors will drive entry level shipments: the performance of entry-level devices, and their overall cost. ARM believes the floor for an entry level smartphone running Android (today with a single-core Cortex A5 based SoC) is $20, and that we’ll see the first devices on sale at that price point in the next few months. Manufacturing limits will likely prevent cost scaling below $20. Keep in mind that a single Cortex A5 is faster than the ARM11 in the original iPhone, which retailed for $599 in 2007.