Motorola thinks current smartphones are actually pretty dumb. Enter the Moto X, Motorola’s not-so-secret, made in America, sensor-laden flagship smartphone.As the first Motorola phone completely designed under Google (Motorola had the last wave of Droid devices in the works for a while), the Moto X has a lot to prove. Mainly, is it worth the $12.5 billion Google spent to buy Motorola more than a year ago?In an intimate gathering with media today, Motorolo CEO Dennis Woodside and SVP of product management Rick Osterloh gave us a glimpse at the $199 Moto X and framed how the new Motorola fits inside of Google.“We looked at the smartphone business today, phones today are really powerful — but they aren’t very smart,” said Woodside. “That’s one of the things we wanted to help solve. In particular a smartphone today requires you to turn it on, punch some numbers in, and manually operate. That shouldn’t be how it is — it should be smarter than that.”Woodside, who was a Google executive before heading up Motorola, pointed out how the acquisition was similar to other Google acquisitions that paid off well, like KeyHole, which led to Google Earth and key features in Google Maps; and YouTube, the biggest media site on the web. Despite Motorola’s struggling revenues over the last few years, it’s clear that Google expects it to rebound in the future.And as the the company that built the first cellphone, it would be foolish to count Motorola out entirely
