Motorola confirmed its anticipated Moto G device, using its launch event to take aim at the budget smartphones offered by rivals.

In a punchy presentation, Dennis Woodside, the Google-owned company’s CEO, said that budget-conscious consumers have “two very bad options” when it comes to smartphone purchases: new devices which feature outdated feature sets, or old flagship devices which have been shunted down the range.

According to Woodside: “Next year, 500 million people are going to buy a smartphone for around $200. And we really believe that up until now, their choice had been between buying a cheap phone with last year’s technology, or buying a phone that was several years old. We don’t think that’s fair.”

The executive drew attention to Samsung’s Galaxy Fame, noting: “it’s a popular product, it has a 3.5-inch display, nowhere near HD quality, a really poor camera, weak processor, and not a lot of storage”.

And moving on to Apple’s aging iPhone 4 as another budget option, he continued that this has a “small screen, much weaker processor than what’s available today, [and] doesn’t even run the latest iOS apps”.

“We think the industry should deliver more value for the consumer’s dollar,” he observed.

Introducing the device, the company said that Moto G has a 4.5-inch HD (720p) display at 339 pixels per inch, which was described as “the sharpest in its class”. It is powered by a 1.2GHz quadcore Qualcomm processor, and is said to provide battery life “all day long”.

Also available are interchangeable shells, flip shells, and grip shells in multiple colours, to give “19 customisation options”.

And dual SIM support will be available in “countries where it matters”.

US pricing for the 8GB version of the device will be $179, or $199 for the 16GB version. UK pricing is £135 and a €169 price point was given for Europe. Two years of 50GB storage on Google Drive is also included.

The device runs the vanilla version of Android, shipping with Android 4.3 and with a “guaranteed update” to Android 4.4 (KitKat) by January 2014. And Motorola made much of the fact that it has not chosen to echo its rivals by customising the OS with its own interface overlay.

Motorola’s Punit Soni, VP of product management, said: “In today’s ecosystem, all of the manufacturers have a very confused relationship with Android. They build on top of it, they add these custom skins that detract from the user experience. Then they go and put duplicate software on top of it, which basically competes with Google’s mobile services, and you have a situation with home screens with multiple mail apps, multiple app stores, multiple video players and music players and so on”.

And again taking aim at rivals, he continued: “We didn’t build [Samsung’s] TouchWiz UI, or [HTC’s] Sense UI, or all of these other custom skins. We didn’t duplicate Google mobile services. We focused our energies on building things that have real value for the user,” he said.

This has included optimising the device for battery life, and “obsessive attention to the basics, whether it is audio, whether it is data storage, memory, touch sensitivity, connectivity – you name it, we focused on those aspects which make the phone a joy to use,” Soni said.

Following the Americas-focus of the earlier Moto X device, Moto G also sees the company going for wider geographic rollout, with launches in “more than 30 countries, with 60 partners, by 2014.”

It is available now in Brazil and in “some parts of Europe”, to be followed in the coming weeks by the rest of Latin America and Europe, Canada and parts of Asia.

This will be followed by a launch in early January 2014 in the US, India and the Middle East, and in “more of Asia.”