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Moto X: Google teases its 'worst kept secret'

The Moto X will be manufactured by Motorola Mobility, which was acquired by Google last year. 

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Reuters
The Google offices are seen near the city centre in Dublin, on July 8, 2013. Google is close to unveiling a new smartphone called the Moto X.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Motorola has begun sending out invitations to a launch event for the Moto X, a smart phone that's been called the company's "worst kept secret." 

A quick recap, for anyone who's missed the Moto X furor: Last May, Google officially closed its multimillion-dollar acquisition of Motorola Mobility, Motorola's cell phone division. In the ensuing months, we heard plenty of rumors about the Moto X, which will be the first high-powered smart phone manufactured by the Google-owned Motorola Mobility (others are expected to follow shortly after the Moto X launch). 

Google CEO Larry Page has said he's "very excited" about the device and Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman at Google, has been spotted using a white handset believed to be the Moto X. Yesterday, Motorola even tweeted a picture of the Moto X being assembled (granted, you can't see the phone itself – only a dude in a white coat eyeballing a piece of hardware). 

Now we've got the invitation to the event, which will take place on Aug. 1 in New York. As Roger Cheng of CNET notes, the invitation doesn't exactly speak volumes about the phone: It's just a bunch of hip-looking people and the words "Moto X." 

So what will the Moto X look like? And how will it perform? Well, chances are, given the pedigree of the two companies, we're going to be dealing with a high-end piece of hardware running the latest Android OS with some sort of Motorola UI on top. Over at eWeek, Don Reisinger has assembled a list of the "must-haves" on the Moto X – a list that includes a big screen, 4G LTE capability, and "clarity that it's a Google product." 

"Years ago Motorola was one of the top-selling mobile phone brands and one that people trusted, but that's no longer the case," he writes. "Search and cloud giant Google, on the other hand, is among the most admired tech companies on the planet these days. To give the smartphone the best chance of success, Google should make it abundantly clear to all customers that the Moto X is its baby, even if it is designed and manufactured by Motorola." 

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