Motorola today launched the Moto G smartphone at an aggressive price point of Rs 12,499 for 8GB and Rs 13,999 for 16GB in India. The phone is priced brilliantly for its specifications and features that include an almost pure Android experience, beautiful design and promising form-factor, that further comes with water repellent properties as well. These as well as the hardware specifications on the phone makes it an attractive smartphone option that will be gunning for not just the tier one but the local brands as well. You can read more about its five impressive features here. We got hold of the device for some time, and here is our first impressions of the Moto G.
We were certainly expecting the Moto G to be a beauty, and we are glad that it stood by our expectations. Starting with the looks and design of the phone, the Moto G has a premium look and finish, which is usually not the case in this price segment. The phone carries a matte look with a brilliantly done plastic framing that feels smooth to hold and is sturdy at the same time. In addition to that, Motorola has ensured to make it look a little peppy and is thus offering removable shells in some impressive colors. You can read about the accessories bit here.
The front of the phone comes sans any hard key, the back with camera, flash light, speaker grille and Moto branding and the sides with regular set of keys and ports. Beneath the removable back sits a 2,070mAh battery, which however cannot be removed. You get dual-SIM slots on either sides of the battery space, placed diagonally on the top and bottom.
It has a 4.5-inch HD (720p) display which is a delight to the eyes. One thing we liked is that the display comes without much glare, and besides that reproduces colors pretty well and offers crisp and vibrant visuals. The interface looked good and we did not notice any lag on swiping the screen to and fro or otherwise.
Though, we feel that the bezel size of the phone could have been kept thinner, as there is a lot of space left unutilized especially on the top and bottom of the display. This makes the display look smaller than what a regular 4.5-inch display looks like.
The Moto G is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz with 1GB of RAM. It comes in two variants – 8GB and 16GB, none of which support a microSD card to expand the memory. However it does come with 50GB of additional free cloud storage on Google Drive for two years.
The rear of the phone sports a 5-megapixel camera with flash light. It did take some decent shots for its size, but we will not judge the camera performance on this basis. What seemed interesting is that Motorola has not used any particular capacitive key to click photo. So to do so, one can simply touch anywhere on the display of the phone to capture a picture. Also, it has added a very Nokia Lumia-like semicircular option list. This includes all sorts of regular options as well as other options like HDR recording mode, slow motion video recording modes. Simply scroll this semicircular menu bar to explore all the options. Besides this, the front adorns a 1.2-megapixel camera.
Moving to the software, Motorola has left the Android 4.3 Jelly Bean on the phone in an almost raw form, which makes the phone a lot more smoother than those loaded with additional tweaks and skins. Motorola has made very few and minute changes to the interface and added some utility based apps including Assist, which the company claims is a smart app that functions automatically replies for calls through a message or announce calls, or play music as well as read out new text messages while the user is driving. Also since the company will be using third-party customer care centers for after sales service, it has also provided an app for registering queries and working on issues related to the phone.
The Android 4.3 Jelly Bean on the phone can be a little disappointing for those expecting the 4.4 Kitkat on the phone, however Motorola is promising to upgrade the phone to Android 4.4 KitKat in the coming days.
Additional features on the phone include waterproof coating on external as well as internal parts, which the company claims will save the phone from damages caused due to water. We are quite eager to test it while reviewing it.
Also, Apart from the dual-SIM compatibility, Motorola has added FM support on the Indian variant, which it believes simply adds more value to the phone.
Motorola has tried to pack almost everything in one smartphone. So be it a remarkable design, the specs or other additional features, the company has assured that it packs all of these in Moto G and offer it at a rather lucrative price point in the mid-range segment. While there is no other phone from tier-one brands that can compete with the Moto G, it will have a tough fight against local players like Micromax which is ruling the market in this price segment.
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