Motorola Surprises By Bringing Moto G To U.S. In Time For The Holidays

Motorola’s lower-cost but impressively well-endowed alternative to the Moto X wasn’t expected to hit the market until January, which we thought was odd considering the company would miss out on a lot of holiday season sales. In a surprising turnabout, Motorola announced that the phone will actually start shipping on December 2nd, and you can preorder the GSM version of the handset now.

The device ships with Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean), but a guaranteed upgrade to 4.4 (KitKat) is coming soon. The Moto G boasts a 4.5-inch (1280x720) display, quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (1.2GHz) processor, and 8GB or 16GB of internal storage (with 50GB of Google Drive storage free for two years).

Moto G, now shipping Dec 2

The rear camera is just 5MP but offers LED flash and a 4x digital zoom, and the front camera is 1.3MP. The battery supposedly lasts up to 24 hours with mixed use, which is incredible if true.

The Moto G starts at just $179 off contract.