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Well let me share experience with multiple phone I owned plus the phones I used of family/friends. Motorola and Nokia are the companies which put their unique 'souls' in their phones and somehow its true with HTC as well to some extent.

Its hard to pick the best out of these three but if I try hard to put one manufacturer above all then its Motorola because of the consistency they have maintained through out their products lineup, be it their good days or bad days.

Performance - Its not only about specs written on paper or benchmark winnings. Its about how do you put all the hardware together and then how you tweak it for 'what' usage. Motorola seems to know it's users very well and don't care about winning on papers.

Battery Efficiency : Nokia and Motorola have always been famous for the battery efficiency in most of their phones. Even their smaller batteries do wonders in their phones because they very well know that its a 'mobile' device afterall which will not be kept on electricity power supply all the time. Thus they tweak their hardware in such a way so that mobile remains mobile, doesn't become a desktop which you can't take out with you because it constantly needs to be kept plugged into the power outlet for power supply. I am talking about consistent efficiency through out majority of the devices by one manufacturer. Their are efficient phone by other manufacturers also but they lack the consistency though out their range. Its not only about efficiency during daily-day usage, but its also about overall life of the battery that how long the stock battery will last.

Build quality - Nokias are usually considered as plastic construction but their phones used to survive for too long. Now these days can't say about all the Lumia phones but I still believe they care about build quality. HTC is also known for good build quality but consistency is not there through out their range. Motorola? Well man open the battery cove of the cheapest Moto E and you will know why their phones last long.

The Chinese stuff? Whatever hardware it looks on the paper, they are still 'Chinese', thats all I can say. Though I have NIL experience with Xiaomy, Oppo etc so will reserve my opinion about these few companies.

Its from my own experience.


But one thing I would like to add here that if you intend to keep the phone for long time and can stretch the budget then go for phone which has bigger internal memory like Moto G. Because now Android will be fully shifting onto ART (Android Run Time) and ART needs more space on the internal memory with more applications. The ART is available in Kitkat also as an option to switch and once you switch onto it, You will immediately notice the big difference in space consumption, but performance and battery efficiency also improves with ART.

Also note that its always better to get a phone which comes with assurance of regular official updates. If not then a popular branded phones has better chances of receiving better response from the dev-community.

Android is all about power of Google and Google is about being up-to-date. :D

I am looking to gift this phone. From the person's usage, I am sure this phone will not see heavy usage. Maybe just whatsapp, calls, occasional browsing, infrequent photos/videos etc. Hence the restricted budget. Plus with this kind of usage, I don't see any major issue in settling for 1 GB RAM. To give you an idea - this upgrade will see the person move up from 256MB RAM & Gingerbread (2.3) :). And yes, the current phone runs just fine - no lag!

As far as usability goes, I had flashed MIUI on my G-Nex. For the duration that I had it, I really liked the customization options and the 'different' UI from the usual vanilla android.

I too don't think much of the benchmarks, rather look for real user reviews. That is why I am confused a little now - coz there aren't even half as many Redmi 1S reviews as there are for Moto E.

I wasn't talking about the RAM. 1 GB is enough. I was talking about internal memory - ROM. Moto E has got 4 GB where users get around 2.XX GB something. It looks filling up quicker with more apps installation if you turn on the ART. Though one can live with 20-25 apps installed on it easily but its good to buy more internal memory for being future proof for a while. Actually there very rare apps can be moved onto memory card in the Kitkat and most of the apps need to be kept in the internal memory.

But the usage pattern you described for it's user, you need not to be worried. Couple of Moto-E were bought in my family which I myself configured with needful app installations and doing some settings in them. Also upgraded the firmwares also myself so I know what a beast this little phone is. Most positive thing about Moto E is the battery life, just exceptional for battery of that spec.

1 Million Happy Moto Customers?

Is Fk trying to say they sold a cool 10L Moto E / G & X?

Thats pretty awesome for a brand that was relaunched just around Feb / March 2014 and been operational via a single sales channel for just around 4 months.



Regards,

I think they are going to make a million more, pretty soon. ASUS and Xiaomi are also selling their phones through Flipkart only. Xiaomi Mi3 which is supposed to be available from 22-July, is already sold out. FK has hit the nail on its head.

I see that ASUS has launched their Zenfone range of mobiles. The specs looks really good for the price. The lowest one starts at 6K and looks better than the Moto G.

I very much need the help of the gurus of this forum.

I own a Sansung Galaxy S -T959 (Samsung Vibrant) for the past 3+ years. Its running on Android 2.2 (Froyo). I thought of upgrading the version to Android 4.0.X, since the RAM is only 400 MB. I did the following things in this regard.
1. Rooted the phone and confirmed the same.
2. Downloaded ROM Manager
3. Have downloaded the ROM and went to manual recovery mode.
4. When I tried to install the packages, am getting the message, "Signature Verification Failed".

I tried with various ROM (ICS_4.0.3_MR1-RC4.2_Vibrant & cm-10.1.3-vibrantmtd) but still getting the same message. I even formatted the phone, and tried the above, but still the error message occurs.

When I looked at few videos in Youtube, they delete the delvik cache/memory. Which I am not able to do.

Kindly look forward to your help.

Did you try the correct ROM! Try to install TWRP or philz touch recovery and then install ROM!

The landing cost for a Moto E is around Rs.6100
Landing cost for Moto G is around Rs.10200
Landing cost for Moto X is about Rs.18600 (All sourced form Zauba.com)

An approx profit of Rs.600 per Moto-E, Rs.2500 per Moto G and Rs.4000 per Moto X.
If we take roughly 500000 Moto E sold, 350000 Moto G sold and 150000 Moto X sold, Flipkart have made an approximate profit of Rs.177 crores only on the sale of the 3 Moto models.

FK has indeed hit the nail on the head, and how..

FWIW, I am now officially fed up of this kitkat ROM business and what not. The stupid S3 reboots atleast twice a day during usage (its not used extensively 4 days a week). The responsiveness is decent but it does get stuck / hung and there's the occasional battery pull.

CM11 installer / milestone / Dirty unicorns / blekota / FP rom have failed.
miui didnt install only.

Waiting for iphone 6 to launch so i can pick up the 5c at a handsome discount.

The Intel processors use Android x86 which is different from the ARM version used for Snapdragon CPU. Unfortunately, the development scene for Intel CPU is bleak and custom ROMs are few as ARM practically dominates the Android hardware scene. If you are not keen to root and install custom ROMs, then this is not much of an issue. It comes with many utilitarian apps installed as stock.

I mentioned about uncertain Kitkat update as the phone ships with 4.3 as default, which is already not the latest version. Even Kitkat has many variants like 4.4.2 & then 4.4.4 (the latest available now). So, I doubt if ASUS will be really keen to provide Android L on this device. The downside to not getting these updates is that a few software features and enhancements that the subsequent Android version brings will become a tipping point for buying a new phone as this one might not have those features on an older Android version. And the possibility of getting Unofficial updates by way of the development community is more or less quashed by the Intel platform.

The back loudspeaker is feeble in output. Call quality is good on earpiece.

Battery is removable

No button backlight - Third-party mods will require root. ASUS could provide this in the Kit kat update, but I'm not sure on this aspect . However, I plan to root and add the navigation bar myself to correct the recents key problem as well.

Long press recents key to make it work as context menu key-

If you see the pics of the phone, you'll see that the rightmost capacitive button looks like two windows stacked side by side. This is the recents key and is used to bring up the apps that are open and you can slide your finger across to close them



LINK

This pic from android website has the recents button on bottom right and it demonstrates the screen it brings up.

The problem is that this key doubles up as a menu key/options key in apps. I find that the options key is more likely to be used in everyday usage rather than the recents key. So, you have to long-press everytime you want to see options in an app. ASUS default apps have options button onscreen but it becomes a problem in third party apps like Quickoffice.

It would've been better if I could somehow get menu functionality with short-press instead of long-press as I don't use the recents screen often.


There is a RAM freeing app preinstalled in the notification shade (Pulldown) which can be used to liberate RAM on the fly and it also displays currently free RAM. It works similar to Clean master app in Play store.




Some more things I noticed

Camera has a burst mode of 100 shots.

There is an app called Splendid through which you can control the screen Colour tint.

Anyone buying the Xiaomi Mi3 ?
It has top end spec.Started pre booking in flipkart.Time to book from 15th to 21st of July.Sales start only on 22nd.

Spec Display 1920x1080 pixels, 2.3GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage and 13 mp camera .

Priced at 13999 Rs.

Runs all time famous MIUI UI.

http://www.flipkart.com/mi

Thanks for replying guys. I'll need to find more use for my device then!

Does anyone know if the Nexus 7 can be connected to a USB data card? I have the microUSB-USB(female) OTG connector but not sure if I can use the data card with it.

If yes, it'd be wonderful while traveling.

That's a very high margin! From what I'm told brick and mortar stores have wafer thin margins. It's bit of a concern why FK is getting monopoly in selling recent handsets. Not good...

Dude, its already sold out on FK. I think if you register now, you will not get before 1st week of August. There is a huge demand for this already, as it wins hands down if compared against MOTO G, at just 1K higher price. Xiaomi has already opened their service centers (my city has 3 Xiaomi service centers already). And, Xiaomi Mi3 is the highest selling handset in China.

However, one might feel that Xiaomi is a completely new entity to India and Moto in comparison is a fairly established giant.