Moto X arrives in the UK next month for £380

Motorola will bring its flagship Moto X smartphone to the UK next month – but British buyers won’t be able to customise the design.

The phone will start from £380 SIM-free including VAT, and will be available on contracts starting from £25 a month. Customers can buy the phones from Amazon, Phones 4U, Carphone Warehouse, O2, and Techdata. Phones4U has the white model exclusively for the first three months. Motorola said the phone will be available from 1 February.

The Moto X was Motorola’s first major release since the company was bought by Google, with notable features such as voice controls and customisation options.

Users can fire up the Google Now personal assistant with the phrase “OK, Google” and give commands hands-free. The display also quietly shows on-screen notifications while inactive rather than notifying users of new messages with a blinking light.

In terms of specs, the UK version of the handset looks like its US counterpart with a 4.7in, 1,280 x 780 AMOLED display. It comes with a 1.7GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB or 32GB of internal storage. Motorola hasn’t revealed prices for the 32GB model.

Like the cheaper Moto G, there’s no microSD slot, but Motorola is offering 50GB of Google Drive storage free for up to two years.

It features a 2,000mAh battery, with a battery life of up to 24 hours. The device packs a 10-megapixel rear camera and 2-megapixel front camera, and weighs 130g. The phone will arrive with Android 4.4 KitKat and support for 4G LTE, Bluetooth 4 and Wi-Fi.

No customisation

While US customers can currently use the Moto Maker website to customise their new Moto X, British buyers won’t be able to do the same just yet.

That’s because phones sold to US customers are manufactured locally, meaning Motorola can ship the customised devices relatively quickly.

But phones sold to European customers will be assembled in China, making it trickier to get the devices out in time.

“That’s what we are working out,” CEO Dennis Woodside told
Pocket-Lint. “Mostly we are in the US so we can hit a four-day delivery window. We know that if you can’t deliver the phone in four days people aren’t going to buy it. So we have to figure out how to do that in Europe. That is why there is a bit of delay in Moto Maker going live.”