How many phones did Motorola release this year? A LOT
2020 was a very interesting year for Motorola. We saw many new phones released and it's pretty easy to lose track. I did, at least. I'm supposed to be the biggest fan in the world and don't even know how many Moto G variants were released in the past year, because there so many!
Moto changed its strategy this year. Instead of focusing into a smaller number of devices for each segment (or 3 for each as they were doing for the past years with regular, Play and Plus variants) we now have Fast, Power, 5G, Stylus, Plus, Play, Vision, Fusion, Power Lite, Plus and Play so that each device can appeal to a very specific segment.
Here are all the 25-ish Moto phones from 2020 put together:
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| GSMarena |
There hadn't been so many phones since 2012, when more than 30 or 40 devices were released. At first, I thought it wasn't the greatest strategy, but it seems to be working. Market share in many key markets has not been affected by the pandemic/economic downturn, which is good, in fact sales are up in many countries.
Apart from that, Motorola is probably saving money with components and there's a lot of recycling parts from a device into another and releasing it with a new design and updated features or software at a more competitive price.
And, for history lovers, if you think about it, this is what Moto had been doing in the 2000s. You probably don't remember how many variants the ROKR or the RAZR had back then. We had a V3, a V3x, a V3i, a V3xx and so on.
Technically, these are Motorola product lines today:
- RAZR
- EDGE
- Motorola One
- Moto G
- Moto E
And that's good. Moto is giving users the power to choose according to their different price or specs needs. The regular consumer will only care and know it as a RAZR or a Moto G, not a Moto G8 Power Lite. Only us, tech fans will care about this. But regular customers will see a lot of devices released from Moto everywhere and that's a good sign.
But one thing that concerns me is the fact that Moto G, E and Motorola One are competing between them in terms of design. Same colors, same camera module and same display design. Back in 2019, Moto G7 had a very unique design language (sure, it looked like Moto Z, but you could tell them apart). Now you can't know which is which. Not sure if this is good, or bad. This probably happens with all manufacturers. It's the current phone market, maybe. But I miss the days of each phone having a different identity. At least we got that with RAZR (and Edge, kind of).
What are yours thoughts on this?
