Well, of all things…Motorola has announced that the Moto G, its low-cost companion to the Moto X, will be available in the United States in time for Christmas. This is the slightly downscaled version: 4.5” screen instead of 4.7”, IPS LCD display instead of fancy AMOLED, 1 GB of RAM not 2, none of the fancy co-processors of the Moto X (and accompanying services that go with them), an old-school “swap colorful backplates” rather than the American-made custom-built approach, 5 MP camera with 720p video capture rather than 10 MP with 1080p, and available in 8 or 16 GB storage rather than 16 or 32.
But.
The Moto G costs $179 for the 8GB model or $199 for the 16. Unlocked. Off-contract.
Read that sentence again. Now again. Now again.
Previously, I said that the Moto X was the most innovative and significant new smartphone since the original iPhone. But now I wonder if this might be it. The 16GB Moto X launched for $199 on contract. The 16 GB Moto G is yours for keeps for the same money and no obligation.
Think about it – this is a phone whose specs and performance should pretty much be on par with the iPhone 4S, which remains out there as the free-with-contract offering. The screen is just as good and larger, there’s twice the RAM, the camera is a step backward but that’s the case with Android almost across the board. Get the US version if you won’t be globetrotting, and you can switch back and forth between T-Mobile and AIO almost at will. In fact, with the oft-quoted AIO deal for $55 a month, the 8 GB model and two years of prepaid service with unlimited voice/text and 2 GB of data per month…will cost you a grand total of $1500.
There are some tradeoffs with the Moto G, mostly involving the camera (the one thing that gives me pause, because I shoot a lot more pictures than I used to before my first iPhone 4), but here’s the thing: there has never, never, never been a phone of this caliber available at this price point. Ever. You want an unlocked iPhone 4S? $450 for the 8 GB model. Over double what the 8 GB Moto G will cost.
More than one reviewer is saying that this is what the iPhone 5C should have been, and honestly that’s what I expected of the 5C: the guts of an iPhone 4S with a Lightning connector and a 4-inch screen. But the Moto G not only hits the sweet spot, it creates a whole new sweet spot: the single best $200 smartphone in the world, full stop. Manufacturers like ZTE and Huawei have to be soiling themselves at this point – right now, frankly, this is literally the only prepaid phone worth buying. Unless the early reviews from the UK – where it’s been out for two weeks already – are wildly off base, this is a phone that Moto could have sold for a lot more; it’s on a par with the Nexus 4 that was $350 until a month ago, and unless you really want a 5-inch screen and LTE, it renders the Nexus 5 an overpriced bauble.
No gimmicks. No gargantuan screens or stylus tricks or use-it-once-and-forget-it’s-there bullshit (looking right at you, Samsung). Just a clean, simple, straightforward Android phone. The phrase gets battered to the point of meaningless, but I’m going to use it anyway: this is game-changing.