Making a smartphone with the intent of having it sell for a budget-conscious price is a tricky balancing act. Sure, you can build a stupid cheap handset just by giving it ancient hardware, but there's a law of diminishing returns there – at some point, you're not saving any more money by going with lower-end tech. At the same time, even if you go with conservative but still decent hardware, if you're not pricing the phone low enough, it's still not going to sell. Some manufacturers have been very successful at finding this balance; companies like Motorola and Nokia certainly come to ...

No, we're not seeing a new phone from Motorola, and it's not some sort of ruggedized version of the Moto G we all know. However, there's a bit of a difference in both the naming (with the addition of the "Forte" moniker), and what you get in the package, if you live in Mexico, and you're on Nextel. Expect nothing different from the Moto G Forte than the regular Moto G, but with a back cover; it's actually the Grip Shell, and it comes out of the box, otherwise setting you back around $15. In addition, they're also throwing in 50GB of Google Drive space. While there's no word on the ...

With March now upon us, the early year expo season has drawn to a close, as first CES and then MWC delivered their one-two punch of new hardware, services, accessories, and as much mobile news as we could handle. With Anton D. Nagy and Jaime Rivera on the floor in Barcelona, we had dozens of great opportunities to check out all the new Mobile World Congress gear for ourselves, while our team back in the States brought you word of the latest product announcements as they broke, while also swinging by New York City to check out the US side of Samsung's Unpacked event. While the whole week is ...

Smartphone fans should be quick to recognize Ashton Kutcher as the actor portraying Steve Jobs in last year's much anticipated (though critically panned) biopic, but in real life Kutcher's been helping out on the Android side of the fence. Last fall, Lenovo recruited him to help promote its Yoga Tablet (the second-gen version of which we just caught at MWC), and now we get word that Lenovo is increasing its involvement with Mr. Kutcher, who will be helping Lenovo define the user interface it creates for a forthcoming line of smartphones. We're certainly well used to seeing celebrities ...

For the longest time, Lenovo stayed back on the outskirts of our regular smartphone coverage. Sure, we'd learn about a new device or two every now and then, but with no carriers in the US selling Lenovo handsets, it was difficult to follow the company with much passion; post-launch, we rarely heard another word about most of these devices. But now all of a sudden with this Motorola purchase, we're looking at Lenovo in a very different light, and no matter what the company might have been up to in years past, it's about to become a much more serious player on the global smartphone stage. As ...

Lenovo is a company rarely in the spotlight in the mobile space. It's tried its hand at mobile devices several times, to a mostly uninterested audience. But Lenovo found itself all over headlines at the end of last month, after Google announced it agreed to sell Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. Fresh off the heels of that announcement, Lenovo just announced three new Android-powered smartphones: the S660, S850, and S860. Priced at $229 sans contract, the S660 (pictured above) is the cheapest model of the three. It will ship with a 4.7-inch qHD display, 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6582m chip, ...

As we prepare to say goodbye to the "Google-ified" Motorola we'd only just gotten to know, it bears remembering that the brand hasn't been issued a death warrant. Motorola under Lenovo may well flourish, after all, so it's premature to start planning the funeral. Still, two ownership changes in two years is a lot for any company, and from the inevitable brain drain of personnel losses to the unpredictable nature of marketing machinations, the future of the Motorola brand is anything but certain. So we thought it'd be nice, at this crossroads in Motorola's history, to take a look back at ...

We were all very surprised when it was announced Google had moved to purchase Motorola Mobility in the second half to 2011. As I noted in my piece from Monday, we were all taken aback and curious as to why Google had moved to purchase a hardware company. Obviously, the purchase was heavily – if not entirely – fueled by Motorola's immense, mobile-related portfolio of over 20,000 patents. But when Google's own Dennis Woodside moved over to Motorola as the new CEO, we could only speculate that Google, despite making it very clear Motorola would remain a separate company, wanted Motorola ...