QUICK TAKE
Sure, you might have to make some minor concessions for the lower price tag, but the 3rd generation Moto G still provides some of the best bang for your buck in the smartphone game.
This site is no stranger to testing some of the more affordable handsets out on the market. While many of them receive favorable reviews, it’s usually with the caveat that it really isn’t that great of a phone, but it’s just hard to knock something so cheap.
With the third generation Moto G from Motorola, this is no longer the case. Don’t get us wrong, there will still be a few concessions made here and there, just not nearly as many as usual. Put simply: starting at $180 unlocked, the Moto G is the epitome of “bang for your buck.”
Build & Design
The Moto G has a removable back panel.
The very first thing I noticed about the Moto G upon taking it out of the box is that it’s a little chunky. The lean, svelte design of your typical flagship phone got tossed out the door along with the dollars off the price tag; affordability, somewhat paradoxically, comes at a price. It’s nearly half an inch thick, with its full dimensions measuring 5.59 x 2.85 x 0.46 inches, and the device’s heft is equally noticeable at 5.47 ounces. That said, its weight doesn’t leave it feeling unwieldy. If anything, it gives the handset a quality feel that reminds the user that it’s solidly built.
True to Motorola’s Burger King-esque approach of allowing you to “have it your way” when it comes to your devices, the Moto G has a plastic back cover that can be easily swapped out, giving you the option to switch up the color scheme of your device should you feel so compelled. Many of Motorola’s customization options are available here too, like picking the color of the “accent piece” (the strip along the back), engraving, and a choice between white or black for the face color.
But the fancier options of the Moto X line like leather or wood won’t be found here, so the swappable shells only offer color customization — though there are flip shells that also give your phone a screen cover that go for $40 a pop. The plastic shell is textured though, giving it its own appeal and offering the user a little more grip than you might find elsewhere (as an owner of a Moto X with an especially slippery wooden back panel, I can speak to the benefits of this).
The Moto G has a 5-inch display and relatively thick bezel.
Sadly, the removable back shell doesn’t offer as much access as one would hope. Once you’re able to wrench the thing off (when I said “easily” earlier, I was using the term loosely), you’ll find that you have access to the device’s micro SD card and SIM card slots, both of which are welcome features, but not to its battery. It looks like we’ve moved on from the removable battery design in smartphones, and that’s a shame.
The rest of the design is as simple as it gets: power/standby switch and volume rocker on the right edge, microUSB charging port on the bottom, and 3.5mm headphone jack on the top. The phone’s rear-facing camera is centered toward the top of the back of the phone, and the front-facing camera is in the upper right corner of the front of the device, right next to the ambient light sensor.
The only other element of the Moto G’s design that’s worth mentioning is that the bezel is a bit thick, especially above and below the display. It doesn’t feel like the most efficient use of the phone’s real estate; its relatively small (by today’s standards, at least) 5-inch display belies its larger footprint.
Display
Speaking of which, the display of the Moto G doesn’t exactly dazzle, but it gets the job done. I’ve often lamented the trend of ever-growing display sizes on smartphones, so I’m comfortable with the fact that it’s “only” 5 inches. Of course smaller screens sadly go hand in hand with lower specs, but at least the device is a manageable size that doesn’t look absurd in my pocket.
No, the disappointing part here is how washed-out it looks. Pictures and webpages looked flat, even if its modest 1280 x 720 resolution did manage to offer a reasonable amount of sharpness (make no mistake: with a pixel density of 294, it’s still a little fuzzy and isn’t about to rival the beautiful displays of top-tier handsets). On a better note, the display had excellent brightness, especially when it was cranked up to the max. I never had any issues when attempting to view it outdoors.
Performance
The internals of the Moto G may not jump off the spec sheet, but they’re nothing to sneeze at, either. For a phone this cheap, most people wouldn’t expect a respectable 1.4 GHz, quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 under the hood. It’s true that the 8 GB of storage and 1 GB of RAM of the base model will leave some users wanting, but for another $40 you can upgrade to 16 GB and 2 GB, respectively. If storage is your only concern, then you can rest easy knowing that both models have expandable memory via micro SD card slots up to 32 GB.
One other fun aspect of the device is that it’s water resistant, making the thing tougher than many of the top-tier, flagship phones out there. According to Motorola, it’s equipped with IPX7-rated water protection, which means the phone’s good for immersion in up to 3 feet of water for 30 minutes… provided you keep that back cover clicked on tight.
Looking at the benchmarks, the Moto G scored 498 on the Geekbench 2 Single-Core test, and 1494 on the multi-core test. This does not compare well against the current flagships on the market. The Samsung Galaxy Note5 scored 1465 and 4610, respectively, while the Moto X Pure Edition scored 1256 and 3558. Of course, benchmarks often aren’t indicative of real-world performance, and while the Note5 is a more powerful device, side-by-side comparisons with the Moto G would not suggest its 3x as powerful.
The Moto G has very little bloatware.
Software
Motorola is often lauded for how its phones offer an experience about as close to as pure Android as you can get without getting a Nexus device, and that’s easily one of the best strengths of the Moto G. This is a smooth, clean experience thanks to Motorola’s contributions that are neither excessive nor obtrusive; any additional features are actually useful, and they’re so subtly integrated (with nearly all of them being optional) that I hesitate to even call it a skin.
Equally pleasant is Motorola’s very limited inclusion of preloaded apps on the device straight out of the box. When I first powered it on and pulled up the app drawer, I found a mere page and a half of apps (and this included all of the Google apps). That’s the sort of light, clutter-free approach to Android most users like to see.
The only drawback as far as software is concerned is that as much I love the suite of features that Motorola offers it users – like the low-power Moto Display, gesture shortcuts like twisting the phone twice to launch the camera, etc. – some didn’t make the cut on the Moto G. For instance, the best feature (in my opinion) of my Moto X is how I can just wave my hand over the screen for the Moto Display to pop up and show me the time and any pending notifications. This “Approach for Moto Display,” along with a couple of other cool tricks, unfortunately aren’t on the Moto G.
Camera & Battery life
The Moto G has a removable back, but the batter is not user replaceable.
The Moto G’s 13-megapixel camera is likely better than what you would expect from a budget smartphone like this (the Apple iPhone 6S only has a 12-megapixel camera), but it still shouldn’t be used for anything more serious than pictures of your food. The biggest issue for me was that the lens has a hard time pulling things into focus; I often found myself waiting multiple seconds for the autofocus to catch up when targeting something new. It’s definitely worth pointing out that in proper lighting photos come out looking sharp, but the moment you try to snap a photo in an even remotely low-light environment, you begin to see some noise. That said, you still may want to keep the camera’s auto-flash off; I found that it defaulted it to using it a little more than it should have and boy, did those pictures end up looking blown out.
On a better note, the battery life here is excellent. Phones with unobtrusive UI skins and smaller displays tend to win in the endurance category, and the Moto G is no exception. Granted, our test unit did not come with a SIM card, and maintaining a data connection is admittedly much more draining than being on a Wi-Fi connection all day. Nevertheless, I managed to squeeze a good four days and change out of the thing on a single charge of the 2470 mAh battery, which again, is sealed in and not user-replaceable. I couldn’t use it on the road too much without the data connection, but I still managed a good hour or so of streaming video, along with snapping some photos, managing email, multiple hours of streaming music, and web browsing, all with the display brightness cranked to the max.
Conclusion
It’s amazing how much you can get for so little these days. The third generation Moto G, which provides users with the second-most-recent version of Android, a 5-inch display, great battery life, Motorola’s useful (but unobtrusive if you don’t want it!) software suite, and even some decent internals, starts at a mere $180 unlocked. It’s mind-boggling. You’ll undoubtedly make some concessions – especially in the build and camera departments – but if you’re just looking for smooth, up-to-date Android functionality at a cheap price, the Moto G is most definitely the phone for you.Pros:
- Motorola’s software offering, even if it is a little handicapped
- Great battery life
- Extremely affordable
Cons:
- Chunky build
- Not all of Motorola’s fancier software features available
- Middling camera