Motorola Planning 2GHz Android Phone For Later This Year

rocket97 writes "On Wednesday, at the Executives Club of Chicago, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha reportedly decided to chat about the relatively near future of the mobile landscape as he sees it — which, in part, includes the ultimate demise of mobile computers in favor of highly-capable smartphones. This being his vision, Jha discussed Motorola's plans for a smartphone with a 2GHz processor — by the end of this year. While Jha did not want to divulge any further information, Conceivably Tech cites another anonymous Motorola executive who was a little more chatty, talking up a device intended to 'incorporate everything that is technologically possible in a smartphone today.'"

Motorola Has Crappy UI

[darkmeridian]

I had the Razr and the Moto Q. It seems like Motorola has the crappiest and most confusing user interfaces ever. If they were loading pure Android, that'd be great. However, Moto customizes the OS with something called "MotoBlur." I assume that this would be a crap firmware/UI. This would prevent the latest Android OS from being used. Also, a two GHz processor sounds great but the impact on battery life will probably outweigh any benefits in a smart phone.

Carrier problems

[Darkness404]

The main problems with this though will be carriers. Its becoming increasingly apparent you can't have 2 year carrier-paid phones and be remotely on the cutting edge. Someone who got the first Android phone released in the US on a 2 year contract still couldn't upgrade it at a lower price. With the iPhone releasing a new phone every year and Android improving by leaps and bounds every other month it seems like, there is just no way that this can't end up with hardware fragmentation because a 528 Mhz Backflip just can't run the same things a 1 Ghz Nexus One or the new Motorola phone at 2 Ghz and the trend for hardware still isn't getting faster and faster, AT&T still only has the Backflip which is really underpowered when compared to the rest of the high end phones which are not on AT&t.

Highly capable smart phones?

[0123456]

So we're going to be carrying around phones the size of laptops? Personally I'd rather carry a phone that's just a phone, and a laptop when I need one... it's bad enough that you can barely find a phone without a camera anymore, for those who aren't allowed cameras where they work.

Obviously one day human/computer interfaces are going to reach the point where they're more efficient than a keyboard, a decently-sized LCD display and mouse, but I can't see that happening for a long time yet.

Re:Carrier problems

[Darkness404]

But hardware fragmentation is pretty easy to combat, think about it. If you need more memory, you pay $30 and get a few more gigs of RAM, need a graphics card? Pay $100 and now you have HDMI-out and can play the latest games, etc.

And even then, it is a lot cheaper to upgrade PC hardware than smartphones. A new low-end laptop costs $350 and can do everything that a $550 smartphone can.

I can keep shoving new graphics cards, memory, etc. in my desktop for a good 5-7 years before everything becomes obsolete. With a Smartphone the most I can upgrade is putting in a new MicroSD card.