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Motorola Moto G Review

Updated on October 28, 2014

Bang for your buck

It's a saying that's thrown around a lot, but with the Motorola Moto G, you're certainly getting a lot of bang for your buck. Priced at £130 from Amazon (clicking on 'Amazon' will take you to the appropriate product page for the Amazon site in your own country, be it the UK, Canada or the USA), you're certainly in the budget category of phones.


However, that's certainly not a bad thing. One thing with this phone is that for one at £130, it has a poweful quad core processor. Whilst it's not as fast as an iPhone 5S, the price of that sim free is around £550 for the base model. Can you really justify spending this amount of money on a smartphone when you wouldn't use all of it's power? The great thing about this phone is that it handles multitasking extremely well, and you'll never feel the phone starting to grind down to a halt. This was also true when you're running multiple apps at the one time as well as installing new ones. Your phone will periodically check for updates for the apps and I'm happy to say that it's a breeze to install (it does it automatically) and you still have full use of the phone.

Moreover, the battery life of this phone is exceptional! With heavy usage (YouTube, voicecalls, Whatsapp, text messaging and email) the battery lasted just under 4 days. That's factoring in the issue that the screen was on 75% of it's brightest level, which will be discussed later.

A look at the screen

Slightly grainy since it was taken on my phone.
Slightly grainy since it was taken on my phone.

The screen

One of the best things about this phone is just how detailed and crisp the screen is. It's full HD, and whilst it's not AMOLED, you still get excellent viewing angles from it. One thing that I was shocked about is that even at 75% which is great for outdoor use, it still looks fantastic. It never looks washed out, and at this brightness level you get the perfect balance of screen brightness and also battery consumption. I would say that going above this level is overkill, and is only necessary if you want a tan off of the phone!


The screen is also highly responsive, with the size of the keys being perfect even for people with larger fingers like myself! At no point did I feel that I was struggling to hit the right key and I always managed to type what I wanted without any glitches.

As an added bonus, Motorola have made the screen for the Moto G water repellent, which is great in light rain. Although you obviously wouldn't get the phone out in a torrential downpour. Moreover, it also has Corning Gorilla Glass on it. For a phone at such a low price point, this is a great addition to it's already heaving set. Whilst it doesn't make the screen indestructible, it's help to protect it from light knocks and drops. As an aside; the iPhones don't have this feature which when you consider the price of it, it's totally inexcusable.

Motorola Moto G Rating

5 stars for My personal rating

Always expanding

As mentioned above, the phone will always look for updates to it's apps. However, a pledge made my Google is that they will continue to support the Moto G by continuously updating the Android OS when a new version rolls out. Currently the system is running on 4.4.2 or more affectionately known as KitKat. The benefit of this is that not only does it envelope everything Google has developed so far with regards to phone speed, but they've also managed to nail the efficiency of the device.


The end result of this is that your battery life will last a lot longer, meaning you'll save money of the year in electricity costs as well as prolonging the overall life of the battery. Further, by Google fully supporting the Moto G with newer releases of it'll mean that you're in essence future proofing your device.

A word of caution

If there's two situations where the Moto G doesn't quite stack up to the competition, it's with it's storage space and the camera. We'll address the two individually starting with the storage space on the Moto G.

Unlike other Android devices, it doesn't have an expandable memory slot in the form of being able to take a microSD card. Whilst this is a bit of an issue, there's two things to remember. One is the fact that you can either purchase an 8Gb model, or the 16Gb variant. With either size, you'll always have plenty of space on the device. If you're using it to take a lot of photos, you can always connect the supplied USB cable to your phone and move data off of it onto your computer.


With the camera, it's great but not awe inspiring. You'll still get really good looking photos from it, but nothing to the level that you would get from say, a Galaxy S4 or an iPhone 5S. Again though, you're paying for a smartphone for a fraction of the cost so this is to be expected. To counteract this however, the videocamera is actually pretty good for a budget smart phone. One thing I really like about it is that it has a slow motion feature on it which is a nice little addition that I wasn't expecting!

A look at the camera on the Moto G

Conclusion

The Motorola Moto G is an exceptional smartphone that does a lot more than its budget price would have you believe. For it's price point, you can't go wrong with the device. It's a great feature packed phone and one you wouldn't be ashamed to be seen out in public with. Currently, Amazon are offering this SIM free at the lowest price point.

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