While there’s a lot to love about our Camera app, we also love our creative Android developers community, which makes fantastic additional apps for your whimsy. Today, we’d like to spotlight Lapse It Pro, which is an app that helps you take time-lapses and makes stop-motion videos.

Some sweet news for Moto G users in Brazil and India! Android 5.0, Lollipop, is now fully available for download to all Moto G (1st and 2nd Gen.) smartphones bought through Flipkart and Airtel in India and through Motorola.com and retail in Brazil. This makes Lollipop available to millions of Moto G users across the two countries. If you haven’t already been prompted to download the new update, you can also pull the update by going to Settings > About Phone > System Updates. If you have a first-generation Moto G, you’ll need to ensure that you have the latest version of Motorola Update Services from the Play Store.

How come everyone doesn’t get the upgrade as soon as Google releases Lollipop?

How come some users in my country get the upgrade and not me?

When will the upgrade for my specific device be available? 

A new year means out with the old and in with the new. In the ole days that might have mostly meant cleaning our houses, but in today's modern lifestyle it can also mean something else: time to choose new apps!

As we begin 2015, here are eight must-have apps that could make your next year a little better.

Timely Alarm Clock
On cold winter days, who really wants to get out of their warm, comfy bed? Make this experience as painless as possible with Timely Alarm Clock. It’s easy to use, gorgeous to look at, and works just as well on tablets as it does on your smartphone. It even turns down the alarm volume when you pick up the device.

Elevate
We spend so much time and energy hitting the gym. Why not give your brain some love, too? Elevate is a mental workout for your brain. Through more than 25 games and personalized training exercises, you can teach yourself to focus better, process information more quickly, write and speak more effectively, improve your memory, and more. You can even track your progress and see yourself get smarter.

Feedly
Stay up to date on reading all your favorite blogs and websites with Feedly. This RSS client is robust, easy to use, and includes other plug-ins to work with services like Evernote. It also makes it a cinch to connect to your social networks so can easily connect to whatever it is you’re reading. You might even use it to discover a few new feeds to follow in the new year.

QuickPic
If you have thousands of photos spread out across various online accounts, QuickPic is your jam. It can pull photos from Picasa, Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr, and more, so you have access to all of your photos in one central location. And, you know, if some of those photos are of a more, shall we say, incriminating than others, rest assured it’s easy to password protect them.

LastPass
Believe it or not, there are still a lot people out there who still use the password, “PASSWORD.” Don't be ashamed. That’s why LastPass exists. It’s a password management app that lets you store all of your passwords in one place, so you can use a different (and preferably stronger) password for every site without having to remember them all. And if you’re worried about keeping all of your passwords in one place, you can add multifactor authentication to ensure your passwords remain hidden and secure.

Cerberus
While you are an upstanding and model citizen, there are others who may not share your same sense of decency. Which is to say that there may come a time when you find that your mobile device has been stolen. Should that happen, Cerberus can help protect your phone. When stolen, you retain remote control of the device, allowing you to track it, wipe the memory, lock the device, and record audio. And when you get near the stolen device, you can narrow down its location (and really annoy the thief) by turning on a loud alarm on the phone—even if the device is in silent mode.

Slack
Anyone who has ever worked on a group project in school knows collaboration is hard. While Slack isn’t going to prevent someone from trying to let everybody else do the work for them, it does make it easy to communicate and collaborate with your team members, no matter where you are, by creating a central hub for messages and important files. Plus, you can break things down by workflow, so nobody is getting spammed with messages unrelated to their work.

Pushbullet
Keeping with the theme of collaboration, Pushbullet is designed to make all of your devices communicate seamlessly. With Pushbullet installed on all of your devices, you’ll be able to push data from one device to another immediately. This makes it easy to send your phone an article for you to read later, send your desktop a picture for immediate editing, or even read your text messages on your computer when you’re too lazy to get up and check your phone.

Tell us, which apps would be on your nice list? Let us know on our Facebook, Google+, or on Twitter using the hashtag #MotoAppyNewYear.

Posted by the Motorola Blog Team

So you’re a Moto user and one of the first in the world to use Android 5.0, Lollipop, which we began rolling out recently—what should you do next with your phone?

How to Quickly Dismiss Your Notifications

Strength. Stamina. Sophistication. Those are just some of the qualities of the new Moto Maxx -- our most powerful and long-lasting smartphone to date.


Our smartphones are our lifeline to the world in many ways, and with Moto Maxx you can go multiple days* without having to recharge. And when you do, our new Turbo charging feature gives you up to eight additional hours in just 15 minutes!**

With a huge battery, the time you save staying unplugged allows you to do more with your device -- from watching videos to playing games to capturing photos and viewing them on the Quad HD display. Combined with the most powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor you can get, Moto Maxx gives you the confidence to live life to the max day in and day out.

Here’s what else you can count on with Moto Maxx:

Long lasting, fast charging
With Moto Maxx, you can go up to two days* without limits thanks to the long-lasting, fast-charging 3900 mAh battery — the largest battery of any smartphone. When it’s time to charge, get a quick burst of battery life when you need it most. The Motorola Turbo Charger included in box provides up to eight hours of power in just 15 quick minutes of charging.**

Accelerated performance
Moto Maxx is designed to outperform your expectations with the newest and most powerful features. Use the 21-megapixel camera to capture stunning pictures and movie-quality 4K video, and play it back on the 5.2-inch Quad HD display, the sharpest display of any smartphone with 565 ppi. The newest and most powerful Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ quad core processor gives you all the performance you need — and then some. It also uses the latest 4G LTE technology, so you can experience faster download and upload speeds. Plus, you get a huge 64GB of storage, perfect for your collections of music, movies, books and games.

Enduring protection
On the outside, Moto Maxx is designed with premium ballistic nylon, a first for the industry. It’s a high-quality, durable material with a distinctive texture and rich color - you might recognize it from outdoor gear, like backpacks. Under that, is a layer of DuPont Kevlar® fiber, a material that is five times stronger than steel. Moto Maxx is protected inside and out with water-repellent nano-coating and then topped with Corning Gorilla Glass.

Pure Android experience
You’ll get a pure Android experience, which means fast upgrades. Moto Maxx also incorporates the same Moto software experiences that are available on the new Moto X. So you can interact with your Moto Maxx more naturally, using the same voice commands, and your Moto Maxx will learn your preferences and adapt to you, making it even easier to use.

Pricing and Availability
Moto Maxx will be available on motorola.com starting today in Brazil and coming mid-November in Mexico. Moto Maxx will come to additional Latin American countries soon.

IMAGES: Follow this link for images (you agree to our license terms when downloading images or video).

Posted by Motorola

* All battery life claims are approximate and based on an average mixed use profile that includes both usage and standby time on a 4G LTE network.  Battery life claims vary by market.  Actual battery performance will vary and depends on many factors including signal strength, network configuration, age of battery, operating temperature, features selected, device settings, and voice, data, and other application usage patterns.

**Battery must be substantially depleted; charging rate slows as charging progresses.  Charging rate varies by Market. 

MOTOROLA and the Stylized M Logo are registered trademarks of Motorola Trademark Holdings, LLC. Android and Google are trademarks of Google Inc. Qualcomm is a registered trademark and Snapdragon is a trademark of Qualcomm Incorporated. Corning and Gorilla are registered trademarks of Corning Incorporated. Kevlar® is a registered trademark of DuPont used under license by Motorola Mobility LLC. DuPont™ Kevlar® is a registered trademark of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company or its affiliates. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. © 2014 Motorola Mobility LLC. All rights reserved.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since we launched the original DROID. Since then, DROID smartphones have come to be known for speed, power and endurance, built to outperform your expectations and push the limits of what a smartphone can do.

And today, we’re excited to announce the latest in this line of premium smartphones: DROID Turbo.

Your name says something about who you are and how you see the world. Maybe you’re named for a person or a place or maybe something just downright silly. We don’t get many opportunities to name things. But when we do, we reserve the best names and nicknames—the most creative, the funniest and most personal—for the people and things we love.

The new Moto X responds to your voice and whatever name you give it, but no matter the name, the story behind it is what matters most.

Whatever your choice, choose for you.

Posted by Barbara Liss, Social Media

At Motorola we’ve been big believers in Android since the very beginning. We love its power, its flexibility, and how it gives you the freedom to choose the experience that’s right for you. In fact, the only thing that would be better than Android is...more Android. That’s why we’re so excited to have been able to work with Google’s Android team to bring you the new Nexus 6, featuring Android 5.0 Lollipop.

With Nexus 6, we’ve worked with Google to bring you a bigger phone with more everything. More screen. More speed. More power. And, it’s the best Android experience ever with:

• More room to view: With a six-inch Quad HD display, Nexus 6 is great for watching, reading, playing and doing. 

• More doing, less charging: An around-the-clock 3220 mAh battery gets you through your day and more. Plus, the included Motorola Turbo Charger gives you a quick burst of power when your battery needs it the most. All it takes is 15 minutes to get up to an additional 6 hours of battery life.

• More epic shots: The 13 megapixel camera with Optical Image Stabilization and HDR+ lets you take your best possible photos with the least possible effort.

• More sound in stereo: With dual front-facing stereo speakers, you’ll get an immersive stereo sound that is great for experiencing music, movies and games as you should.

• More with Lollipop: Nexus 6 comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop - a sweet new take on Android. Lollipop introduces Material Design so that content responds to your touch, or even your voice, in more intuitive ways, and transitions between tasks are more fluid. Plus, new call and message notifications allow you to act on (or dismiss) them without interrupting what you’re doing. And much much more.

Nexus 6 will be available for pre-order through the Google Play Store in late October starting at $649. There are two colors to choose from - Midnight Blue or Cloud White - and two memory options - 32GB and 64GB. Nexus 6 will also be available on motorola.com and through carrier partners starting in November. You’ll hear from our carrier partners soon with additional pricing and availability information. In all, Nexus 6 will come to 28 countries across Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America starting later this year and as we head into Q1.

More Android All Around
It’s no secret we love Android. That’s why every one of our Moto phones is built on a foundation of pure Android - it’s easier to use, delivers amazing performance and lets you choose how you want to use your phone. So we have more sweet Android news to share...

Now that Android 5.0 Lollipop will be going to the world with Nexus 6—a product of some of our own engineering—we are excited to confirm that this latest and greatest Android release will also come to our other devices as part of our ongoing software strategy to provide fast updates to our pure Android experience.

While Google has not yet publicly released Android Lollipop, we are happy to confirm that the upgrade will come to:

As a product manager for our software, I use all versions of our phones. A lot.

Here’s a not-so-secret, early Easter egg for you: This week, we’re celebrating 50 app updates since we released Moto X!

We’ve got a bunch of new updates to share with you all. We’re keeping the momentum going this week with a swath of new enhancements that both tighten up the backend and bring some new goodies to the user experience.

Last year, on October 29th, we introduced the world to a mouse, a hat and a little windy trouble brought to life by immersive storytelling technology. That was the first Spotlight Story. It was called Windy Day.

Ready for another story? It might be the same forest, but things are definitely different once the sun goes down.


Continuing our work with award-winning storytellers, Buggy Night was directed by veteran animator Mark Oftedal along with much of the Windy Day team, including Caldecott winning illustrator and writer Jon Klassen and Academy award-winning producer Karen Dufilho-Rosen.

With each Spotlight Story we’re uncovering more ground -- both technologically and creatively. We’re continuing to explore novel storytelling possibilities for mobile. Possibilities that are revealed when mobile is considered a true medium, rather than just a smaller screen. We’re finding out what happens at the intersection of hardware, software, and content.

Technologically, Buggy Night takes interactivity and immersiveness to the next level. For this story, we created seamless interactivity by leveraging Android 4.4 KitKat graphics capabilities applied to a true 360-degree environment. Creatively, this meant that we had to tell a story that unfolds where you choose to look -- and where you don’t.
Keep an eye on your Moto X and see what happens when your phone catches the latest Spotlight bug going around.

If you missed our first Spotlight Story, Windy Day, you can check it out in the new Library section of Spotlight Player. And to keep up to date on all things Spotlight Stories, follow our Tumblr or join our Google+ Community.

Posted by Rachid El-Guerrab, Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP)

It’s been an exhilarating few weeks for our team, and it’s hard to believe that it was just days ago that we launched Moto G in India. We promised that we would deliver KitKat quickly, and today we’re thrilled to share that we were able to start rolling out that update within a day of making the commitment. It’s official: Moto G phones in India are now being updated to Android, KitKat 4.4.2. This very latest build brings a number of cool, new features to Moto G, like an improved phone dialer, new photo editing options in the Gallery app, the ability to print documents and photos, and more. For more information, check out the release notes and our updates page.

So it might be a little cold in the last days at our Libertyville offices—but there isn’t a polar vortex that could stop us from us from cranking out the new software updates!

Here’s the latest Download:

New Year, New Gallery Look - Our Motorola Gallery has a fresh, new look! True to our promise to enhance the best parts of Android, we’ve developed a new Motorola Gallery UI that looks a lot cleaner and a lot more beautiful. The navigation is faster, the album drawer is streamlined, and the thumbnails are bigger and bolder.

Move Over, iPhone - It’s even easier to move your information over from an iPhone in our latest update to Motorola Migrate, the app that allows you to move your personal content from your old phone to your new phone. Now you can transfer your iCloud contacts and calendar events right from the app and not just in the MotoMaker web tool like before. So whether your old phone was an Android or iPhone, it’s a breeze to move over to your new Motorola phone.

KitKat Gets a Boost—Literally - We have begun releasing KitKat to Moto G on Boost Mobile. Check our upgrade pages for Australia and the U.S. for more information.

KitKat Comes to Moto X in Canada - Do KitKats come in maple? We started this week rolling out KitKat to Moto X on Rogers and Fido, the first Moto X to receive KitKat version 4.4.2. See the upgrade page for Canada to learn more.

As always, we welcome your thoughts, feedback, and comments on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. We listen to them, and they make our products better.

Posted by Punit Soni, Product Management

On the heels of a great reception for Moto G in Europe, we're happy to announce that Moto X has also crossed the Atlantic and will be available in the UK, France and Germany from 1st February.

Since its global launch Moto X has already started changing how people interact with their smartphones. Touchless Control, Motorola's sophisticated voice control system, enables your Moto X to respond to your voice so you can check the weather, get directions, or do just about anything without lifting a finger. With Touchless Control people use Google Now as much as three times as often. Motorola's Quick Capture enables you to launch your Moto X's camera with two quick twists of your wrist so you never miss the perfect moment, and it's encouraging Moto X users to take as many as 30% more photographs. And Moto X users are interacting with Active Display on average eighteen times a day, thus lighting up their screens less often, and enabling Moto X's already great battery life to stretch even longer.

All of these experiences are built on a foundation of pure Android with no skins to slow you down, clutter your phone or get between you and Google's best-in-class mobile services. And because you've told us that having the latest software is important to you, Moto X will come with Android 4.4 KitKat right out of the box. Altogether, touches like these have helped Moto X make nearly 20 "best of 2013" lists.

Now, with Moto X, smartphone buyers in the UK, France and Germany have two great Motorola devices to choose from. Prices for Moto X start from £25 per month in the UK and €399 in Europe. Click here for more information on pricing and carriers in Europe.

It’s a New Year and the Motorola software team's 2014 resolution is to continue to rapidly deliver delightful software experiences to our users. Over the holidays, we’ve been working on a number of software enhancements that we hope will help start your year off right.

Here’s the latest Download:

Your Personal Text Messaging Assistant - Love getting text messages read aloud to you while driving? Now you can reply back—completely hands-free using just your voice with Motorola Assist.

As part of this update, we’ve also enhanced Motorola Contextual Services, the key magic behind some of our Motorola applications. It provides the secret sauce behind activity detection in Assist and optimizes Touchless Control. This latest update helps make drive mode detection faster and more accurate using Bluetooth for Assist.

Zap Your Photos and Videos - This app is a really fun way to share stuff with friends near you. Droid Zap uses your phone’s GPS/WiFi functionality to send photos and videos with a simple gesture. This latest update gives a sleek, new look to the app and offers support for KitKat. Available on DROID Ultra, DROID MAXX, and DROID Mini.

KitKat Breaks into Europe - The KitKat goodness continues to roll out at a furious pace! Last week we began rolling out Android, KitKat 4.4.2 to carriers and regions in Europe. Check the software updates release page for the latest on your device.

Kernel Sources for Moto G - For our developer friends, we’ve released the Kernel Sources for Android, KitKat 4.4.2 on Moto G. Download the kernels here. Knock yourselves out!

We think 2014 is going to be a great year. We’re here, we’re listening, and we’re making your Motorola phones better all the time. We're committed to bringing you many more software innovations over this next year. Want to tell us something? Feel free to comment on our profiles on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook.

Posted by Punit Soni, Product Management

When we launched Moto X, our goal was to solve real consumer problems and give people refreshing new choices in the sea of smartphone sameness.

We heard from people that they wanted more control in how their phones looked, so we introduced the Moto Maker customization tool and made it available on all major carriers. That enabled our customers to choose from hundreds of color combinations and, for the first time, real bamboo backs. We heard that battery life was a major pain point, so we engineered Moto X to go all day long. And we heard that having the most current software was really important to our owners, so we made sure that Moto X was the first smartphone to upgrade to Android 4.4 KitKat.

But we're not stopping there.

We've been hearing a lot recently from people who want a new premium smartphone at a reasonable price without having to wait for a contract upgrade. That came through especially loud and clear during our holiday flash sales.

So from today forward we're offering Moto X at an everyday starting price of just $399 on any major US carrier, without a contract. This includes customized devices.

Today several wireless carriers offer good month-to-month or prepaid service plans that cost much less than the contract plans that come with subsidized devices. Combine one of those plans with our new $399 everyday pricing and you could save hundreds of dollars over two years while keeping the freedom to change service providers when you feel like it. We can even help you finance your purchase* so you pay monthly for your contract-free Moto X.

Because you should have the freedom to buy a great device when you want, without chaining yourself down.

Happy new year!

Rick Osterloh
Senior Vice President - Product Management


*$0 down and zero Interest on all purchases if paid within 6, 12, or 18 months. Interest will be charged to your account from the purchase date if the balance is not paid in full within the promotional period.

We don’t know about you, but over the past few weeks we’ve had visions of KitKats dancing in our heads. We’re excited to tell you we’re starting to roll out Android 4.4.2, KitKat—the very latest version—TODAY on Moto G!