hardware

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Motorola has always made phones with bold colors and design aesthetics, and the Google-owned company’s upcoming DROID lineup is no exception. Evleaks has shared a leaked rendering of the new DROID Ultra in dark red. “Ultra’s full Kevlar backplate shows off the new shade, and apparently the white edition even has a totally blank face to boot.”

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Dear Handset Maker:

Your company and hundreds of others are engaged in an epic battle for the smartphone handset market, which within a year or two will exceed a billion customers and $150 billion a year in revenue.

Don’t you want a big piece of that? Because if you do, you’re not acting like it.

Samsung gets most of the market share and some of the profits. Apple gets most of the profits and some of the market share. But Samsung fears with justification that its lead is slipping away to lower-cost and more aggressive vendors. Apple’s momentum has slowed horribly with the onslaught of Android phones.

The rest of you handset makers — let’s face it — are scrambling for crumbs on the floor.

Instead of taking one of the known-bad losing strategies, why don’t you try the obvious winning strategy?

I’m going to describe the losing strategies, then spell out the winning one.

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We don’t know a whole lot about Motorola’s upcoming flagship phone, the Moto X, other than that it will be made in the U.S. and feature new technology that has been in the works for years.

Now a report has shed some more light on what the Moto X will offer. Customers will be able to customize the look of the handset more than any other Android phone to date, and the device will be environment-aware thanks to some special hardware sensors.

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Remember Motorola Mobility? Google bought it for $12.5 billion in 2011, and the smartphone maker hasn’t released one new device since. Now Motorola is ready to unveil several new Android phones between now and October. The upcoming flagship device from Motorola will be called the Moto X, and it will be assembled in Texas.

The news was just announced onstage by CEO Dennis Woodside at the D11 conference.

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Google is expected to start shipping the second iteration of its Nexus 7 tablet this fall, according to DigiTimes. Supply chain sources have indicated that the device will feature a 7-inch display and start going into production this summer. Factories overseas are expected to make about 8 million of the next-gen tablets for 2013.

The future of the Nexus 7 wasn’t addressed by Google at its I/O conference earlier this month, but the company is rumored to announce a white Nexus 4 phone and Android 4.3 Jelly Bean at a June 10th event. That would make for a good time to unveil a new Nexus tablet as well.

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