Motorola confirms Moto X flagship smartphone

Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside has confirmed that his company is developing the so-called Motorola X Phone, but that it will be called the Moto X.

Woodside was speaking at the AllThingsD D11 conference, and revealed that he had a new “hero” handset with him at that moment. “It’s in my pocket,” he said, ” but I can’t show it to you.” The big tease.

Still, Woodside did spill the beans on a couple of major differentiating factors that should mark the Moto X out as a little different.

The biggest thing is that the Moto X is apparently going to use its array of sensors far more extensively and smartly than its rivals. The phone’s gyroscope and accelerometer are going to be on all of the time, feeding the phone information about where you are and what you’re doing – it’ll be “contextually aware.”

This will lead to instances where the phone knows you want to take a picture, so will boot up the camera without you even having to press a button. It will also know when you’re traveling at 60 miles per hour in your car, and will behave differently so as not to distract you.

Woodside stressed that all of these sensor components will be “ultra-low power,” so they won’t sap your battery too much. Indeed, we can expect the Moto X to sport a very generous battery life overall thanks to a novel twin-processor set-up.

It was also stated that the Moto X would be “the first smartphone that’s going to be built in the United States,” in a Texas factory that Nokia used to use to make its feature phones.

Of course, it will still use components sourced from elsewhere in the world – processors from Taiwan, for example – but 70 percent of the assembly will occur on Motorola’s home soil.

Apparently the Moto X is “going to be broadly distributed,” which should hopefully mean that the next Motorola flagship won’t be hamstrung by limited availability like previous models from the manufacturer.

Now find out what the Best Mobile Phones of 2013 are.