Motorola unveils its first Google smartphone

The Motorola Moto X smartphone, using Google’s Android software, is displayed, Thursday, Aug. 1, 2013 at a press preview in New York. In the background is a Deck, from Sol Republic, which is a wireless speaker that operates up to 300 feet from the phone using Bluetooth technology. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

SAN FRANCISCO – Motorola on Thursday introduced the keenly-anticipated Moto X, a Google-centric smartphone that buyers get to design themselves.

Moto X is the first Motorola smartphone created in collaboration with Google since the Internet titan completed its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility in May of last year.

“At Motorola our roots are deep in mobile hardware — we invented mobile communications,” Motorola Mobility Canada general manager Odile Guinot said in a release.

“Now, as a Google company, we’ve become the kind of company that can build a smartphone like Moto X,” Guinot added. “It fuses our history of mobile innovation with the best of Google mobile services.”

Moto X will be available in the US by the end of August or early September at a starting price of $199 if bought along with a two-year service contract with a telecom service company.

It will also be available at that time in Canada and Latin America.

People can visit an online Moto Maker studio to customize colors, accents, memory capacity and other aspects of handsets, which will be assembled in the United States and delivered free of charge within four days, according to Motorola.

Moto X smartphones are powered by Google’s Android software and features include sophisticated voice controls and anticipating what users might want from the Internet at any given moment.

Motorola also streamlined the ease with which smartphone pictures can be taken.

“Moto X promises to be unlike any device we’ve offered before,” said Jeff Bradley, senior vice president of devices at US telecom giant AT&T.

Moto X will work on an array of telecom networks, according to Motorola.