Motorola hints at future lineup: customisable screens, dirt cheap phones

Motorola has revealed it’s planning on working on an extremely competitive low-cost smartphone as well as a smartphone with customisable screens. In an interview with Trusted Reviews, Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside teased the company’s future plans.

Motorola is all about disruption. Since being acquired by Google, the once struggling tech company has boldly broadened its horizons, focusing on creating quality products with budget prices and an emerging market agenda.

“In much of the world US$179 is a lot of money so there’s a big market at a price point of less than US$179,” Woodside said. “We’re going to look at that and just delivering on that value promise is super important. I mean why can’t these devices be US$50? There’s no reason that can’t happen so we’re going to push that.”

In November last year, the Moto G was announced as a device designed to “appeal to lots of people” outside the US. It’s a revolutionary cheap phone with high-end specs. Costing four-times less than the latest iPhone, it has a 4.5″ 720p display, 1GB RAM and a quad-core, 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor. There are two storage options (8GB and 16GB) both sporting a 2070mAh battery. The G is also running Android 4.4 Kitkat.

Motorola is also experimenting with more customisation of its future smartphone lineup. When the Moto X and the Moto G were debuted last year, the company introduced the Moto Maker website, which allows you to customize your smartphone’s design and certain specs.

Soon after, Project Ara was announced — the awesome concept of having a completely customizable smartphone similar to what Phoneblok is all about. Woodside says that’s not enough:

“On the more premium side we’re pushing more customisation. Today you have colours and beginning of materials but you don’t have screen size and you don’t have functionality and we’re going to bring all that in the next year or so.”

The idea of Project Ara is about creating a modular smartphone — a long-lasting skeleton or frame that can be fitted with various pieces of hardware such as the camera, RAM, CPU and so forth. This means upgrading the device would be simple and inexpensive. How a customisable display will fit onto this drawing board remains a mystery but extremely exciting.