Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Prime Picks! – The #1 Unlocked Smartphone on Amazon!”.
All right, what’s up guys, i’m pbhd here and welcome to a new video series idea: here’s how this one goes. So we pick a category on amazon, probably somewhere in tech, and we find the number one best-selling item in that category on all of amazon and buy it and give it a shot see if it’s actually worth it. I don’t really have a name for this, yet maybe we could come up with a name. If there’s some sort of clever comment, i might use that, but as of right now, that’s the general idea. So category number one for the initial episode is naturally smartphones on amazon. There’S a category under electronics called unlocked cell phones and the number one best-selling item sitting at the top pretty much since it came out. Is this the moto g6? So this is a 250 smartphone uh, maybe even a little bit less than this right now on amazon, but that makes it definitely falling in the budget category and i definitely tend to focus most of my smartphone videos on flagships, the the phones i’m most usually spending Time with, but we’ve definitely covered mid-range and budget stuff in the past and with budget stuff like this, it’s really all about where you save your money, where you strategically bring some stuff up from flagships from 900 phones and where you don’t and so on, moto g6. When you look at it, it has a couple things that it brings up from today’s flagships, but it still saves money in a lot of the places where you might not say it’s worth it, it’s a well-balanced checklist, so they brought up the 18 by nine aspect. Ratio, for example, on the display they brought up the glass back. They brought up dual cameras usbc, but they didn’t bring up a notch. They didn’t cut the headphone jack, they didn’t shrink the bezels to be tiny, so there are trade-offs.
So i won’t put these amazon videos in the same category as like a full review which are much more detailed. But for these quick little device expose we’re going to focus on the good, the okay and the bad. And if there is any the ugly but basically figure out why this thing sits at the top of the charts and see if it’s actually worth it, so the good you can start off with the display here. So moto g has actually kind of always been leading budget smartphones since the beginning of the series. But this is the first moto g with an eighteen by nine display instead of sixteen by nine. So basically it’s bigger and it’s definitely taller.
But it’s only one or two millimeters wider, so you get much more screen in not much more phone. It’S a 5.7 inch 1080p lcd panel. It’S not blowing anyone’s pants off, of course, in terms of brightness or colors like some oleds would, but it’s otherwise pretty good, especially for the price gets just bright enough to not be a problem, and it’s still coming in at over 420 pixels per inch. So it’s plenty sharp too. So, even if you see 1080p and think it’s low, it’s not, and just generally, as a pixel person, i’m happy to see them take care to not have a garbage display and then there’s the design, which is also good.
This is the sleekest most premium, looking moto g, yet you might even remember in previous years of the smartphone awards. The moto g has been this defending champ in the best budget phones category, and these phones have always been rubberized or plastic or hard in plastic. Never like this, never with this glass, the rounded corners tapered edges gets these clicky tactile buttons i’ll have more to say on this all later, but this is a well-built phone for 250 bucks and then also under the good is the software, and this is something that Motorola has excelled in in the past with past moto, g’s and other past phones, and they do it again here in a lot of the same ways, but with one major exception and i’ll explain so this phone has near stock android, and i talk about this.
All the time with just a couple of additions on top of it – and i really like that – it’s something i’ve praised for years, especially with past motorola phones and they’ve, built in features like moto display, which shows your notifications in like this non-obtrusive way. Unless you interact with them, even while the screen is mostly off, even though it’s not an oled, there’s moto actions which have been classic for a while, the chop chop of your phone to turn the flashlight on or the double twist to open the camera stuff. Like that and it’s all built into one place, but everything else for the most part here is pretty tame pretty functional, nothing too flashy uh. Now, since it is an amazon special, it has a bunch of these pre-installed amazon, apps amazon drive amazon’s, kindle app their amazon, music and even alexa actually front and center.
I don’t use any of these and they’re not uninstallable, but if you get a custom launcher, you can just kind of hide them. The fingerprint reader can lock the phone and unlock the phone. You can turn on one button mode which lets you use the single slightly shrunken fingerprint reader as a gesture pad to do swiping to go home and back and all that stuff, but that’s pretty much it no crazy, stylus features the face unlock is super basic. There’S! No squeeze function, no crazy, fake buttons, no edge screen, it’s clean near stock android.
The way a lot of people, including me like it, but the one caveat i mentioned earlier uh, usually near stock android, means easier. Software updates down the road. So if you have near stock, it’s usually just a couple weeks behind like the pure stock android devices, but with motorola lately, that’s not been the case and they’ve been lagging behind slacking pretty hard on software updates, sometimes not updating phones at all.
So i would say, sadly, don’t buy this phone if you’re expecting a long tail of software updates and security patches. That just doesn’t seem like something motorola’s into right now and i’m like basically calling them out like they should change that. But as of right now, i can’t say that this phone will get that anyway. That brings us to the okay. You know, there’s, like i said, there’s not a lot of stuff.
You can bring from a 900 flagship down into this price point but doesn’t mean they’re bad. You know, there’s things that are just middle of the road. Okay, on this phone there’s, no ip certification for water resistance, but motorola calls it splash proof. So you know some people who are clumsier than others might not want to take the risk with this one, but what’s probably more important here is the glass back, but also no wireless charging and the glass is still kind of nice.
Don’T get me wrong, it’s solid! It feels good it’s a little heavier it’s premium in the hand with the tapered edges, but obviously now a fingerprint, magnet and much more fragile. I feel like the moto g series is one that could have totally stayed away from the glass trend and been fine, like they’ve done it with more expensive phones in the past, but they just went to glass here now. The specs are: okay, so uh, snapdragon, 415 mid-range chip, three gigabytes of rams, pretty good uh, 32 gigs of storage to start and a 3000 milliamp hour battery, which has been holding up just fine, especially thanks to the 1080p display. But the standby time is not all that great, so i guess use it to get the most out of it. It has a headphone jack, that’s good for a lot of people, that’s actually great in 2018 and the fingerprint reader it’s it’s kind of sad. That motorola felt the need to put their logo on the front of the phone so bad that they literally shoved it in between the fingerprint reader and the screen. I will never not hate logos on the front of phones, and this makes it look like they cut down on the size of the fingerprint reader to make room for a logo. I hope that’s not what happened and the cameras on the back.
There’S a 12 megapixel camera with a 5 megapixel secondary shooter. It looks like a face no way around that it’s totally a face, and it’s funny the photos it takes are decent at best. The dynamic range is one thing: that’s particularly weak, but the detail holds up. If you don’t zoom in and pixel peep too much, basically, if a 900 phone was taking, these photos, i’d be calling it a little weak, but in a super inexpensive phone like this, it definitely gets the job done with no problems.
And then, of course, you got to ask if there’s anything bad, anything, truly bad about this phone and honestly, the standby time is pretty bad. I’Ve had it die just by going from 50 to zero overnight, there’s, not anything crazy, going on with the software. It’S just pretty weak and maybe aside from the the poor track record with software updates, there’s nothing truly horrific about the moto g6, even like the usual suspects. You’D look for to be garbage in a cheap phone uh, the front-facing camera still actually not that bad.
The vibration motor totally average, the speaker, if you notice, there’s no speaker on the bottom, where you usually find the crappy ones there here, it’s actually just the front-facing earpiece as the only speaker on this phone. Technically, it is just one source. So it’s easy to completely block, but you’ll never really hold your phone accidentally in a way to block it and the fact that it’s front-facing means it sounds better and louder than pretty much any other downward-facing speaker. So for 250 bucks i mean what it really comes down to is this phone gets the job done with no major glaring flaws.
So it’s probably not really a surprise that this is really cheap, making it the number one best-selling phone on amazon right now. I feel like i could probably carry this phone daily. The big complaints i would have would be the camera, because i’m a big camera person and probably the speaker – i’m really used to front-facing really good speakers, but the screen is okay, like it’s fine, it gets the job done. I think what’s more interesting is i don’t know if this is clearly the budget king like it has been in previous years? There’S plenty of other manufacturers actually now really focusing on this price point things like nokia, things like xiaomi things like redmi, just to name a few, so you can’t call this the budget king quite like it was separating itself from the pack before, but it’s still pretty Good, so if you were browsing amazon, just wondering why the g6 was the number one best-selling unlocked cell phone or if you were just wondering you should buy this phone or not gets a thumbs up from me. It’S pretty good either way. Let me know what you guys think if this series idea is something you’d be into maybe leave suggestions for other categories on amazon to pick up and check out the number one product for, but until the next one, thanks for watching peace.
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