Motorola's new Moto G aims to be a great phone for a great price, the company's CEO said. The new model, out today, is designed to sell for $179 or less without a contract, making it much more affordable than its predecessor, the Moto X, as well as Samsung's Galaxy S4 or Apple's iPhone.

Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside told All Things D that the industry had abandoned 5 billion people who would never pay $600 for a phone. And while there are cheaper Android phones available, they typically run older versions of the OS, can't run the latest apps and often lack such features as a front-facing camera, Woodside said.

The site noted that Motorola, which is owned by Google, needed to cut features to hit its price: The screen is smaller and the phone drops the always-on voice recognition. But it comes with a gigabyte of memory and 8GB of storage and runs a quad-core Qualcomm chip. And it's running a modern version of Android — 4.3 now with a KitKat upgrade due soon.

Woodside said the phone presents a big opportunity to sell overseas, where most of the 500 million people who are in the market for a smartphone live. He also sees opportunities in the prepaid market.

The Moto G will be available in some European and Latin American countries right away and in the U.S. starting in January.

To read a CNET product review of the Moto G, click here.

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