Vodafone customers keen on a near-stock Android experience can buy Motorola’s flagship smartphones — on a contract — as of today, with pricing starting from a low $45 a month.
The performance oriented Moto X Style will be available on Vodafone’s $80 Red plan for an additional $3 per month, while the well-rounded Moto X Play will be available on Vodafone’s $40 Red plan for an additional $5 per month.
Pricing for both smartphones undercut that of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 6s, which will go on sale next week on the back of strong pre-order demand.
Partnering with a carrier will have no effect on the near-vanilla Android software running on Motorola’s smartphones, said Danny Adamopoulos, the product manager of Motorola in Australia and New Zealand, at last month’s launch event.
“Vodafone has seen the value of a our native Android experience. We haven’t had to put any Vodafone material on the Moto X phones. “It has a significant influence as it simplifies the testing process."
The move ensures customers get the latest version of software quickly.
Previous Motorola flagships could only be bought as an outright purchase from a handful of retailers. The strategy to sell smartphones outright proved successful with its less expensive Moto G range, but the more expensive price of the Moto X flagship made it more difficult for it to gain traction.
The Moto X Play and Moto X Style
The Moto X Play best fills the mid-range of the market. It has a 5.5-inch, Full HD display, a splash resistant coating and a 3,630 milliamp-hour battery, which Motorola claims will last for two days before needing to be replenished.
Inside is a custom built Motorola chipset, which is composed of a Snapdragon 615 1.7GHz octa-core CPU, an Adreno 405 GPU, a natural language processor and a contextual computing processor.
The smartphone has 2GB of RAM and will come in storage options of 16- or 32-gigabytes, with support for microSD storage cards up to 128-gigabytes in size.
Both the X Play and the X Style come with a 21-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front camera.
Topping the range is the Moto X Style. It has a larger 5.7-inch, 1440p display, and will have back casing made from real wood.
Its Motorola chipset differs with a Snapdragon 808 1.8GHz hexa-core CPU, an Adreno 418 GPU, and dedicated processors for language and context. There’s more RAM at 3GB and it is offered as a 64GB model, in addition to 16- and 32- gigabyte variants.
The battery is smaller at 3,000 milliamps-hour, but the smartphone still benefits from a splash resistant nano-coating.
A review of both smartphones will be published in the coming weeks, in addition to our current review of Motorola’s third-generation Moto G.
