Motorola Moto G Review

The Motorola Moto G is basically a pretty decent mid spec smartphone but what makes it really special is its budget price. Though, at this time you can easily find a cheap high end smartphone with android but finding out such an affordable smartphone that delivers everything it promises, and its best asset is its price. The Motorola Moto G perhaps is the less capable sibling of the flash bang Moto X that was released earlier this year by the Google-owned smartphone maker. Yet it offers so much at such a stunning price point. It has a comfortable design and feel, commendable performance, intuitive user interface and excellent screen along with great battery life.

The Moto G handset is designed keeping the target audience in mind and with this handset the company is all set to kick off the global smartphone revival. This is basically a mid-range handset that comes with a low end price tag and is armed with the latest Android KitKat. The phone is hugely inspired by the firm’s first, post-Google takeover handset, the Moto X, and shares most of cues with it. The Moto G also features a water repellent coating that allows you to use the phone in the rain, however, since it is not waterproof, so don’t jump in the swimming pool with it.

The Motorola Moto G is the close sibling to the Moto X, and it was released with the intentions to shake things up with its absolute low cost that for sure grabs the attention of huge masses. Though, it is not a something you call cutting edge technology or has high spec but even then, there are many people who will more than likely be appeased by a modest offer that gets things done quite nicely.

Let’s have a close look at the phone specs and features, and see what it has to offer that no other phone in the market is offering other than its cheap price tag.

The retail package of the Moto G carries the bare minimum. It is shipped in the tiniest box that we have ever seen, and inside the box all you will find is the phone and MicroUSB Cable. You even don’t get an A/C adaptor for faster charging, but again keeping its low price in mind, we can proudly say that the Motorola Moto G proceeds a bit too far with its endeavor to economize production and shipping costs.

When it comes to design, the Moto G is closely identical to its sibling the Moto X. the company keeps the design formula same from the subtle curved rear casing to the overall size, the Moto G does not far from its higher powered sibling. It is a plastic phone that is more concerned about feeling good in hand rather than being awfully thin or light. It weighs around 143g and about 11.6mm thick which makes it significantly thicker and heavier if you compare it with other phone in the same range and with similar specs. Although, it should not be much of a sacrifice for an average buyer.

Coming back towards its design element, the Moto G is extremely easy to handle because of its extremely form fitting factor. Furthermore, its curved rear casing gives it an ergonomic and comfortable feel in the hand.

Like the Moto X, the Moto G also employs all the same ports and buttons around its trim, and they all have also been positioned in the same places as well. A good range of 19 different fascias is also available for the phone that comes in all sorts of different colors and three main types so that you can customize your handset according to your own choice and preferences. The Moto G also features a 5 mega pixel camera with an LED flash. The camera can record 720p videos.

With a 4.5 inch 720p LCD Display, the Moto G is able to deliver quite affair amount of crispness with pixel density of 329ppi. The display of this mid-range smartphone works satisfactorily. Readability is also fine in the web browser. In addition, there’s some liveliness splattered on which is because of the faint hint of saturation that is seen with its color reproduction.

Outdoor performance of the screen is also quite acceptable, although, it demonstrates somewhat ambitious because of its weaker brightness output and the trivial distortion at wide viewing angles. Despite the fact that, its screen is not the best screen that we have seen so far but the fact is that it does not need to be either. After all, this is what you can get at this price tag.

With Android 4.3, the Moto G is surely a step up from its big sibling Moto X, and furthermore, it is also going to get the latest and well accepted Android 4.4 KitKat soon. So, it is going to be a big hit with this respect. The interface, as expected, is very easy to use and friendly. The Moto G also throws a lot of additional custom experience features at us which includes the kitchen sink.

Although, it sometimes appears ending up feeling more unneeded than valuable but in case of Moto G, it has been kept simple yet straightforward. Moving onwards, the lockscreen in Moto G features the same large dotted circle around the centrally placed padlock button, and it also features lockscreen widgets which are resizable tiles and one of which is always visible at the top of the main lockscreen above the padlock icon.

While, all the rest of the widgets are a swipe to the right away. In addition to this, the main widget on the lockscreen can be expanded in order to display additional information. You can also access Google Now from the lockscreen as well.

You can choose from multiple unlock patterns which one you want to use. These unlock patterns include simple slide, pin, password, pattern and face unlock. On the other side, the lock screen can even be avoided altogether.

What is more, once you unlocked the phone, you will be greeted with the well-known homescreen interface introduced in Ice Cream Sandwich. There are dock customization options for you and the dock also features two shortcut icons. One on each side of the app drawer key.

Lastly, the organizer in the Moto G also features the usual set of core apps same like any other Android phone. Furthermore, when exploring Google Now, you will be pleased in finding out how much more intelligent and thought out this device is. Thanks to its enhanced features and uncanny functions of Google Now.

Typing experience on the Moto G is also very pleasing, thanks to its 4.5 inch display. Plus, the stock Jelly Bean keyboard further adds to the experience. The keyboard is sufficient enough to fulfill all our needs. On the other hand, its responsiveness can be little bit better.

The Motorola Moto G is armed with a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 CPU coupled with 1GB of RAM and the Adreno 305 GPU. Since it comes with a reputable processor under the hood, it is more than efficient to handle surface level operations. But the bad thing is that its performance leaves you yearning for more power. Its strain and sluggishness will be especially apparent when you are performing some intensive tasks.

The phone comes with 8GB and 16GB of internal storage. This much storage is sufficient enough for basic users. However, content driven folks can easily fill this space up, and in that case, cloud storage will come into play. You may want to invest in it.

The phone comes with the standard connectivity features that include quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 3G globally, or CDMA support for the North American model. Furthermore, Bluetooth 4.0 is also on board alongside Wi-Fi support including b/g/n. On the other hand, you will be missing some advanced connectivity features like NFC, IR port and LTE support.

In addition, once the web page is load completely, navigation is quite smooth. Although, rendering sometimes is delayed that cause a bit nuisance, but that is not much of a problem keeping its price in mind.

The main rear 5 megapixel camera in the Moto G is one of those elements that have been cut down a little in order to save costs. It has got a 5-megapixel sensor as well as an f/2.4 lens both of them are of mid-range and perform quite well. However, the virtue of its camera is that what the main camera lacks in resolution, it makes up for it in versatility.

The camera can take some genuinely good photos in comparatively challenging conditions.

The Motorola Moto G also features a front facing camera like many other Android smartphones. Though, you all can guess very easily what we have to say about its 1.3 megapixel front facing camera. The front facing camera is just fine for well-lit selfies and Skype video calls.

The camera interface is simple and gives you a hassle free experience to take photographs. It also has got some manual controls as well as some shooting modes to enhance the beauty of the images taken with this camera. It comes with focus control, flash, HDR, geo tag and sound recording (in video) toggles. Furthermore, it also has got switches for the aspect ratio, and panoramic or slow-mo video recording modes.

On the whole, it will take a little bit to get used to its features and settings as the somewhat restricted number of comprehensive options are likely to make your shooting options less flexible. It is better to choose manually which shooting mode you would prefer for your images for getting more consistent results across your images.

Picture quality is also acceptable as you cannot expect some extraordinary results from a mid-range low price tagged phone. The images taken outdoor with plenty of lighting come up with average details and neutral color reproduction. However, under low lighting the camera fails to impress us. The images are more detracted with vague details that if taken as a whole, are softer and more prone to blurring.

Talking about its video recording features which is limited to 720p because the camera is not equipped with enough beefy gear that it can handle the higher resolution capture. The bitrate is a meager 10Mbps, which can partly explain the poor resolved detail. Audio is recorded at 128 Kbps in stereo mode with a sampling rate of 48 kHz. The camcorder interface is same as the camera one.

A quick look to its multimedia, let’s see what it has to offer us. Google Play Music app is the only music app found in the Moto G that fuses your own personal library with the search giant’s All Access streaming service. Although, there is particularly nothing new here.

Audio quality even at its maximum is nothing more than average. On top of that, you may sometimes notice some crackling and strained tones that make the sound somewhat irritating to the ear. The FM radio also works fine. You simply have to plug in headphones that act as an antenna, and the phone automatically start scanning for the available radio stations in your area. However, you can also manually scan for the radio stations if the app does not configure it.

Considering its performance with other operations, it is quite surprising to see that high definition videos have good playback with the Moto G. Plus the device also supports many popular video file formats. On a verdict note, video watching experience on the Moto G certainly is not ideal but in spite of having said that, we can live with what the device has to offer us.

Keeping it short and to the point, we can only say that call quality of the Motorola Moto G is very unremarkable lacking in both the beefiness as well as in top-end clarity. On the other hand, the calls are completely functional but the top volume can be a little bit higher.

Furthermore, the phone also has a secondary microphone on its top which provides active noise cancellation for calls. However, if you switch it to speakerphone, it produces some crackling that can be bothersome for you.

The Moto G comes with a 2,070 mAh battery which is bit smaller than the one found in Nexus 4, but considering its price tag, we guess it is the right move not to invest in a larger battery and better camera. Despite that, we are pretty much pleased with what the phone is able to turn out despite having a small capacity in battery compartment.

The Moto G is a phone that you will need to charge on a daily basis since the company has not incorporated any of its own power saving modes into the phone. However, the standard ‘battery saver’ mode is what you get with this phone.

In order to compensate with that, the device switches off 3G background data access for apps the minute the battery is low. This is a smart move and extremely effective tactic to extend the last minutes of a phone's battery. With this, you will get sufficient time before you can charge the phone. Plus, you can easily squeeze about a day and a half starting from the full battery if battery saver is engaged, and this is standard for any Android phone. So, no complaints in this department.

The Motorola Moto G, unlike other lopsided and cheerless entry level smartphones, has got plenty of variety in its design as well as in its software experience that provide its users with something that they can look forward to. With that, it does lack in several things that are considered as standard these days, but we guess these were just the some additional features that the company needed to eliminate in order to deliver its product with such an outright price.

The device is available at $179 for its 8GB model and $199 for its 16GB model which is surely mind-blowing and unimaginable for many people. Though, it does not have everything that an expensive smartphone possesses yet it delivers quite well in almost all areas. Its price tag is its best asset that makes it more powerful than many expensive smartphones.

It is the best budget phone money can buy and it is worthy of being called a mid-range smartphone. It has killed the midrange competition with its outright price and excellent features and also have said goodbye to compromised and sluggish entry level budget smartphones. So, if you are not willing to buy a top end expensive smartphone, then the Motorola Moto G is the obvious choice!