Fighting fire with fire is only a safe bet when the odds are somewhat balanced. Google knows this, so to battle Apple’s next-generation iPhone 5S this fall, it’s planning to fight with napalm. A recent report revealed that Google will spend half a billion dollars or possibly even more to market its Moto X smartphone following its launch in the late summer or early fall. As Quartz points out, that means Google will spend half of Apple’s entire fiscal 2012 advertising budget to promote a single phone.
It might sound crazy, but Google has no coice but to spend big if it hopes to make Motorola’s new phone a blockbuster. Tens of millions of people will be planning to purchase Apple’s iPhone 5S this fall, so it’s going to take some serious spending if Google hopes to convince a sizable chunk of them to consider the Moto X instead. Samsung’s Galaxy Note III is expected to launch this fall as well, as are a handful of other flagship phones from the likes of HTC, Nokia and BlackBerry.
The Motorola Moto X will be a user-customizable phone built in the U.S. and it is expected to feature a 720p display, a 1.7GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, a 10-megapixel camera, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage and Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean. The Moto X has been pictured in several leaks and it will reportedly be available in a number of colors.
