Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Moto G5 Plus: Budget Smartphone King?”.
Hey: what’s up guys, I’m cabby HD here and usually when you see a piece of tech that is way cheaper than the others in the category like wave Euler, you just a fall so thinking it’s probably inferior in every way, but the Moto G 5 and the Moto G 5 plus are the result of Motorola and not really cutting down from high rent flagships, but more building up as high as they can for a certain price and they’ve come up with this this year for 230 bucks they’re still killing it in the budget Game, so I want to shine another light on this because of the fact that I keep coming back to you that good phones are getting cheap and cheap phones are getting good. Probably the biggest difference between this gen Moto G and a last one is just the outside the design and the hardware. The Moto G has always been this shamelessly apologetically plastic, but this year it steps up to metal. So all around the back and the side and the frame – and it feels a lot better and more durable as a result, now the looks are a little more polarizing. It definitely still looks a little bit better because of the metal, but it also definitely still looks like a budget phone.
It’S the bezels that are still big on the sides and the forehead and the chin. No doubt about that, and it’s a pretty basic design. From top to bottom, nothing too crazy about it. Button placement is standard.
The headphone jack still at the bottom of all of that is great, but one thing that makes this feel a little more cheap is actually the chrome rail, like all the way around the bezel. You don’t see that really in like the renders, but in real life it actually does make a difference. I feel like on the more premium phones, the bezels are usually just more shrinking down or much more dark to sort of fade out the way, but the chrome here around the rails is much more reflective kind of reminds me of the Galaxy Nexus just a little Bit less curvy, but that’s not really a bad thing. It’S just something you notice about the phone.
The one thing I would say I don’t really like about the design on the outside of the new Moto G. Is that the old camera lump on the back? I really think if this phone was the exact same size, but didn’t have that big bump sticking out, it would look pretty clean, but this sticks out of it. So much that it’s a defining feature of the way. This phone looks.
The Moto Z had that big old camera bump because it was a fitting spot for all the Moto mods that fit on the back. I don’t think you had to have this big camera bump on the the g5, because there are no motor mods for this one. Either way, though, overall, the build quality and film hand is a step up from last year and when you compare to other smartphones under 300 bucks, which there aren’t many of this, sits up at the top pretty clearly in my book. So the specs of the new Moto G are also decidedly mid-range about what you’d expect a 3000 milliamp hour battery in this g5 Plus, and there are two versions of it: one: with 4 gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of storage, that’s 300 bucks, and then this $ 230, cheaper version of the phone has 2 gigs of ram and 32 gigs of storage. That is expandable, though, since the phone does keep that rare micro SD card slot and the software experience of the Moto G is pretty classic motorola, mostly pure stock Android.
But with some enhancements that they feel will make it better, and I really like that about them. That’S something they’ve kept where they really don’t. They don’t have a whole skin on top of Android, you don’t have a whole suite of redundant apps.
It’S nothing too crazy. It’S again near stock, but when they have certain software or hardware features they like to integrate them to take advantage of each other. So when they have an OLED display, for example, they like to take advantage of that with software, so one main place they saw for enhancement on this phone was the home button and it kind of stems from a weird place from a being budget. But this phone has a weird home button situation: there’s one big physical home button with a quality fingerprint reader down at the bottom, but then there’s no back or multitasking buttons on either side of it. It’S just blank space and a wasted chin, but then on the screen. You can have fully normal software buttons, your back home and multitasking, but of course they take obscure miel estate and not everybody wants that. So their unique solution for people who want to use all off screen buttons is what they’ve called home button gestures. Apparently, the home button is actually big enough to use sort of like a big glass trackpad.
It’S actually sensitive enough to figure out what you’re doing, if you’re doing a button press versus a gesture, and these seem to work fairly well. So when you turn these on its a tap to go home, then it’s a hold for a second to turn the screen off. Then you can hold a little longer to get into Google assistant.
Then you can swipe right across the home button to go back and then swipe left across the button to go to recent apps and you can actually interchange those last two. If you want to swipe right or left another enhancement here in stock Android to the Moto G is gestures to go into multitasking, you basically just drag the window up to the. I actually think this is better and easier to remember them before.
So you kind of dragged into the multitasking experience and dragged out of it makes sense and then there’s other little things like the slightly transparent theme in the app drawer and the Moto widget. So you get on your home screen that show the battery and the time and all that stuff. The screen off gesture that came with the original Moto X. You have the double chop to turn on the flashlight, which is familiar. You have the double twist which launches the camera really quickly. That’S still there.
So all those gestures and all those enhancements come down to the Moto G again and they’re awesome. So I’ve said a lot of good things about this phone, but it’s not your perfect flawless fantasy phone. It’S definitely not quite perfect in order to get a phone down into the price that you get this one in two. You got to make some trade-offs, obviously, to cut costs for one thing: it’s still using microUSB down at the bottom, which isn’t a huge deal.
You could say that it’s really just fine if most people don’t use USB type-c yet. But I would have liked to have seen USB C and then this is also missing NFC, which was a bit of a bigger deal on a certain other phone. But that phone was claiming to be a flagship killer, this one’s not claiming to be any of that, it’s just a lower priced phone, so it doesn’t have the NFC chip that may or may not be a big deal to you. Based on how often you use mobile payments and then the speaker up at the front, it’s it’s decent. It’S definitely not the loudest and not the clearest out there. But the thing is it’s better than most of the high-end flagship smartphone speakers nowadays, strictly because it’s front-facing, so it doesn’t have to be as loud because it’s pointed right at you. I just wish it was a stereo pair since its kind of weird holding the phone sideways and then having the audio come from one side of the phone, and I think the camera is the area. Will you’ll see the biggest drop-off the quickest drop-off from when you had a high-end flagship phone to this lower price? On paper? It’S still a 12 megapixel smartphone with an F 1.7 aperture, but it doesn’t have optical image stabilization. So you can get pretty good shots out of this camera when you’re really well lit and when you’re outdoors only have a lot of light. But as soon as you start to lose light, you’re gon na see a lot more things like noise in the frame, because it’s raising the ISO to shorten the shutter speed to keep that motion blur down. You’Re gon na see chromatic aberration, you’re gon na see a lot less dynamic range, a lot more contrast and overall, just a lot less natural colors, it’s not quite as good of an image, processing and Motorola’s struggled with high-end cameras and their best phones. So this is definitely not gon na be the phone you buy for the camera quality, but at the end of the day, when you start comparing this moto G to a lot of the other phones, you can get for this price for $ 250 or less.
It becomes really obvious that this still falls as a complete package at the top of the heap. So can we give the budget crown back to the Moto G? I think so yeah. I think it’s gon na deserve that this moto G 5 plus takes a lot of the cues from the bigger more expensive brothers. But it’s also coming from the low price that the Moto G has always been in sort of elevating it into a phone. That kind of feels a lot more like a premium flagship or at least tries to I’d, even say that the budget flagship has previously gone. For me, two phones like the one plus three and the one plus three T, but now those are sort of creeping up into like 400 $ 450 price ranges, they’re kind of edging up there and starting to compete with flagships now.
So for the best phone that you can get under 300 bucks, it’s kind of a no-brainer moto G is holding that crown. So if you’re ballin on a budget, this is the phone to check out. This is the one, so that’s been pretty much it thanks for watching I’ll leave a link to this phone below I’ll leave a link to all my other phone reviews and other stuff below as well talk to you guys, the next one peace .