Motorola has confirmed during the D11 conference that Moto X, its news smartphone, will be made in the U.S. and launched by this year end.
At the All things D's D11 conference held in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Wednesday, Motorola confirmed that Google's Moto X smartphone will be made in the U.S. and will be launched later this year. In an interview with All Things D's Ina Fried, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside said that its upcoming smartphone will compete against the leading smartphones in the market such as Apple's iPhones and Samsung's Galaxies.
Google acquired Motorola for $12.5 billion last August, but the intentions of Google remained sketchy until the D11 conference, when Moto X was unveiled.
Woodside told All ThingsD that the new smartphone, formerly known as Google X Phone, took a page from its previous high-tech invention of MOTOACTV watch. The Moto X smartphone will have "battery-friendly sensor technology" similar to that in the MOTOACTV watch.
"What Motorola learned was how to manage very-low-power sensors," Woodside said, noting the capability of these sensors to collect location and heart-rate information. "They took those learnings to the smartphone."
He further said that the Moto X smartphone is just the beginning of a whole new series of smartphone product-line.
"We'll launch a handful of smartphones that aren't the end, but show where the company is heading," Woodside said to All ThingsD.
Woodside hopes that the launch of the new smartphone followed by a series of other phones will change the course of Motorola's future. "We're going to play a different game than Motorola has played in the recent past," he added. "It's not going to radically change the world in the first launch, but we do think that the products will find their markets."
In December last year, reports of Motorola's "superphone" were leaked, which said that Motorola was working on the latest technology like flexible display and ceramic case for its smartphones. But it is not clear if any of it will make it to this year's smartphone list. "Those are further off," Woodside said.
