Motorola Moto G Phone Review

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The Motorola Moto G is an important phone, for Motorola at least. It’s the first new Motorola phone to be released in the UK in ages, and the first we’ve seen since Google bought Motorola back in 2012. It’s also superb. Thanks to its 720p screen and solid Snapdragon 400 processor, it offers far better specs than any other big-name a phone selling for under £150. If you want a sub-£150 phone, get this one. It's that simple.

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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.

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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 microSD 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'.

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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.

What’s also seriously impressive is that Motorola has used Gorilla Glass 3 as the screen covering. This toughened glass layer means the phone is less prone to flexing under pressure and scratching than most low-cost phones. Gorilla Glass is not unheard of in the sub-£200 market, though – the LG L7 II and Huawei Ascend G510 have it, although others tend to use ‘unbranded’ toughened glass.

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