Moto X Phone's Top Engineers Weighs In on Specs Before Release Date on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon

One of the biggest complaints about the Moto X, besides the fact that after previewing the smartphone to international markets Motorola announced that the device will come only to the United States, is the Moto X's specs. The smartphone does not have specs that can compete with some other top of the line smartphones; instead it focuses on customization as the main appeal of the device. Motorola's CEO has already come out in defense of the smartphone, and now Iqbal Arshad, one of Motorola's top engineers, has come out in an interview with CNET to defend the device that he and his team worked so hard on.

Arshad began by discussing the dual-core processor that comes with the Moto X. While some new devices use quad-core processors, Arshad said that for the most part mobile devices do not need more than two CPU's, so they are unnecessary:

"It is a dual-core processor, but the thing people have to understand is that in mobile devices, more CPUs don't necessarily mean better or faster devices. In fact, in most instances, no more than two CPUs are being used at any given time. In order to save power, the algorithms controlling the device are often trying to turn off CPUs. In the stress tests we have conducted on competing devices, we launched 24 Web sites at once on the device, and none of the devices used more than two CPUs at once to do this. So more than 90 percent of the time, the additional "cores" on the CPUs are turned off..."

Another big critism of the Moto X is the display, which is 720p instead of 1080p like many phones currently available. Arshad believes that the resolution for the Moto X, combined with the new architecture the phone will have, maximizes the abilities of the device, and compares the perception of the Moto X to the way automobile enthusiasts look at electric cars:

"It's hard because people are programmed by the industry to look at things like how many cores a chip has or whether the display is 1080P. That's how chip and display manufacturers differentiate their products. But we've spent thousands of engineering hours building a new kind of processing architecture that will really change how people use their phones. So it's hard to understand because you're comparing architectures that are fundamentally different. It's kind of like people who are looking at a Tesla electric car and expecting it to have a V-8 engine. When you talk about an electric motor, it's hard for people who are used to comparing specs on traditional cars to understand how it truly compares, because it's completely different."

Overall, it seems as though the Moto X has a chance to be a unique device in a crowded market, and perhaps being different rather than trying to match other devices will be what makes it successful when it is launched in the coming weeks.