In the latest round of mildly insane rumours, Google’s X phone will reportedly debut in May with release in July.
DroidLife started the buzz when it was alerted to a 600 page forum thread where a long time Motorola source had posted details about the so-called X phone.
The phone, it said, would be announced at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O in May, with release on July 8. All carriers would sell the phone, with Verizon offering on contract for $299 or in the Google Play store for similar off-contract prices to the Nexus line of phones. It wouldn’t be a Nexus, but it would run Android with removable bloatware.
Unlocking the bootloader (the initial software that runs the operating system and allows installation of custom software) through Verizon would cost $15 per month or through Google Play, it comes unlocked with no fee. This raised some metaphorical eyebrows in the comments on the DroidLife story – who would pay $15 per month, perhaps indefinitely, to unlock their phone?
The X phone would be Google’s first, all-its-own baby, the Christian Science Monitor reported, a product of Google and the now Google-owned Motorola division and could be on a par to rival Apple’s iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy S III, reportedly soon to have an older, gruntier sibling itself in the S4.
Back in December the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was hard at work on the rumoured X phone (Google, unsurprisingly, hasn’t confirmed a gosh darn thing) and quoted Motorola chief executive Dennis Woodside as saying the company was investing in a team and technology that would do something “quite different” than current approaches.
Google recently posted $US50 billion in revenues for the 2012 financial year and senior vice president and chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said the company had inherited Motorola’s product pipeline when it bought the company, some 12 to 18 months of work. However profitability was key, he said.
Whether the X phone will prove to exist and whether it will crush the iPhone 5 and S4 remains to be seen – with Apple and Samsung also rumoured to be releasing new models this year, 2013 could make for interesting times.
