So let me just get this out of the way. Google/Motorola sent me the Moto X a few weeks back and I truly love the device. All else aside, one of the things that drove me nuts about Android is that when I am sitting in a meeting and I get an email or a message, I have to pick up the phone, unlock it, and slide down the notifications just to see if that message is important enough for me to interrupt what I was doing. The Moto X fixes that with the Active Display. The touchless controls on the Moto X are also all sorts of awesome, and I haven’t even mentioned the amazing battery life.

Well, the Moto X was so last week and Motorola / Google just announced the Moto G. What is the Moto G? A stripped down Moto X, if I am putting it simply. No active display, no touchless controls, a smaller battery, smaller screen, and no LTE. I know what you are saying to yourself (if you haven’t closed this tab yet), “Wait, remind me why I care about this new Moto G phone again?”

You ready? It costs $170 unlocked and off contract. You are getting what is by all means a decently specced smartphone for less than $200 no strings attached. A 4.5-inch LCD display at 1280 x 720 pixels (329PPI) with a 5-megapixel shooter, Android 4.3 to be updated to KitKat within weeks, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor clocked in at 1.2GHz with 1GB of RAM, and 50 GB of free Google Drive storage.

Why is this super exciting? Because well, the US super smartphone market is so oversaturated, it is ridiculous. If you have north of $500 to spend on a smartphone, or $200-$300 and you don’t mind tying yourself down to an operator, you have so many options to choose from, good luck with that decision. Phones like the 5s, 5c, Moto x, s4, HTC One, Note 3, LG G2, and the list goes on and on. And on.

But what if you want to buy a great smartphone for your every day needs and you want to keep your budget low? What are your options? Not many. Some basic Lumia devices that still bring with them the issue of the supporting ecosystem, or lack thereof, and there is the Moto G.

Who is the target for this? Not me. So who? My mom. My dad. My friends who don’t live in the US and don’t have operators subsidizing their smartphones. All those millions (billions perhaps) of people in emerging markets that actually use their smartphone as a computer and often do not even have running water. Yes, ironic, but factual.

At $170 to $190 depending on internal storage, the Moto G clearly understands that there are places outside of the western world that have mobile needs that are begging to be filled. Guess what many of these places do not have… LTE, so yea, there’s that.

Personally, I think this is a brilliant strategy on Google/Motorola’s part and just in case Android wasn’t already dominating the global market, if they keep this up, there will be no stopping them. In general, the importance of acknowledging global audiences and not just US/UK is something not many have been too good at in the mobile space. That includes OEMs who make hardware and it also includes the players in our space, the monetization space.

The one that is able to supply the widest scale of global demand on the mobile front will be the one who ultimately wins. Everything!