Google has announced that it will be releasing its new mid-range smartphone, the Moto X, in the US, Canada and Latin America around the end of August or early September.
Manufactured in newly-built facilities in Texas, the Moto X will be the first product built from the ground up since Google acquired Motorola for $12.5bn (£7.9bn) in May 2012, and continues the web giant's ventures into hardware seen elsewhere with Glass and the self-drive car.
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Indeed, Motorola's chief executive Dennis Woodside has described the Moto-X as a "self-driving phone", on account of the way it responds to voice commands and is integrated with Google Now a natural language interface. The Moto X can answer questions and provide recommendations in a way that the company says will revolutionise the way people interact with their phones, taking voice commands much further than the functionality currently offered by the likes of Apple's Siri. Because the phone will be permanently in listening mode, a simple command like "OK Google now" will be enough to activate it, removing the need to tap a control button.
The hands-free theme continues with the Moto X's motion control features. For example, the camera can be launched by two twists of the wrist, with the shutter triggered by touching any part of the screen.
Impressive battery life is promised too. Woodside said that the sensors in the Moto X are the result of a learning process that Motorola achieved through its development of the MOTOACTV watch, which constantly gathers heart-rate information.
"What Motorola learnt was how to manage very-low-power sensors," he told All Things Digital. "They took those learnings to the smartphone."
The Moto-X is aimed at the mid-market, possibly so as not to tread on the toes of Samsung, whose devices represent 60 per cent of Android shipments worldwide and who command 95 per cent of the profits in the global Android smartphone market, according to analyst IDC. Google will be keen to keep the South Korean firm in the Android fold.
The phone features a 4.7-inch, 720-pixel high-definition screen in a body slightly larger than an iPhone. It has a 10-megapixel camera with special light collecting sensors that should mean more detailed photos without a flash, and a battery that promises 24 hours on a single charge under normal usage.
It will cost from $199 (£132) on contract with 16MB of storage. Google has not announced any plans to release the Moto X in Europe as yet.
