The Moto G is a really quite amazing device, launching at £140 (or thereabouts) you got a device that wasn't cringe worthy, the phrase "you get what you pay for" doesn't really apply here, you get far more for your money than you would think, I could sit here and rattle off specs from a list and bore you all, but i wont, I'll go over the most important specs of the phone and how my experiences with them were.
The Screen
At 4.5", the 720p IPS panel on the Moto G is nothing short of amazing at this price point. Is it the most awesome display in the world? of course not, don't be a moron, but, can you get a device with a better screen for £140, dear god no, you have to get to the £200-£300 price range to get similar displays, Motorola cut the right corners the the G, and it's not possible for me to say they cut corners on the screen, not with a straight face anyway.
The 720p resolution on the 4.5" screen means you get a PPI rating of 326, so it's above that 300PPI threshold that means from a normal distance (i.e not 2mm from your eye) it'll look almost identical to an iPhone 4S, its just an inch larger diagonally, colours look pretty good, it obviously wont look at good as something like the Galaxy S5 (because it's AMOLED) and it wont look as great as an HTC One M8 which uses a far more expensive S-LCD panel, the screen on the M8 probably costs more than the entire Moto G, so put it into perspective, the colours look good but not great, the same with touch response, HTC did some magic with the M8 line (including the One Mini 2) and got crazy low screen latency, to make it feel even faster than it is, but again, the One mini 2 costs more than double the Moto G's price, lets not even get to the full sized M8. The Moto G gets bright, i don't have the tools to give yo an actual number, but in daylight i have no issues with it (especially in auto brightness) and at night, it gets dark ,but not dark enough, it still hurts my eyes if i look at it at 3am with hazy eyes, but again, if you take into consideration it's price, this screen shouldn't be able to exist in a phone of this price.
The Cameras
5mp on the back and 1.3mp on the front, nothing ground breaking here and honestly they are the weakest points of the device, specifically the rear camera, we are used to front facing camera's being rubbish and ignored, so the front facing camera here is Galaxy S3/HTC One X quality, not amazing, but not terrible, it's a front facing camera, it shoots 720p video and you'll take selfies with it no matter what, Snapchat will be as prevalent and weird as ever.
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| No one wants to see this, don't make me take more selfies |
The rear camera on the other hand, is pretty terrible, yes it is possible to get some good shots, i have done just that once or twice, but it was in very optimal conditions, HDR was set to firmly be on, there was ample lighting, little wind, and the subject was still, i shot flowers because they are relatively easy to shoot, I'll have shots from the Moto G below, but I'll say one last thing before moving on, Google+ Auto-Awesome has been a lifesaver for this camera for me.
Video on the Moto G is a plus and a minus, it only shoots video at 720p which is a tad disappointing, but, and it's a pretty big but, unless you have a Google Play edition (or forced yours into a Google Play edition like i recently did) you can also shoot 720p 60fps slow motion video, and it actually looks pretty good, it's a bit choppy, but if you realise how little processing power exists in the Moto G, the fact you can shoot slow-mo video at all is pretty amazing, just whatever you do, disable audio, dear god disable video, i don't even know why there is an option for audio when you record slow motion, it sounds like a Cyberman got wrecked on the weekend with a Dalek and had one too many Jägermeister shots.
The Performance
The Snapdragon 400, the MSM8226 specifically is the chip that has blown away many people in the tech community, the SD400 is a lowly chip, a low power part made for cheap devices, it uses 4 ARM cortex A7's, a reference design from ARM and not the custom Krait cores Qualcomm designs, a CPU we are only used to seeing in the cheap SoC's from people like MediaTek and Rockchip, not exactly known for their performance. and it has a GPU made by Qualcomm's in house graphics group (fun fact, Qualcomm hired a group of devs from AMD, AMD makes radeon cards, and the Adreno name is an anagram of Radeon) the Adreno 305 is not a powerful GPU, it's again designed to push lower resolution screens, the highest it can push is 1280x800, so the Moto G is pushing it, but honestly playing with it, you'd never know.
I'm not going to show you benchmark results, because who actually cares, the interesting part is, that even after near 9 months of use, the Moto G is just as fast as the day i got it, i don't know what trickery Motorola has done to the Moto G, but honestly, i find it hard to tell the performance difference doing normal things between this and my Nexus 4. It is possible to bog the Moto G down, the 1.2Ghz SD400 isn't as fast as the 2.5Ghz SD800, it just isn't, but i don't notice unless i try to do some gaming, games like Flappy Bird, Swing copters, Angry birds etc will all play will ease, not even a stutter, but Asphalt 8, Deus Ex: The Fall, and Batman Arkham Origins will suffer, but if you buy an inexpensive phone and are expecting to play games that in some cases have near console quality, you are insane. Likewise 1GB of RAM helps the Moto G get it's price down, but doesn't help it with multi-tasking, it's gotten better with the 4.4.4 KitKat update, but don't expect to have Skype, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and swing copters all in RAM, you will be kicked out quite often, keep you expectations levelled, the Moto G is a marvel, but it's not a miracle worker.
The Battery
It's pretty dope, that's all i need to say really, the non-removable 2070mAh Lithium-ion battery lasts all day, from when i wake up at 8am until i go to sleep at near midnight, unless i am streaming Google play music all day, i have no worries that it'll make it through the day, and i don't know if this is just me, but it also seems to charge quite quickly, in about an hour and 15 minutes i can go from 5% all the way to 100%. 4 hours screen on time is no problem with the Moto G, and all of this is when i have my Sony Smartwatch 2 connected, which uses the far less efficient Bluetooth 3.0 rather than the Bluetooth 4 with LE that most new wearables are coming out with, It uses a standard MicroUSB 2.0 connector, so you can use any charger you want with it, also any battery pack you could ever want, as long as it has a MicroUSB connector/a USB port for you to add a MicroUSB cable to, Ah standards, wouldn't it be great if everyone adhered to them.
The Rest
Motorola hit a home run with the Moto G, it's their best selling smartphone, ever, and you can see why, the Moto G is downright amazing for it's price, having a decent sized screen with acceptable colour reproduction and (for the price) a high resolution screen, it's plenty fast, and it's stayed fast, even with a load of junk on my phone it's never gotten unbearably slow, so kudos to Motorola on whatever trickery they imparted on the Moto G, because this doesn't feel like a £140 smartphone, and it most certainly doesn't feel like a £140 smartphone that has been used and abused for nearly 9 months.
The build quality is astounding for the price, it's no HTC One M8 which is 90% aluminium, no the Moto G is all plastic, the rear shells are replaceable, mine came with the black shell on and i got bored so i replaced it with the pink shell that i got free in the box, there is no creaking, no flexing, no torquing or anything, the Moto G is just a solidly built device, again, I'm going to sound like a broken record, this is built like a device that far exceeds it's price tag. The dimple on the back is just perfect, whoever thought about it at Motorola, give the man (or Woman) a raise, because its perfect, its right where my index finger sits, and if Motorola where to ever do a fingerprint scanner, they should put it there, do a tap and hold scanner like Apple (and now Huawei) so there is no swiping nonsense, just tap and unlock, perfect placement.
If you really want to know the dimensions i can tell you them, its 130mm tall, 66mm wide and 11.6mm thick, and you know what? it means jack all, the Moto G feels pretty damn perfect in the hand, there are curves in all the correct places and the weight (143g) is distributed evenly, its not overly top or bottom heavy, it doesn't feel like a lead weight and it doesn't feel unsubstantial, it just feels right.
Wrapping up
Would i recommend the Moto G? no, but not because it's a bad phone, not by any stretch of the imagination, i wouldn't recommend this Moto G, the 3G one, because there is this exact same phone now available for a slightly increased price that includes 4G LTE and it includes a MicroSD slot (to complement the 8GB internal storage) and as of yesterday, the 2014 Moto G got announced, it's a 5" 720p screen, its got improved cameras 8mp on the back and 2mp on the front, it's got front facing STEREO speakers (think of Boomsound from HTC and whatever Sony calls it on the Z2/Z3/Z3c) and that also has a MicroSD card slot, but this has 8 or 16GB of storage, but no LTE, pick your poison, so that's why i wouldn't recommend this Moto G, but as a range and as a family in general, if you're on a budget or just no longer want to buy phones on contract, this is bloody amazing and it's going to be hard to recommend something else.
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