Shopyourworld.com, a website that sells imported items in India, has become the first to launch Google’s Motorola Moto G smartphone in India, marking the return of the brand after a long hiatus.
Motorola was once the number two mobile brand in India, ahead of Samsung and LG, and behind Nokia. However, the company, which was famous for both its mid range and low end phones, soon shifted its focus from markets like India after it was hit my financial troubles.
The Motorola Moto G is not really top-of-the-class as far as hardware is concerned, but as always, Motorola is likely to rank high for those looking for value for money.
Moto G is known as the most affordable high end phone, selling for $180 (~11,000 rupees) in the United States. It is part of the new line up that includes the more famous Moto X – the completely customizable android phone.
The Moto G has a 4.5-inch HD edge-to-edge display with a resolution of 720×1280 pixels (translating to a pixel density of 329ppi) and boasts a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 screen. Powered by a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon400 (Cortex-A7) processor coupled with an Adreno 305 GPU, the Moto G features 1GB of RAM. On the optics front, the Moto G sports a 5-megapixel rear camera along with an LED flash and also includes a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. The rear camera supports HD (720p) video recording.
The smartphone, which has an edge-to-edge display, has a water resistant nano-coating on the outside and inside, and is powered by a rather bigger-than-usual 2070mAh battery.
What may disappoint some would be display size, with 5 inches having become a sort of standard among smartphones.
Interestingly, on the same day, Datawind, the Aakash maker, also announced a large-display phone, but priced at just Rs 3,500.
The DataWind PocketSurfer smartphones is billed as the world’s least expensive 5” screen smartphone. At present, a similarly speced phone costs at least Rs 5,000.
“Intended to create benchmarks in the smart phone category, DataWind’s new products break the affordability barriers of smartphones and bandwidth constraints of cellular networks to deliver calling facility and internet access to anybody who can afford a simple mobile phone,” said Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of DATAWIND.
The company claims that the phone has what it calls a “breakthrough web delivery platform” that compresses and accelerates web content by factors of 10-30 times.
“Even on traditional GPRS/EDGE 2.5G mobile networks, web pages are delivered in 3 to 5 seconds at a fraction of the cost,” DataWind said.
The entry-level device is the PocketSurfer 5X at Rs.3, 499 for a dual-SIM smartphone with a 5” touch-screen. The second in the range is PocketSurfer5 and is priced at Rs 4,999. PocketSurfer offers Android Jelly Bean and Wi-Fi and EDGE networks. This model also sports a 5 inch capacitive touch screen.
The third and the final model in the range is the PocketSurfer 3G 5, priced at Rs 6,499, which comes with 3G.