Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside confirmed the existence of the company’s upcoming X Phone at the D11 conference on Thursday. Along with being the first smartphone to be built in the United States, the executive claimed the handset, which will officially come to market later this year as the Moto X, will be one of the most sophisticated devices ever built. Woodside revealed that the handset will track a users’ every move and location by keeping the accelerometer, gyroscope and other sensors on at all times.
“It knows that when I take it out of my pocket I might want to do something, I might want to take a picture so it’s gonna fire up the camera… Imagine when you’re in the car the device will know, whether it’s on or off, that it’s travelling at 60 miles per hour, so it’s going to act differently,” he explained. “It’s contextually aware of what’s going on around it, it allows you to interact in very different ways than you can today with other devices.”
As noted by Tom Simonite of MIT’s Technology Review, a device with sensors that are always on and constantly processing data will require a lot more power than the average smartphone. Although Woodside noted that Motorola has experience with low-power sensors, there are still some concerns that the Moto X will suffer from poor battery life unless Motorola decides to include a massive battery similar to the one found in the DROID RAZR MAXX.
The Moto X will be available sometime this summer on multiple carriers.
