Moto X with wood panel coming to India soon

 Flipkart, an e-commerce website that partnered with Motorola for the Moto G as the exclusive launch partner in India, has now announced that it will soon launch Moto X in the country. Unlike Moto G, which is targeted at budget conscious buyers, Moto X is a high-end Android phone and is likely to cost around Rs 25,000.

Flipkart on its Twitter page said on Thursday that just like Moto G, it would launch Moto X with some exclusive offers. While Flipkart did not reveal a launch date, the phone is likely to be available for purchase before March 20.

In answer to several queries from its Twitter followers, Flipkart said that in India Moto X will launch without Moto Maker, an online tool offered by Motorola in the US. Through Moto Maker, customers can customize the Moto X before Motorola ships the unit to them. But Flipkart said that the phone will be available with wood panel finish in teak and walnut.

"Walnut (will have) black front and silver accents. Teak (will have) white front and silver accents," the company noted. With plastic back cover, the phone will be available in five colours.

Moto X has a 4.7-inch screen with 720 x 1280 pixels resolution, 2GB RAM, 16GB/32GB storage, 10MP primary camera and 2MP front camera. It is powered by a dual-core -- but high-end - Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that runs at 1.7GHz. The graphics chip is Adreno 320, which is capable enough to handle almost all high-end games available for Android devices.

The phone launched with Android 4.2 last year but now has been upgraded to Android 4.4, which is the latest version of the OS. It runs an almost unmodified version of Android, though Motorola has added some special features to the OS. For example, Moto X is a phone that is always in listening mode and hence can be activated through voice commands even when its screen is in the sleep mode. Then there is a feature called flick-to-click that allows the Moto X user to start camera app by holding the phone in their hand and flicking the wrist.

Both Flipkart and Motorola consider Moto G launch in India to be very successful. Moto G was priced aggressively in India and Flipkart had trouble keeping it in stock immediately after the launch. But on Thursday the company said that it has "made improvements in planning (the stock) this time around".

However, one factor to keep in mind is that Moto G lacks a worthy competitor in the market. Unless Motorola is very aggressive with the price - somewhere around Rs 22,000, which seems unlikely -- Moto X will have to compete against phones like Nexus 5, the official Android phone that sells for Rs 28,999, and Samsung Galaxy S4, which recently got a price cut and is now available for around Rs 30,000. Both Nexus 5 and Galaxy S4 have better hardware than Moto X.