(3) Brian X Chen. With Moto X, Google Enters a Crowded Marketplace; Taking on high-end rivals with a phone controlled by voice; A company with blemished record on hardware is giving it another try. New York Times, Aug 2, 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/0 ... rtphone-market.html
Quote:
"The phone has all the standard features expected of today’s top smartphone, with a twist: the ability to control the phone by talking to it, without lifting a finger.
"sales could be an uphill climb. The phone * * * is landing squarely in the brutally competitive market for high-end smartphones. And Google has a lot to prove before it is taken seriously as a hardware maker.
"The phone learns the voice of its owner and responds only to it. Some people might find this creepy, but it is a feature that a user must turn on voluntarily.
"Mr [Iqbal] Arshad[, Motorola’s senior vice president of global product development,] said the company had to develop a new computing system, X8, to make Moto X work well. One low-powered processor in the phone is devoted to processing natural language. Another low-powered processor is dedicated to detecting movements of sensors — two twists of the wrist will open the phone’s camera, for example. The design of the computing system allows the phone to constantly listen for the user’s input and quickly respond without constantly draining the battery, he said. (The phone’s battery is supposed to last 24 hours handling various tasks.)
"The smartphone business is still expanding — in the second quarter this year, it grew 52 percent compared with last year, according to the research firm I.D.C. But most of that growth is coming from manufacturers offering cheap smartphones in emerging markets, he [Tero Kuittinen, a telecom analyst at Alekstra, a mobile diagnostics firm] said. And the companies competing with Apple and Samsung for the high-end market just have not had much luck. Mr Kuittinen said that after Google bought Motorola, it killed its line of low-cost cellphones and 'moved to high end, just when the high-end market ran out of gas.' * * * Google also has a track record of spotty hardware sales.
My comment: There is no need to read the rest.
(4) Peter Svensson, US Factory Means Buyers Can Customize Google Phone. Associated Press, Aug 1, 2013.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/bu ... e3f77a67_story.html
Quote:
"its [Google's] first smartphone designed completely in-house [as opposed to inheriting designs from Motorola, which Google bought last year, OR Google-branded Nexus phones created when Google worked with other phone manufacturers]
"Workers at the factory in Fort Worth, Texas, assemble the custom phone
"The Moto X is the first smartphone to be assembled in the US.
"The Fort Worth factory will let Google stamp the phone as 'Made in the US,' but assembly is just the last step in the manufacturing process, and accounts for relatively little of the cost of a smartphone. The cost largely lies in the chips, battery and display, most of which come from Asian factories. For instance, research firm iSuppli estimates that the components of Samsung’s latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, cost $229, while the assembly costs $8.
"The factory is owned and run by Flextronics International Ltd., a Singapore-based contract electronics manufacturer. It’s set to employ 2,000 people.
Note:
(a) The title in this posting comes is the original one when published by AP, which Washingtonpost.com changes.
(b) "Rick Osterloh, the head of product management at Motorola, said the Moto X has a special chip devoted to listening, which means it doesn't have the drain the battery by keeping the main processor running all the time."
Obviously there is a typo in "which means it doesn't have the drain the battery"--most likely, it should be "which means it doesn't drain the battery"--but I check other websites for the same AP story, and all have the same typo. |
发表于 8-2-2013 11:18:41
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