Motorola Moto G

Ever since the Moto G launched in late 2013, it’s continued to annihilate every other budget smartphone out there, making it a steadfast presence in our Best Mobile Phones list. It’s now been succeeded by the superb new Moto G, but Motorola’s strange decision to make the second generation of its unstoppable budget handset a 3G-only phone means the 4G version of the old Moto G still has plenty of life left in it – particularly since Motorola has started to roll out an Android Lollipop update in some regions and we hope to get it here in the UK very shortly.

Of course, 4G contract prices do get a lot more expensive once you start adding more data, but regardless of which network you want, the 4G Moto G is still the smartphone to buy for everyone who isn’t after a flagship model. The 4G verison also comes with a microSD card slot to expand the phone’s 8GB of internal storage – something that the 3G Moto G sorely lacked.

^ The Moto G is a solid, no nonsense handset, it’s not fancy but it’s not ugly either

In every other aspect, the 3G and 4G versions of the old Moto G are exactly the same. It may not be the kind of handset that immediately jumps out at you, but its build quality is superb for such a cheap phone. At 130x66x11.6mm, it’s not the slimmest handset either, but the bezels are small and it’s fairly compact considering its 4.5in display. At 143g, though, it does feels a bit weighty in the hand.

You can easily add a bit of colour to your phone thanks to Motorola’s snap-on rear covers, available in seven colours for £13 each. There are also tough shell cases with front flip covers that stay shut thanks to magnets and automatically turn on the phone when you open it. They cost £25 but look to be well worth the extra expense, given the protection they provide. There’s also a Grip Shell with a rubber frame for extra grip and impact protection.

^ The Flip Shells are tough, textured plastic on the outside …

^ … with a soft finish on the inside of the screen cover

Speaking of protection, one feature that has made the transition from previous Motorola handsets is the splashproof coating. This means that it should survive anything short of a complete immersion in water, we spilt a pint over the first RAZR with no ill effects. It also has Gorilla Glass 3 to protect its screen from scratches.

MOTO G ANDROID 4.4

Of course, what you see onscreen is arguably more important than what surrounds it. The 4G Moto G comes with the latest version of Google’s operating system, Android 4.4, but the 3G Moto G still ships with the slightly older Android 4.3. Fortunately, an update to Android 4.4.4, has now been released for the 3G Moto G and you should update your phone immediately if required – just go to App tray, Settings, About phone, to check the version number.

Motorola has left Google’s OS, largely untouched, just adding a couple of useful features and tweaking the camera app. The Assist app makes your phone more intelligent, for example you can set the hours you usually sleep for and the phone will automatically go silent, or only allow favourite callers, or those who call twice in succession through. It will also go on vibrate if you have a meeting in your diary. Both could be useful, though they’re still a little inflexible for our liking.

Motorola has also expanded what you can do with photos from within the gallery app. You can apply a wide range of filters now to photos you shoot, add frames around them, crop them in various ways, and even write (or draw) on the screen with your finger in any colour you like. You can also print photos straight out of the gallery to services such as Google’s Cloud Print.

Android 4.4 also supports the new version of Hangouts which combines your instant messaging and SMS apps into one, though you still need to switch between these two streams to keep track of all your conversations via both.

The lockscreen now also show the appropriate album art for the music you’re listening to and includes basic playback controls, so you don’t have to unlock the phone to pause or skip tracks. You also get immersive mode, where the status bar and controls go away, allowing apps to go full screen until you swipe from the top.

^ The new Lock Screen will delight music lovers

Slightly faster browsing is another bonus, with the SunSpider JavaScript browser benchmark recording a score 1,297ms, a small but appreciable improvement over its score of 1,410ms when we first tested it. Other benchmarks were unaffected by the change, though Google claims that memory use is improved, the handset is more responsive to touch and multi-tasking is now quicker.

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.

For once, it’s actually as easy as the promotional video makes it look

The app will pull across call logs, text messages, pictures, movies and music on the old phone. We got a warning that all the data may not be transferred (but then we were testing with a 16GB Samsung S3 and an 8GB Moto G). It takes a while to complete the transfer, but you can use the phone for other things at the same time. In our case it transferred the call logs, pictures and music fine, but text messages didn’t come across and it ran out of space copying the videos (a sensible choice to leave).

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

Moving your files over may be easy, but storage is still the Achilles heel of the Moto G. The 4G Moto G solves this problem by finally including a microSD card slot, which supports cards up to 32GB, but the 3G version is still left with a few dilemmas. There’s a micro USB port in the centre at the bottom, and the headphone is directly opposite at the top. Under the snap cover there’s little to play with, there’s a micro SIM card slot, but the battery is integrated and there’s no memory card slot.

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. For £160 you can get a 16GB 3G model, adding 8GB of usable storage and making it far roomier at 13GB.

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. It’s a lot of storage, though Google charges just $2 a month for 100GB. Once your account lapses you’ll probably want to subscribe given the low price, or buy another handset with the offer possibly, to continue to upload content. You will be able to access and download any content already on Google Drive – nothing gets deleted. For more details read our Google Drive review.

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 felt slick, with no hesitations when switching apps.

Using the Chrome browser it scored 1,410ms in the SunSpider 1.0.2 JavaScript benchmark, it’s not a great score, and those who are always browsing the web should look elsewhere. Still, it renders most of the BBC news homepage in a flash, and only take a couple of seconds to get the whole thing displayed. A Geekbench 2 score of 1,303 smashes other budget handsets, though is still a few hundred points short of the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini.

Again the Adreno 305 chipset isn’t the fastest on offer, but once again it’s a great choice for a handset at this price. The 3DMark Ice Storm test ran at fairly smooth 23.8fps for a score of 5,412, it also coped with all the games we threw at it, such as Minion Rush and Real Racing 3. It struggled with Ice Storm Extreme with just 9.6fps, but then it’s only £135 and it plays current games, so there’s nothing to complain about. It outclasses every handset we’ve seen at this price, and even surpasses phones at twice the price we’ve seen over the last year.

MOTO G DISPLAY

The 4.5in display has a resolution of 1,280×720 which gives it 326 pixels-per-inch. This is exactly the same figure as Apple’s iPhone 5s, which has 1,136×640 pixels over a 4in display. There’s certainly no problem then with either the screen size or the detail on offer, it doesn’t quite live up to a £549 handset but it’s close.

After tweaking the brightness up from the automatic setting we got some great results from the display. Blacks were deep and contrast was good, colours looked accurate yet still vibrant. White’s tended towards the cooler, bluer side but nothing problematic. It’s a decent display at any price and at this price it’s outstanding.

^ This quick shot shows the variation in colour between the Moto G, Nexus 5 and Samsung Galaxy S3 – click to enlarge

With the top-end handsets getting larger and larger displays, this isn’t a phone that’s ideal for playing games or watching a lot of video on the commute, but then the iPhone has a smaller screen than the Moto G and that’s still a great phone.

MOTO G CAMERA

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.

^ 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

^ Here we’re moving the focus/exposure point around, and it’s struggling to capture anything in the brighter areas of the image

^ From top to bottom you can see how the Moto G’s murky rendition is outdone by the Nokia Lumia 620 with a cleaner brighter take, these two shots were taken almost simultaneously. Below that you have our trusty old Samsung Galaxy S3, which shows that although budget phones have come a long way in terms of processor speed and screens, their cameras still can’t compete even with older flagship models – click samples to enlarge

^ Indoors we put the Moto G up against the slightly more expensive HTC Desire 500. This handset isn’t as quick as the Moto G and has a lower-resolution display, but you can see that its 8-megapixel camera is obviously superior with far more detail in the fur of our model under typical indoor lighting – click samples to enlarge

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, not quite as big as the 2,300mAh battery in the Nexus 5, and well short of the 2,600mAh pack in the Samsung Galaxy S4, but then both those handsets have much bigger screens.

In our 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 we 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 the Moto G is the best value for money smartphone we’ve ever seen. With its excellent build quality, high-quality display, great performance and good battery life, it single-handedly says goodbye to compromised, sluggish budget smartphones and potentially kills off the mid-range competition, too.

However, now that the new Moto G is out, the old 3G Moto G pales in comparison to its newer big brother, but we’d still recommend the 4G version if you’re after the best 4G handset currently available. Available for around £128 SIM-free or as little as £13.50-per-month on Tesco Mobile, the 4G version is a great alternative to the new Moto G, if only for the future-proofing 4G support provides. With an upgrade to Android Lollipop due imminently, the 4G Moto G is our go-to 4G phone of choice.

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