Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This Phone is $169 – What’s the Catch?”.
( Intro sounds ). This brand new smartphone from 2023 has a 6 1/2-inch 90 hertz display with a hole-punch cutout a 5,000 milliamp-hour battery triple cameras, a micro SD card slot for expandable storage, a headphone jack and water resistance for 169. Nice. But what’s the catch, There’s got ta, be a catch right. So look, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it. Again., Good phones are getting cheap, nuh and cheap phones are getting good., And this video is gon na focus on the second part of that which is the cheap phones that are getting so good, because this phone hit my inbox recently.. It’S called the Moto G Play for 2023 and, if you’ve been paying attention to what Motorola’s been doing recently, they’ve been making a lot of really good budget phones.
In the background for the past couple years., I just wanted to know personally from using it myself. How do you end up at a phone? That’S a 10th of the price of the ones that I’ve been really enjoying So on the outside. Well, it’s a pretty big phone, which I like and there’s actually a 6.5 inch flat, 90 hertz LCD display.. Now it’s not the best-looking screen, you’ve ever seen., It’s only 720P, so I can literally see pixels sometimes and it doesn’t get very bright.
You know viewing angles are pretty bad if you get off axis. And of course the bezels you can see are slightly thicker, especially in the chin. And there’s this little bit of light fall off around the hole-punch camera at the top.. But the thing is: can you really pixel peep at this price Like this? Is plenty of screen for texting web browsing navigation flipping through apps scrolling through social media, the classic stuff you wan na do on a phone. Mission accomplished.
You know it’s a big screen, so that’s not the catch., But what about the build? You’Ve probably picked up that it’s a pretty big phone, but it’s also made of plastic.. But honestly, the layout is perfectly fine. Like you’ve got the port and the speakers at the bottom there’s a headphone jack at the top, and you have bonus expandable storage alongside the SIM card tray right, where it belongs.
And on the back. Yes, that is a decently-fast fingerprint reader right in that classic Motorola dimple spot., So it’s laid out. Well, it absolutely does not bend or creep or anything. Weird, like that. Plus, you might have heard plastic is absolutely not the end of the world when it comes to a smartphone build.. Obviously the premium ones will really like to feel more premium and heavy and so glass will do that.. But this is often more durable than glass if you drop it.
And some people like a lighter-weight phone, when it is this big. Also it is still water resistant., I can’t say waterproof it’s IP52, but it’s water resistant.. So the build.
That’S not the catch.. So, okay, what about the battery? You might be wondering Cheap phone. It’S excellent! Perfectly unironically, not exaggerating it’s excellent, which actually shouldn’t be a surprise. Given the spec..
It’S a 5,000 milliamp-hour battery powering a phone with a 720p display., So you’re good for a day and a half easy two light days is no problem with seven hours of screen on time.. Now it’s only up to 10 watt charging, which is pretty slow and there is no wireless charging, but I’m not gon na consider that a gotcha at this price. Again, it’s like you – can just charge it up overnight.
Every night, like a normal person and battery life, will be fine. And even the software is really good.. It’S virtually the same experience as their $ 1000 flagship Edge phone, which is to say near stock Android, with a little Moto extra features, sprinkled on top..
So at its most basic it’ll kind of feel like a Pixel when you dig through like quick settings and notifications and the launcher, but then you get some Motorola widgets tucked in you know you get a couple extra settings in the settings app, but then you get This Moto app that lets you dig into your extra gestures and features that they’ve perfected over the years., The double chop for the flashlight, the three finger screenshot. You know the peek display feature that gives you a peek at your new notifications and even swiping down on your notification panel from the fingerprint reader on the back.. Basically, everything minus the double twist to quickly open the camera, probably because the camera is not one of those things that you really look forward to on these super cheap phones., Oh wow, look at the light fall off. You can see it on camera, but either way. I’M happy to report that this camera is functional, which is like that’s what you would hope for at this price, which is yeah. It’S functional., I’m just not a huge fan of the triple camera layout. Here., Like I know, they’re trying to look premium and triple cameras looks premium, but the top one is a two-megapixel macro camera and the bottom one is a two-megapixel depth camera for portrait mode.. So I’m mainly just looking for this main 16-megapixel camera to be able to capture scenes documents. You know, take photos and videos without problems. And it does especially if you give it enough light.. It’S not gon na win any comparison tests, that’s for sure., But hey. We ask a lot of our phones, like the fact that this $ 169 gadget can already make phone calls and send text messages and navigate you around the world and also play games and also browse the web. And it can also take decent pictures and 1080p videos and that’s solid.. I initially had my suspicions about whether or not it was going to actually use this depth camera when I take a portrait-mode photo, but it did yell at me when I covered it and tried to take a portrait-mode shot. So it’s paying attention to it at least., But when I took the photo and turned up the background blur, this is the cutout shape which, if you zoom in just a little bit, is truly bizarre.. It’S really bad..
I’Ve never seen anything. This bad in my life. ( chuckles ). They really just said “ Yeah, we’ll just save a little processing power here and use the zigzag cutout method from those scissors from preschool to make this work.” But see that’s the thing..
That is the catch.. It’S not the build quality, that’s fine, and it’s definitely not the battery life. That’S great.! It’S not the cameras, and it’s certainly not the software.. It’S that this phone is slow, really slow.. So this phone has a MediaTek Helio G37 chip inside and three gigabytes of RAM.. Other phones with this chip set include the Techno Spark 9, the Infinix Hot 12 and the HONOR X7a, all of which retail well under $ 150 US..
So clearly, it’s a cheap chip right and that’s how it ended up in this phone. For some context. The Geekbench score of the iPhone 14 is this, and the Geekbench score of the Moto G Play is this.. So when I say it’s trying to save processing power by not really doing detailed portrait cutouts, I actually mean that, like it, absolutely lacks any meaningful processing.
Power. And I’m not nitpicking about like maybe it’s just slow on some high-end games or something.. No, this phone is slow, all the time., It’s slow to scroll and just like move around the UI. Now remember.
I mentioned at the beginning that this phone has a variable. 90 hertz display, but I’ll be honest. It would’ve taken me a while to tell because it is almost never anywhere near 60 hertz.. It’S constantly hanging up and stuttering everywhere. It’s slow to unlock it’s slow to open apps, not not just huge apps, just normal apps.. Even the settings apps takes an embarrassingly long time to open and even longer, to search through things..
Some of this is like speed of storage as well to be fair., So I don’t wan na put it all on the chip. But, like the point here is it’s absolutely the catch.. This phone is slower than average to take pictures., It’s slow to type stuff to browse around and just to do anything like high-end gaming or photo editing is kind of out of the question.. It might be the slowest phone I’ve ever used and I’m constantly reminded of it, which can make it quite unpleasant to use.. So the longer I use this phone, the more it had me thinking about one big question, which is: is it better to get a brand new cheap phone like this or an older, formerly expensive, flagship one. Like this phone? This is 169 brand new right This phone here.
This is the OnePlus 7 Pro you might remember, it. It’s one of my favorite phones ever.. This was the phone of the year in 2019., So this was 669 back when it came out, but it can be had easily for well under $ 200 right now secondhand.. So this is just one example of a phone like this.
This phone. If you compare dollar for dollar with the Moto is just so much better of an experience across the board. Obviously, it’ll have a much better chip set., So the Snapdragon 855 is a few years old, but it’s much more capable and part of an overall smoother, better performance profile, with faster storage and more RAM.. It has a much much nicer, OLED screen, which is sharper brighter and actually hits the 90 hertz refresh rate all the time.. It has way more built-in storage, although it’s not expandable, and it has a much better set of cameras..
It’S a primary plus an ultra wide and a zoom, and it’s built from glass instead of plastic, which feels rock solid, and it has a 4,000 milliamp hour battery, which is probably the only hardware line. You can call it a draw, or maybe even a win for the Moto phone, but we can’t forget that warp charging that OnePlus was famous for., So this old flagship will do 30 watts of wired charging.. So it’s seeming pretty unanimous here., But one distinct advantage of the budget phone is because it’s new it will get software updates further into the future than the old phone.. Now this is theoretically, of course, like Motorola does not have the best track record here. So it depends on what phone we’re talking about, but the Samsung A14 5G, for example, has a pretty similar spec sheet and a similar price point and that’ll probably get more software updates than the Moto..
But the idea here is even if a flagship phone is promised. Three to four years of software updates and the budget phone is only getting two as soon as that flagship phone is more than about three years old. It doesn’t have that advantage anymore., So the OnePlus 7 Pro is probably about done with software updates. While we probably have a few in the tank for the Moto., It is also funny, though, sometimes how I hear people talk about software updates, like some people, don’t think about software updates at all.
They avoid software updates.. Don’T do that by the way. .