What is the Motorola Moto G?
The Motorola Moto G is an important phone. It's
the first phone released by Motorola in the UK in a
long time, and it's also one of the best-specced
phones we've ever seen for under £200.
It's not a case of being 'too good to be true' either.
This is the sub-£150 to buy, and our best gadget
of 2013.
ROUNDUP: 10 best cheap phones you can buy
Motorola Moto G – Design & Features
The Moto G is a plastic phone, with a curved back
that cares more about feeling good in the hand
than being terribly thin or light. At 143g and
11.6mm thick, it’s significantly thicker and heavier
than most phones with similar specs. However, for
the average buyer this won’t be much of a
sacrifice.
The back is smooth and comfy, and as the 4.5-
inch screen is smaller than many high-spec
Androids (if quite large at the pice), the Motorola
Moto G is easy to use one-handed. It might lack
the recognisable design of the Razr-series phones,
but it offers a level of customisation thanks to an
array of available body shells.
Thought removable phone fascias were dead? The
Motorola Moto G is trying to bring them back. 19
different backs are available for the phone, coming
in all sorts of different colours, and three main
types.
There’s the normal one, bundled as standard, flip-
style cases like those you can get for the Samsung
Galaxy Note 3, and a back that gives a bit more
protection, with chunkier sides and a slight
protrusion of around a millimetre in front of the
screen. This ensures the glass front of the screen
doesn't take the brunt of any drop impact.
The idea is that the Moto G is not a phone you
need a separate case for. We used the phone with
the standard black plastic back, and there’s
thankfully no hint that the back is meant to be
switched.
There’s an inoffensive ordinariness to the Moto G
that we think is the right move to make at this
price. It’s what rivals like the Samsung Galaxy Ace
phones go for, too. There's just one issue: the
black case is a magnet for greasy finger marks.
One of the most notable things about the design is
something that has no function at all. The Motorola
logo sits on the back of the phone sits in a
concave indent that just wills you to stroke the
thing’s back as if it’s a miaow’ing pet. Completely
pointless as it may be, but like the Moto G’s
alternative to a comfort blanket it’s an oddly
reassuring presence.
ROUNDUP: 10 best Android phones you can buy
Although the Moto G doesn’t quite have the
aesthetic purity of the Nexus 5 , with both matt and
gloss finishes on show and non-colour-matched
buttons, it still looks more expensive than it is.
This looks like a £250 phone, not a £130 one.
Motorola has employed a water-resistant ‘nano’
layer inside the phone, designed to protect it from
light splashes. The design also keeps any power
connections away from water, by sealing in the
battery. It’s non-removable, which some of you
may not like, but finishing touches like mild water
resistance are the last things we expect at this
price.
There are features missing you’ll often find in more
expensive phones, though. There’s no micro-SD
memory card slot (Motorola says this is not a price
issue, though), no NFC, no 4G and no integrated
support for wireless screen mirroring.
These are the sacrifices the Moto G has had to
make in order to offer such a high-spec screen at
such a low price. But they're the right ones.
They're features that are relatively little-used by
the vast majority of people.
With the entry-level £135 model you get 8GB of
internal memory, around 5GB of which is
accessible, and there’s a 16GB version that costs
£160. While some may complain about not having
expandable memory, we’re nevertheless impressed
by what Motorola has managed to cram in. Some
phones at the price only offer 4GB of internal
memory.
The Motorola Moto G is a phone that proves how
cheaply a high-quality phone can be made with a
bit of aggressiveness and the right decisions. It
stands out among its peers as the new 'phone to
beat'.
ROUNDUP: 10 best phones you can buy
Motorola Moto G – Screen
The Motorola Moto G’s most impressive feature is
its screen. This is the first time we’ve seen a 720p
screen on a phone that costs less than £140.
This gives the phone the sort of ultra-sharp text
and images that we’ve only seen in much more
expensive phones to date. 720p resolution
stretched across a 4.5-inch display gives a pixel
density rating of 329 pixels per inch (ppi). Higher-
end Androids may offer 1080p screens these days,
but that’s still higher than the ppi rating of the
iPhone 5S (326ppi).
Such a sharp screen makes small text easily
readable in the browser. It makes 3D games look a
lot less ‘jaggy’ than they would on most rivals,
too, which tend to have 800 x 480 pixel screens at
this price.
Resolution is not everything, but general image
quality is good too. The Motorola Moto G uses an
IPS display, the same type used in both the HTC
One and iPhone 5S, and it's a good one.
Performance is stellar for the price. Colours are
well-saturated and vivid, contrast is strong and the
evenness of the backlight is on-par with phones
costing several times the price. It doesn’t look
quite as natural as a top £500 phone’s screen,
especially at top brightness, but this is
undoubtedly the best phone screen we’ve seen at
the price from a major manufacturer.
