Tech

Review: New $180 Moto G is a stylish upgrade worthy of the original

Meh GPU and flaky camera are outweighed by LTE, better CPU, 2GB RAM, and the price.

Andrew Cunningham – Aug 8, 2015 8:00 am | 182

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

I was a big fan of the original Moto G when it launched. It couldn’t hold a candle to the parade of high-end phones that makes its way through the Orbiting HQ every year, but the original brought solid build quality, a decent display, and a modern bloatware-lite version of Android to a market segment served mostly by cut-rate garbage and old flagships.

The second-generation model was still fine but less impressive—it got bigger and got a slightly better camera, but it was a step backward in battery life and had substantially the same specs. The 2015 Moto E complicated matters further by adding LTE and a faster chip to a phone that cost even less, though it was still a step down from the G in other ways.

For the third-generation Moto G, Motorola has managed to put together something that outdoes the first model in every important way. It’s a better-looking, more customizable phone with better CPU performance, LTE connectivity, an option to double your RAM, an actually respectable camera, and good battery life. The Moto G’s job is to provide the full Android experience for a third of a flagship’s price, and it’s a job the phone does well.

Look and feel

Specs at a glance: Google/Motorola Moto G (3rd generation)
Screen	1280×720 5-inch IPS (294 PPI)
OS	Android 5.1.1
CPU	1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 (quad-core Cortex A53)
RAM	1GB or 2GB
GPU	Qualcomm Adreno 306
Storage	8 or 16GB NAND flash, micro SD card up to 32GB
Networking	802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0. GSM model (XT1540) bands: LTE (2, 4, 5, 7, 17), UMTS/HSPA+ (850, 1700/AWS, 1900, 2100 MHz), GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz). US Cellular, Virgin Mobile model (XT1548) bands: LTE (2, 4, 5, 12, 17, 25, 26), UMTS/HSPA+ (850, 1700, 1900 MHz), CDMA (800, 850, 1900 MHz), TD-LTE (41 TD2500), GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
Ports	Micro-USB, headphones
Camera	13MP rear camera, 5MP front camera
Size	5.59″ x 2.85″ x 0.24-0.48″ (142.1 x 72.4 x 6.1-11.6mm)
Weight	5.47oz (155g)
Battery	2470mAh
Starting price	$180 off-contract, $220 for 2GB model with 16GB storage

The Moto G’s basic design and size are largely carried over from the last generation. You’re getting a 5-inch, 720p IPS screen surrounded by thick-ish but not egregious bezels. The phone is all-plastic but avoids the cheap, slippery look and feel we’ve complained about in other phones, and the wobbliness of the power and volume buttons that we’ve complained about in the past is mostly gone here.

The sides curve gently into the back and the phone is comfortable to hold—I still miss the smaller bodies of the first-generation Moto X and Moto G, but that ship has obviously sailed. Given that the Moto X is now 5.7 inches, I guess I should just be happy that the G hasn’t gotten even bigger.

The look of the phone has changed just enough to give it a little bit of personality that older models largely lacked, especially if you take advantage of the new-to-Moto-G Moto Maker customization option.

The base black model is still all-black, but the base white model gets silver highlights around the sides and on the back. If you use Moto Maker, you can change the color of the small camera-and-logo strip and pick a backplate with a different color, all without increasing the base price of the phone. For past Moto Gs, you needed to buy a black or white phone and add the backplate separately if you wanted one. You can engrave a 14-character message on the back if you’re into that—at least you could replace the backplate if you were worried about the resale value.

Motorola has traded the lightly rubberized plastic back of the older Motos G for a harder plastic with ridges on it. The grippiness of the new material is about the same, but it’s more interesting to feel and to look at so I’d call it a positive change. Though the strip in the middle of the back can’t be changed after you order the phone, you can still swap the rear shells at will if you have a broken one or if you want to change the color.

Look at the inside of those shells and you’ll see a couple of small rubber bits designed to protect the micro SIM slot and the microSD card slot—those pieces help the Moto G attain its IPX7 rating, which means that it can be submerged in up to a meter of water for up to 30 minutes. You won’t want to throw this thing into an ocean or lake or even into the deep end of a swimming pool, but that’s more than enough to protect it from spills, rain, and being dropped in the sink (if you’re lucky) or the toilet (if you’re not lucky).

As we mentioned earlier, the new Moto G’s screen looks about the same as the second-generation model’s. At 294 PPI, the screen’s pixel density is a bit on the low side, but it’s still sharp enough for most purposes. The move from 300 PPI to 400 PPI (roughly 1080p in a screen this size) is noticeable, but it makes little practical difference for most text and images.

Like the second-gen model, contrast isn’t as good as in a higher-end IPS panel or AMOLED panel, but color, brightness, and viewing angles are all pretty good, and there’s none of the backlight bleed across the top of the screen that you’d sometimes see in the first-gen model.

For those wondering, call quality (at least on AT&T) is fine; it sounds like a cell phone. The phone’s single front-facing speaker gets pretty loud and it’s fine for general OS and notification noises, but you won’t want to use it to play music for your next house party.

Software

The new Moto G ships with a mostly “stock” version of Android 5.1.1. Android enthusiasts are the ones who care the most about having stock, skin-free Android, but it’s a good thing for regular people, too—it generally means a version of Android that’s more visually consistent and doesn’t include piles and piles of duplicative apps from OEMs and carriers. It also generally leaves OEMs with less work to do when it comes time to issue Android updates (more on that later).

Google controls the core building blocks of the Android experience on the Moto G—the Home screen and app drawer use the Google Now launcher, the default software keyboard is Google’s, and the notification center and quick settings shade are all Google’s, too. Google apps like Chrome, Maps, and Gmail (which also handles Exchange and other IMAP accounts, as it does on Nexuses) provide most of the other smartphone staples.

Motorola adds just a handful of apps to replace Google’s. One, a gesture-heavy camera app, improves on Google’s camera app by allowing you to set an external SD card as the default storage target and scan barcodes and QR codes without using a separate app (you can always download Google Camera and use it instead). Another, called “Messaging,” works like an even-more-barebones version of Google’s basic SMS app—you can replace it with that app, use Hangouts to combine SMS and Hangouts chats, or replace it with some other SMS app from the Play store.

More important are the additive apps, one for basic FM radio usage; one called Migrate that helps you pull your data over from other Android phones, iPhones, or dumbphones; and one called Moto that handles just about everything else.

The Moto app controls Moto Assist, an assistant feature that offers to mute certain notifications and phone calls and send auto-reply messages if you’re sleeping or in a meeting. You can set both time-based and location-based filters for Assist. The Moto G can respond to a pair of gestures, both of which can be enabled and disabled in the Moto app—make a chopping motion with the phone twice to enable and disable the LED flashlight, and twist your wrist twice while holding the phone to open the camera without needing to unlock it or interact with the screen.

And finally there’s “Moto Display,” a sparse white-on-black screen that shows you the time and whether you’ve received any notifications whenever you receive a new notification or pick the phone up. On devices with AMOLED displays, this can save some power since the screen only lights up a few of its pixels to show you this information. On the Moto G, the whole screen is lit up regardless of what information is being displayed—it can still save battery by saving you from unlocking your phone all the way if you don’t need to, but that’s about it.

Google’s built-in version of this feature, dubbed Ambient Display, can be enabled from within the Moto app if you want to use it instead. It won’t wake the screen if you move the phone, but it will still work when you get a notification; other than meshing a bit better with Lollipop’s actual lock screen design, the two are functionally comparable.

The Moto G still doesn’t support a handful of features included in the Moto X lineup. This includes both SMS and call forwarding to computers running the Motorola Connect extension for Chrome and the always-on voice activation, which requires either a low-power coprocessor or an equivalent block on the SoC.

I don’t find any of the Moto app’s additions extraordinarily useful, especially since Google implemented its own version of the Moto Display feature, and I rarely (and thus, manually) activate Do Not Disturb mode on whatever phone I’m using. The good news for people like me is that they can just ignore those features, since aside from a notification you get the first time you set up the phone, you never need to see any of it.

On 64-bit support and encryption

A quick technical note: While the Moto G’s Snapdragon 410 is a 64-bit chip, Motorola still ships 32-bit Android on both the low- and high-end versions of the phone. It did the same thing on the 2015 Moto E, and when we asked, the company told us that it didn’t want to deal with the extra memory pressure from running a 64-bit OS on a 1GB phone. We’d guess that it didn’t want to maintain a separate 64-bit Android build for the 2GB version of the Moto G, so it’s running 32-bit Android too.

Practically, users won’t notice or care that the G is running a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit chip, and it’s still faster than the previous Moto Gs. But for the technically inclined, note that this phone may not take full advantage of the performance benefits that come with 64-bit ARM chips and the ARMv8 instruction set.

Finally, like the 2015 Moto E, the Moto G isn’t encrypted by default. Encryption was originally going to be required for new Lollipop phones, but Google quietly relaxed the requirement a few months later, citing performance concerns. Encryption is still “strongly recommended” but generally speaking, if Google doesn’t make a rule mandatory, OEMs aren’t going to follow it.

On updates

The first-generation Moto X, G, and E impressed just about everyone who paid any attention to the Android update mess. In the move from version 4.3 to 4.4 and the move from 4.4 to any one of several 4.4.x updates, the high- and low-end Moto phones were routinely among the first to receive them, even accounting for the standard ~~meddling~~ testing and validation performed by the likes of Verizon and AT&T.

And then the second-generation phones and Lollipop all hit around the same time, and things changed. The second-generation Moto X and Moto G got 5.0 in relatively short order, but Android 5.1 didn’t come to the Moto X for a few months after release. Rollout for 5.1 on any other Moto phone has been a crapshoot—some phones on some operators in some territories have it, others don’t. Some are stuck on 5.0, others on 4.4. Motorola’s page for software upgrade news is kind of helpful, though it won’t tell you anything about timing if the update hasn’t started rolling out.

Motorola has blamed some of these delays on poor support from its partners and the general bugginess of the 5.0 release, and the company has also promised that selling the new Moto G and X unlocked will remove carrier-related delays from the equation for the newest Moto phones. But in 2015 the company has squandered a lot of the update-related goodwill it generated in 2013 and 2014.

The new Moto G will probably see Android M and possibly even future releases, and when it gets them they won’t be loaded down by skins and bloatware. But it’s no longer a given that it will receive those updates promptly, which used to be one of the biggest points in the Moto lineup’s favor. Let’s hope the company can rebuild some of that trust in the waning months of 2015.

Camera: Let there be light (please?)

Motorola says the new Moto G uses the same 13MP camera sensor as the Nexus 6. We weren’t exactly blown away by that phone’s camera when we reviewed it, but when you put it in a $180 or $220 phone, the expectations are much lower.

Give the Moto G some light and it’s actually pretty impressive, far-and-away better than the 5MP sensor from the first-generation model (we didn’t have a second-generation Moto G on hand to test with). It captures a lot more detail, and the colors look pretty good.

The problem, as it is so often with Motorola’s phone cameras, is low-light performance. We noticed three different issues: first, in outdoor shots with a mix of well-lit spots and shadowy spots (check the skyline picture), the shadowy spots tend to be too dark, washing out some detail. The camera’s auto HDR, which we turned off for these samples, should help a little here, though it will add a hint of blurriness.

Second, in decent indoor light, the new Moto G does a respectable job with color and detail but a poor job with exposure, which is way too low. Third, in poor indoor light, things become shadowy and muddy. This was also the case with the Nexus 6, so it’s not clear that Motorola can do anything in software to fix this.

At least the two-tone flash is a big improvement. Phone camera flashes are never amazing, but this one helps with light without completely ruining color or blowing out the shot.

Internals and performance

The new Moto G steps up from a Snapdragon 400 to a 1.4GHz quad-core Snapdragon 410. It uses four of ARM’s low-end, 64-bit Cortex A53 CPU cores and a Adreno 406 GPU. And while the 2.4GHz 802.11n is less forgivable than it was two years ago, all Moto Gs now include LTE, which will make a big difference while you’re out and about.

Though it won’t make much of a difference for raw speed, there’s a key difference between the $180 Moto G base model and the $220 upgrade model aside from the 8GB of storage space (we have the 16GB model, and there’s about 11GB usable out of the box, for reference). The low-end phone has 1GB of RAM and the high-end one has 2GB.

The main advantage of packing more RAM into an Android device (or an iOS device for that matter) is that you’ll be able to fit more apps and browser tabs into memory at once before the OS has to start ejecting them from memory to make room for others. In general use this will improve multitasking responsiveness, but it’s not going to (for example) make browser tabs load noticeably faster or get you a huge bump in gaming performance.

We’d strongly recommend the 2GB version, just because doubling your storage and RAM for $40 is too good a deal to pass up. Just know what it will improve and what it won’t improve. Our 2GB Moto G didn’t have the same snappiness as a high-end flagship, but it moves at a steady clip and the extra RAM helps keep things nice and consistent even under heavy usage.

Back to the SoC: Qualcomm’s mid-end chips are improving at a slower rate than its high-end chips. Of course, it doesn’t want to cannibalize the sales of Snapdragon 800 chips by making 400- and 600-series SoCs too good, but the downside is that the bar for year-over-year improvement has been set pretty low. In the 2015 Moto G, buyers get a respectable CPU bump with a barely there GPU bump.

The 410 is around 40 percent faster in multithreaded use than the Snapdragon 400s in both Moto Gs (closer to 50 percent in single-threaded use), not to mention 10-or-so percent faster than the 1.2GHz Snapdragon 410 in the 2015 Moto E. This isn’t a bad bump! It doesn’t turn a low-end phone into a high-end one, but it’s enough to make the new Moto G feel snappier than the old one.

The Adreno 306, on the other hand, isn’t a spectacular performer, and in fact it looks like a small step backwards. We’d attribute this to a drop in clock speed—the Adreno 305 in the older Moto G apparently runs at 450MHz while the 306 in the new Moto G runs at 400MHz.

The result is a GPU that’s around a third as fast as the Adreno 330 in the Snapdragon 801 in the second-generation Moto X—and that’s true even though that chip is a year and a half old and it’s powering a 1080p screen instead of a 720p screen. If both GPUs are rendering at 1080p, as they do in GFXBench’s Offscreen test, the new Moto G’s GPU is about one-fifth the speed of the 2014 Moto X’s.

Two years ago, this level of GPU performance wasn’t really a problem, since mobile game developers don’t code exclusively for high-end GPUs anyway—it’s in their interests to cast a wide net, and that includes a lot of older and slower phones. For most games, the Moto G will still be passable, but you’re going to run into framerate stuttering (we did in a few games, including Goat Simulator, Need for Speed Most Wanted, and Dead Trigger 2, though none were unplayable) and you’ll only run into more over the next year or two as games become more demanding.

Motorola still formats the Moto G’s userdata partition using the Flash Friendly Filesystem (F2FS), which tends to boost storage performance. It’s an improvement over the old model on all fronts.

Battery life

The second-generation Moto G bumped up the screen size without significantly increasing the size of the battery, and the result was a big drop in battery life. The new model doesn’t do quite as well as the original Moto G, but it lasted around an hour and a half longer in our light Web browsing test and about 40 minutes longer in our heavier WebGL test. A ten-hour runtime under light use is more than respectable.

A few compromises, but not many

The 2015 Moto G, the 2013 Moto G, and the 2013 Moto X. Motorola has done a good job establishing a competent family of phones with a strong visual identity. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Moto G is probably the most important phone Motorola makes. The Moto X is a good halo model and this year’s looks even better than last year’s, but the market has been unkind to high-end Android phones for the last couple of years. The Moto E is respectable, but it cuts more corners and isn’t all that much cheaper than the Moto G. In Motorola’s lineup, the G represents the best value for the price (and as intrigued as we are by the midrange Moto X Play, we won’t be getting it in the US).

And that’s the place it occupies in the wider Android ecosystem, especially in countries where Xiaomi isn’t selling phones. Like the other Moto Gs, it does a few things pretty well and it does nothing particularly badly. We could wish for better graphics performance, a more satisfying camera, and a more striking screen. But the new version of the Moto G is enough of a step up that it’s a great upgrade for users of dumbphones, old Android phones, and even first-generation Moto G buyers. That said, we’d strongly recommend purchasing the $220 model—16GB of internal storage is more comfortable for files and apps, but the extra gigabyte of RAM is an even bigger improvement that you can’t solve with an SD card.

The fact that the Moto G is so competent drives home the superfluousness of so many flagship phone features—the move from 720p to 1080p to 1440p and beyond, faster SoCs, ever-thinner metal-and-glass slabs. Those things are all nice to have, but you’d be hard-pressed to argue that any of them are essential.

The good

At $180 and $220 unlocked, the Moto G still offers a good deal for the price
Snapdragon 410 is a solid upgrade to the old Snapdragon 400’s CPU performance
LTE
Much better battery life than the second-generation model
Solid and well-built plastic frame feels like it could sustain a few drops
Waterproof
Moto Maker customizability and other design tweaks give the phone a better, more distinct look
Camera performs well in decent light
Bloat-free, modern Android
SD card slot for storage expansion, if you care about that sort of thing

The bad

Qualcomm’s low-end GPU performance is becoming more of a problem
$180 base model comes with half the storage and, more crucially, half the RAM
Single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi was underwhelming in 2013, and it’s downright obnoxious now
Motorola’s update track record has become more mixed as time has gone on

The ugly

Poor low-light performance spoils what could otherwise be an impressive budget camera

Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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