Weekend Wrap-up: Moto X unveiled, Wii U sales extremely sluggish
Thanks for checking out another edition of the Weekend Wrap-up, where we fill you in on some of the big news items of the past week. We’ll be moving this post from its previous Saturday evening spot and publishing it on Sunday morning instead, so that you can catch up on the week’s tech news on what is hopefully your quietest, most relaxing day of the week. If not, I’m sorry.
Moto X-posed
After a lot of leaks and teasers from Motorola itself, the company’s newest smartphone finally made an official appearance this week. The Moto X is a 4.7-inch, highly-customizable device that falls more into the mid-range tier than the higher tier with the Galaxy S 4 or the HTC One. Motorola and Google are banking on people wanting to completely customize these phones and also hope the phone’s killer app, its hands-free, always-listening mic tempts buyers into making a purchase. One disappointment: the phone runs Android 4.2.2, now a tiny step down with Android 4.3 running loose.
Wii have a problem
Nintendo’s Wii U console, the company’s first 1080p system and the successor to the very successful Wii, hasn’t been meeting sales expectations. Actually, that’s an understatement. The Wii U is selling very poorly. Since the console’s launch late last year, only 3.61 million units have sold worldwide. In the April-June quarter, sales were abysmal — just 160,000 units. Nintendo had hoped to sell 9 million Wii U systems by March 2014, but that target looks to be in serious jeopardy.
Unstoppable 7
Apple’s Developer Center was down completely for over a week and not all of the sections are back yet. But that didn’t stop Apple from releasing Beta 4 of its next mobile operating system, iOS 7. Most of the update seems to focus on fixing bugs, though there are a couple of small changes on the design side of things. It looks like a lot of the major changes may be out of the way and these last few betas will be Apple’s chance to fix lingering issues and add some design polish to the OS before its wider release this fall.
When I Quip, you Quip, we Quip
Remember Bret Taylor? He was instrumental in the creation of Google Maps, helped found FriendFeed and later went on to become the CTO of Facebook. He’s back again, this time with a social, mobile-first word processing tool called Quip. It’s available as an iOS download and on Android as a free preview, and it hopes to take on Microsoft Word (and other competitors) by nailing mobile design for a word processing app and putting an increased emphasis on collaboration.
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Thanks again for catching up with us. And remember, we’ll be publishing these Weekend Wrap-ups on Sunday mornings from now on.