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Motorola Moto G

Motorola Moto G Review – With its bright 720p display, the Moto G makes an instant impact that cannot be matched by anything else in its price bracket. 720p was cutting-edge, flagship phone spec only 18 months ago, so to see it in a phone that costs under £150 SIM-free, and as little as £100 on PAYG deals is truly impressive.

Motorola Moto G, it’s a real game-changer

Motorola Moto G

Motorola Moto G leaves you wanting for nothing, and genuinely makes the G feel like a far more expensive handset than it actually is. There are a few areas where the low price shows. It is quite a heavy device, and quite chunky too. It’s slightly larger and slightly thinner than the Kazam but feels similar in the hand, with its curved soft-touch backplate feeling comfortable to hold.

Here, though, the rear case is firmly fixed in place, so there’s no way to switch the battery or to augment the 8GB of storage – of which around 5.5GB is available. The camera is the biggest disappointment. It shoots five-megapixel images and is no better than any of the other phones in our test. We had low expectations for those; we hoped for more here. Beyond this the Moto G really shines. It is powered by a Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz with 1GB of RAM, and delivers a smoothness that is more in line with a mid-range phone. It is helped by the software, which is a near stock Android 4.4.

The phone launched with Jelly Bean but was among the first to get a KitKat update – unheard of for a £100 phone. Better still, Motorola’s tweaks are real enhancements rather than bloat or change for the sake of change. Assist automates common tasks and is a smart feature we’d like to see built into Android in future, and Migrate makes it easy to bring your data across from another phone. It cannot be overstated just how impressive the Moto G is. It changes how you look at budget phones and for many users only the mediocre camera would give them reason not to pick it up.

Screen

The screen is simply stunning, and even surpasses most of the lower mid-range phones on the market today. Compared to the rest of the budget market they are simply not in the same league as the brilliant Moto G.

Performance

It is noticeably slower than a high-end smartphone when launching apps, but has a smoothness and lack of lag in general use that it becomes really enjoyable to use. Many users won’t need much more speed than this.

Features

This budget phone is so impressive that the things it lacks seem to stand out more than its rivals. Chiefly these amount to a shortage of storage (and no expansion options), no 4G connectivity and a pretty mediocre camera.

Value

It is unlikely that there has ever been a better value smartphone to hit the market than the Moto G. You’d happily pay a lot more for an Android device of this quality, and it feels like an absolute bargain. We can’t praise its value higher.