MOTO G – A REVIEW

It may not have been accompanied by the flash and razzmatazz of a flagship phone launch, but the Motorola Moto G is still a huge deal, in both senses of the phrase. The Moto G is a solid, no nonsense handset, it's not fancy but it's not ugly either.

Google has long had its Nexus-branded handsets, but these were made by other manufacturers and at just one high-end handset a year.

MOTO G SIZE AND SHELLS

The Moto G isn't the kind of handset that jumps out at you, in fact it's very safe, very plain and a little boring. Given its price though, it's a success, it doesn't feel or look cheap just utilitarian. At 66x130x11.6mm it's not the slimmest handset but the bezels are small and it’s fairly compact for a handset with a 4.5in display. Though it feels a bit weighty at 143g. It comes in black, but you can buy white, dark blue, cyan, fluorescent yellow, pink or this red. It also has Gorilla Glass 3 to protect its screen from scratches.

MOTO G ANDROID

Of course what you see onscreen is arguably more important than what surrounds it, and with Motorola being owned by Google we were hopeful that the handset would ship with the latest version of Android. It came with 4.3 initially and has got its update directly to 4.4.2.Thankfully, Motorola has left Google's OS, largely untouched, just adding a couple of useful features and tweaking the camera app. 

MOTO G MIGRATE

Motorola has made it easy to move from another Android handset to the Moto G. You do this by first installing the Motorola Migrate app from the Google Play Store on your old handset. Once done you connect the two phones directly via Wi-Fi, which requires nothing more than pointing the camera on your old phone at the QR code displayed on the Moto G. The transfer then starts automatically. The app will pull across call logs, text messages, pictures, movies and music on the old phone. It takes a while to complete the transfer, but you can use the phone for other things at the same time. Contacts and emails will be transferred anyway as they are part of your Google account, so this is just Motorola tidying up the things that Google hasn't dealt with. It's very neat, very clever and should relieve the worries of those who don't want a clean slate on a new handset.

MOTO G PORTS AND STORAGE

The basic model has just 8GB of storage (of which you get 5.01GB free when you first boot it up), as such it's not really suitable for those who want to load video onto it, or carry around lots of music. The 16 GB model gives you 13 GB free space, perfectly another 8 GB.With the handset you also get 50GB of extra online storage for Google Drive for two years, for a total of 65GB once you count the free 15GB everyone gets. 

MOTO G SPECIFICATIONS

The chipset is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 with quad cores running at 1.2GHz. It uses the older Cortex-A7 architecture and so can't keep up with the flagship Snapdragon 800 but it still keep everything running along smoothly. Android 4.3 (upgradable to 4.4.2) felt slick, with no hesitations when switching apps.

MOTO G DISPLAY

The 4.5in display has a resolution of 1,280x720 which gives it 326 pixels-per-inch. This is exactly the same figure as Apple's Retina Display iPhone 5S, which has 1,136x640 pixels over a 4in display. There's certainly no problem then with either the screen size or the detail on offer.

MOTO G CAMERA

Motorola's camera app is one the biggest changes to stock android, it has hardly any onscreen controls, you just tap to take a photo or hold down to shoot in burst mode at roughly 2-3fps. The camera is one area where the Moto G shows its more budget leanings. It's a got a five-megapixel sensor and it only shoots video at up to 720p. The front camera is 1.3 megapixels and again can shoot 720p video. Quality from the main camera is acceptable, colours are accurate but there's a distinct lack of detail compared to the top-end devices. The automatic mode really struggles when there's varying light levels across the frame, and there's a lack of dynamic range even once you've tweaked the exposure. In low light it really falls apart with lots of noise. In comparison to other handsets, even around its own price, the Moto G isn't particularly impressive. In the one-to-one pixel crops below you can see that there's a definite lack of detail, with shots looking a bit blurry and murky.

It's hard to expect a budget phone to have a great camera, but with the Moto G being so strong in other areas it's hard not to feel a little disappointed. For quick snaps to upload to the net it does its job, but this is one area where the Moto G really isn't a perfectly good, that-will-do replacement for a top-end smartphone.

MOTO G BATTERY LIFE

As we mentioned above, the back panel may come off, but the battery itself isn't removable. Thankfully, it's a sizeable 2,070mAh battery.

In the continuous video playback test the Moto G lasted for an impressive nine hours and 12 minutes. That's almost two hours better than the high-end Nexus 5 (which was criticised on that point) and with few handsets scoring more than 10 hours in this test, it's a strong result.

MOTO G CONCLUSION

The screen isn't huge, there isn't much storage on the basic model and the camera is nothing to get excited about, but in every other respect this is the best value for money smartphone ever. It's well-built, with a high-quality display, fast enough not to bother even us, and has a good battery life.

The Motorola Moto G single-handedly says goodbye to compromised, sluggish budget smartphone and potentially kills off the mid-range competition too. Simply put, if you're not buying a top-end handset, then the Moto G is the obvious choice.

- Vandhiyadevan