The Moto X is being billed as the first smartphone fully constructed in the USA, but this could mean and extra $4-5 on the price of each handset.
AllThingsD reported that by basing their manufacturing plant in Texas as opposed to China or Taiwan, as many handset manufacturers do, the price of constructing the devices rose from $7 or $8 to $12. However, Motorola is convinced that it’s worth the extra spend to give them the freedom to produce custom handsets for each customer; buyers will be able to choose a personalised engraving on their device, at least, that’s the plan.
The Moto X is a pretty impressive device, sporting a 4.7 inch 720 AMOLED display, 2GB of RAM and a dual core 1.7 Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 processor, but given that it sells in the US for $199 on a two year contract or $579 SIM free it still has some serious competition from cheaper devices.
While $4 or $5 per phone may not seem like much the costs are likely to add up for Motorola, as the Moto X isn’t passing its manufacturing costs onto the consumer, retailing at the same price as other, more cheaply produced, devices on contract.
For now though this is a problem for Americans to worry about; there’s still no announcement on when we can expect to see the Moto X hitting the shops here in the UK.