Breaking down Google's impact on the Moto X

As the first device designed after Google's acquisition of Motorola, the Moto X is a good combination of both companies' services.

Moto X is the first completely new smartphone project that was launched after Google acquired Motorola Mobility. As such, it fully integrates the technology assets of both companies. It is a carefully designed, customizable mass-market consumer device with much embedded Google technology: speech recognition, contextual awareness, and personalized search. It’s available in 18 colors with 7 accent colors. The specifications are adequate for a high-end smartphone and meet or exceed most of the iPhone 5 specifications.

At the announcement in New York yesterday, Motorola Senior VP of Product Management Rick Osterloh introduced the Moto X with a personal demonstration. Rather than one big Apple or Samsung-like announcement with hundreds of people, Motorola held four personalized sessions for approximately 50 journalists at a time, allowing interactive questions.
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Osterloh led with “Touchless Control.” Motorola adapted Google Now to utilize a proprietary always-on speech recognition function. It’s based on the Motorola X8 Computing System that combines a standard Qualcomm Snap Dragon S4 Pro dual-core CPU and quad-core GPU with two proprietary cores, one for natural language and the other for contextual computing.

The Moto X uses the natural language processor to monitor local sound sources at low power for the words “OK Google Now,” that when detected takes the smartphone out of a low-power state and turns the speech stream over to Google Now for recognition and a response through Google services, such as search and navigation. Osterloh said the Moto X is not listening to every word - it’s just listening for the signature of “OK Google Now” to awaken the smartphone. If Google Now’s speech recognition were constantly monitoring for this cue using ordinary hardware, the battery would quickly become drained.

The user can train the Moto X to recognize his or her voice. It’s not completely foolproof, as someone with a similar voice can prompt the Moto X to awaken. This was shown when an attendee at the event shouted "OK Google Now" and briefly took control of the device. The user can choose to add a password or PIN code to protect the device from unauthorized access, and a Bluetooth device, such as an in-car hands-free system, can be configured as a trusted command device, eliminating the need for password or code entry. Touchless Control was demonstrated to work at cocktail-party levels of ambient noise, and at a distance of up to eight or 10 feet.

Motorola’s researchers learned that the average person activates his or her smartphone 60 times a day, to check the time or respond to notifications. The Moto X uses the contextual processor to operate its “Active Display” to present time of day, missed calls, and notifications at low power without taking the smartphone out of sleep mode. Only a minimum number of pixels are illuminated, saving power by leaving the rest of the OLED display dark. The contextual processor recognizes if the smartphone is face down or in a pocket and does not illuminate the Active Display.

The 10-megapixel camera has three improvements. A twist of the wrist launches the camera without entering a password or PIN. The UI is simplified, moving most camera controls to a panel that can be exposed with a left-to-right swipe. This UI makes it possible to take a photo by touching any part of the screen, replacing the small blue icon that requires concentrated fine motor control to press. The camera is easier to focus and produces better images with an RGBC camera sensor that captures up to 75% more light when the picture is taken.

Most interesting is the user customization. The image at the beginning of this report gives one a sense of the many choices the consumer has to personalize the Moto X with a color scheme. The consumer can choose from two bezel colors, 18 back-plate covers, and seven accent colors, for a total of 252 unique combinations. The user can also add personalized text to the back of the Moto X, such as a name or email address that a good Samaritan might use to contact the owner if the smartphone is lost.

Motorola has created a web service called “Moto Maker” for consumers to use in visually sampling and choosing colors, accent colors and personalized text inscriptions. The suggested price is $199 with a carrier contract. Those interested in buying one can visit a carrier and purchase the Moto X at a contract price, where they will be given a voucher that includes a PIN number to enter into the Moto Maker web service to order the Moto X. Motorola said that it has organized its supply chain to assemble the Moto X in Fort Worth, Texas, with a four-day turnaround from order to shipping to customer. Consumers can also use Moto Maker to purchase directly from Motorola online.

Recognizing speech, understanding the meaning of speech and executing specific commands are priorities for Google. To this point, Google recently hired artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil to lead engineering advances in speech technologies. Motorola may be pushing present-day speech technology to its limits. Moto X’s Touchless Control appears to have made at least an incremental improvement over Google Now and Apple Siri. Even if the incremental improvement in speech is not large, the combination of Touchless Control, Active Display, colorful customizability, and buying experience will drive consumer adoption. Google takes risks and innovates at a scale of many millions and billions. Whether the Moto X achieves Google scale remains to be seen.

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Why the new 'superphones' really are super

Why the new 'superphones' really are super
The word 'superphone' is an old marketing and headline gimmick, but this year's lineup of extreme phones has earned that moniker.

The word superphone has been used by marketers and journalists since the 1990s to convey the idea of a phone that far outshines the competition.

More than 10 years ago, for example, the Nokia 9210 was widely hailed as a superphone because it was more like a laptop than other phones. It was a clamshell device, opening up to reveal a keyboard and a color screen that were much bigger than those on other phones but much smaller than the ones on actual laptops.

Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone With its 41-megapixel camera, the Nokia Lumia 1020 smartphone falls into the category of "superphone," says Mike Elgan.

Since the '90s, the superphone label has been used by marketers trying to set their products apart from the competition and by journalists grasping for a colorful word to express their excitement about a new phone or a new feature.

In other words, the word superphone never really meant anything. It was a word without a clear definition. As a result, it hasn't been taken up by the public.

The time has come for that to change. A new crop of phones really should be described as "superphones," and I'll tell you why.
A new definition for 'superphone'

We have come to accept that phones have features and functions that are inferior to other devices. Their processors are weaker than PC processors. Their camera electronics are inferior to the technology in real cameras. And their usage models are based on the idea that people will use them to do limited, scaled-down versions of what is possible on other devices.

We love our phones because they're mobile and multipurpose, not because they're more powerful or do something better than anything else out there.

But it may be that our understanding of the term super, as applied to phones, is flawed and should change.

Supercomputers are super not because they are pretty good for room-size machines, but because they can do things only supercomputers can do -- like predict future global weather patterns or beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.

Superman is "super" not because his powers are pretty good for an alien, but because they exceed those of any human, alien or other superhero.

In order to qualify as a superphone, a smartphone should have key features that radically exceed not only those of other phones but also those of other consumer devices. It should be able to do things that even our PCs, laptops, digital cameras and other things can't do.

Meet the new superphones

New superphones are being announced and coming on the market that do super things. They have fundamental abilities you can find only on these phones.
Super cameras

A new category of superphone has cameras capable of using more pixels than even high-end prosumer digital cameras.

Nokia this week announced its Lumia 1020 superphone, which is super because it has a 41-megapixel digital camera inside. (My high-end prosumer Canon EOS 7D camera has an 18-megapixel CCD.)

While the best use of all those megapixels will be for digital zoom and "oversampling," which means removing digital noise by giving a 5-megapixel image multiple choices for each pixel, the phone will also be capable of taking 38-megapixel photos -- far more than prosumer digital cameras can.

Other superphones in this category are Nokia's older Symbian-powered PureView 808 (also 41 pixels) and the upcoming Sony Honami i1 (expected to have a 20-megapixel camera).
Super smarts

Describing Siri and Google Now as "artificial intelligence" is controversial, but I've heard leading AI experts do it.

The ability to understand what you say in everyday language and then talk back -- plus the ability to learn, do things for you and make decisions about whether to interrupt you -- are AI-like features that consumers can get only from a small number of phones.

For example, iOS phones like the Apple iPhone have hardware inside designed to optimize the use of Siri. This experience is not available on laptops or desktops or anywhere beyond the hardware-optimized iOS devices it runs on. That exclusivity makes the iPhone a superphone.

Likewise, the small number of phones specifically optimized at the hardware level for Google Now are also superphones, according to my definition. The Nexus 4, co-designed by Google and made by LG, probably fits into this category, and the upcoming Nexus 5 (rumored to become available in October) almost certainly will.

Google has teased but not announced the specifics of its upcoming Moto X phone. Some pundits have suggested that this phone may have hardware optimizations for Google Now as well, since Motorola is owned by Google.

By my definition, any phone hardware-optimized for artificial intelligence capability that's unavailable on desktop computers is a real superphone.
Other super capabilities

The coming age of wearable computer products, like Google Glass devices and smartwatches, means smartphones will increasingly serve as the hubs of wireless personal area networks.

When smartphones are specifically hardware-optimized to boost the capabilities of wearable devices, they will become super, as long as those hub functions are unavailable on other devices.

These are just examples. I think we're going to see a rise in the availability of superphones that will be not only better than other phones, but also better than any other device at fundamental tasks important to users.

The superphone label is finally meaningful, and it has become meaningful because we're in the midst of a shift from a world in which phones do limited, stripped-down versions of what other devices can do to a new world where phones can do things no other consumer device can do.

And that's going to be super cool.

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