The last couple of years have been a whirlwind for Motorola as a company, but the end consumer really wouldn’t know that unless they really paid attention. The company’s product line offered to the public certainly does not seem to have suffered as the company has undergone major changes. Consider this, the current iteration of Motorola’s most popular smartphone, the Moto G3, was released while Motorola was under last ownership, Chinese computer maker Lenovo. The company released the third version of the Moto G along with Moto G3 cases and accessories under the Moto brand, even Lenovo has since revealed that the company plans to kill off the Motorola brand once and for all.
The previous iteration of the Moto G, the Moto G2 and its more expensive X-branded sibling, as well as the budget basement E version, were released while Motorola was under the umbrella of its previous owner. An owner none other than Google itself. While many lovers of the Motorola brand were delighted that Google had acquired it and believed that this essentially secured the future of the Motorola brand; that was not going to be. In just a couple of years or less, Google decided it didn’t want to own a hardware manufacturer and sold Motorola to its current owner, Lenovo.
The first Moto X and shortly after the Moto G that we are writing about today were launched in the last days of Motorola being a completely independent company. Even the instant success the Motorola brand had with the Moto series of smartphones wasn’t enough to stop it from selling the company’s smartphone division to Google.
None of this changes the fact that Moto logo phones continue to be among the best Android smartphones on the market. Motorola, despite its highly uncertain future, continues to sell Moto-branded phones as well as accessories like Moto G3 cases by ship.
It’s also incredibly interesting to note that in the midst of its turmoil as a company, Motorola is managing to accomplish something that most other Android makers continue to struggle with. That feat is Android updates, something that has always been a sore spot for Android users and something that iPhone fans always make fun of Google for. However, Motorola has managed to release timely updates before almost all other manufacturers and keep its smartphones running on the latest version of Android.
At the time of this writing, Motorola has just released the OTA update to Google’s latest Marshmallow OS for its previous generation of Moto G, the Moto G2. The Moto G2 launched with Android 4 or KitKat, but received the fifth-generation update to the operating system as a Lollipop update less than halfway through its life cycle. Now, long after the phone stopped selling, Moto released an update that is sure to give the phone a longer lifespan.