Google Moto X: a superphone at a budget price The phone, which is to largely be manufactured in America and is likely to launch later this year, will use advanced sensors to anticipate user behaviour, Motorola's Dennis Woodside announced at a conference in America. Woodside, a former Googler who was brought in to run the 2011 acquisition, said the flagship device would compete with both top Android devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One as well as the iPhone, which is expected to be updated later this year. The device, which is likely to build on the features in Google's "Now" search product, will aim to predict what a user wants to do so that they do not waste time choosing it manually. Examples include automatically sensing a device is travelling at speed along a road and suggesting entering "car mode" or making it faster to open the camera application. Woodside added that Google wanted to sell the device at lower margins than companies such as Apple have become used to. Although he did not aim the iPhone specifically, he told the D11 conference, "Those products earn 50 per cent margins. We don't necessarily have those constraints. Those [margins] will not persist. He said that while computers and televisions had seen dramatic price drops in recent years, smartphones had yet to see such falls. Although the price of smartphones is largely hidden to users by costly monthly contracts, only Samsung and Apple have consistently made profits from the devices, and Google's approach will worry LG and Sony, and apes the business models of emerging Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei and ZTE. Google said it would start to hire 2,000 people at its Fort Worth, Texas plant in August.