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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I don't follow Android that closely. How is the performance of this phone? Cheap phones like this will help get Android into the hands of another billion people. It's probably more important to have a more recent version of Android than the fastest CPU.

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It's quad core. Looks like an excellent phone for the price. Interesting that Motorola is one-uping the Nexus to some degree here (the Nexus is closer to being a flagship, but this is significantly cheaper).

This might be my next. What's for sure is I'm never buying another $600 phone again.

I'll never buy one of those again either, subsidized or not. One reason beyond the cost is being at the mercy of the telco for upgrades.

So, unlocked, is this thing jail-breakable/cyanogenmodable or similar?

What's a reasonable expectation for how many years I could keep it security upgraded?

You don't need to be unlocked any more to install CyanogenMod, for most popular phones. http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/CyanogenMod_Installer#Supporte...

The Motorola blog says that the phone will have an unlockable bootloader (in the U.S) which means you should be able to install custom ROMs.

I really enjoy my $399 32gb Nexus 5. I couldn't be happier.

But yeah, $600-900... never again.

It's quad core cortex A7 @1.2 Ghz, that's not even in the same league as the 2 year old Galaxy Nexus (dual cortex A9 @ 1.2). This is in no way comparable to any modern flagship smartphone performance wise.

This is similarly spec'ed to a Nexus 4. A little bit worse, actually, but not by much.

This is probably still too expensive for another billion people.

I think the most recent version of android is the most important part. really.

It's considerably worse than an N4, N4 has 2Gb RAM, Quad Core 1.5Ghz.

It's closer to the 2012 N7 Quad 1.3/1Gb RAM.

Still a hell of a lot of phone/screen for the money.

It is not about a faster processor, but the architecture, X8 in this case. This is what makes the Moto X very interesting, like the always on and some other quirks.

I agree that a cheap performant phone is what is quite revolutionary. Google/Motorola does it right.

This in the same league as the first generation N7 (very roughly) which is a hell of a lot of hardware for 200 bucks.

If this had been around when I bought my N4 I would have been very tempted (as I just want something that is a decent mobile web browser, I don't really use Apps at all).

Chrome runs like crap in 1GB RAM. The keyboard frequently gets garbage collected while I'm typing on it, and the whole thing can crash if I rotate the screen.

That's running on a stock Galaxy Nexus.

That might just be a GNex issue. I don't have any issues with Chrome on my phone (which is slightly faster than the GNex but has the same amount of RAM).

You might want to factory reset - after all those incremental upgrades it can be worthwhile. My wife's GNex is on 4.3 stock and it had some lag before I reset it via a fresh burn of 4.3 factory image. Chrome runs better than acceptably on it. (Or are you on < 4.3 - in that case root and download/run LagFix free app to force TRIM. Pre 4.3 it makes a difference.)

Not sure how the new OS performance is -- but all the requirements were significantly lowered as they push for cheaper & faster phones.

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