Moto G, king of budget techknow beat

TOP CHOICE: Moto G remains a compelling purchase even nearly a year after it was first launched, thanks to a software update and a smart price cut.

By Bilal Iqbal

Once upon a time in the not so distant past (no, really, we are talking November 2013 here), in a budgeted land full of darkness there arrived a curious little device that turned expectations of an affordable smartphone head over heels.

Talk budget and many a buyer have been burnt by the subpar user experience offered by brand names or the low quality pushed by their little-known Chinese competitors. But this one device promised to be different, to have cracked the code to make phone-on-a-budget work.  

Moto G, as it came to be known, was the all-hail budget smartphone king from once phone-giant Motorola that no other known manufacturer had been able to crack until the end of 2013, or even now for that matter, thanks to a smart price cut. 

A gadget for the budget-conscious consumer must follow a fine line between specs and price. Such phones are always sized down to a budget, partly due to price constraints and partly to give consumers a reason to go higher.

When it comes to software features, the QR500 smartphone will offer the bulk of features that its blazing fast QR2,500 cousin offers. You will get a smaller, less capable camera, less RAM, less processing grunt, smaller screens, lower resolutions but the feature list will be — more or less — the same as the flagship phone.

In a way, the smartphones of today are a lot like cars. There are some features that are considered basic now — a higher price will fetch you a better feature set, but not necessarily a substantially different one.

Not everyone has the budget to afford the latest and greatest. A line has to be drawn somewhere. Previously, a budget conscious consumer could get away with something decent for about half the price of the current flagship. The Moto G, as you would suspect, changed that. It brought down the cutoff point for a decent smartphone to 1/3rd of a flagship price. Even now, given that a variant of it costs less than 1/4th of a flagship, it can still be considered a decent enough phone to buy.

If QR600 is all you have to spend on a phone, consider the Moto G. The 8gb variant of the phone will fetch you an astonishingly decent enough specs that you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. Compromises surely have been made – and none stings more than the absence of expandable storage on an already-meagre 8gb of storage space – but budget is all about living with compromises and Moto G makes it easier than any other budget handset for you to live with.

The other Android phones available between QR600 and QR800 in the market are: Sony Xperia M, Sony Xperia L, LG Optimus L7 II, HTC Desire 310, HTC Desire 516, Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 and a bunch of phones from Huawei.

Let’s just cut to the chase here: the screen on the Moto G has screens from all other known manufacturers on this list beat. It is a 720p unit with a 4.5 inch size, and while some of the competitors may offer bigger screen sizes, none quite manages to match the screen resolution of the Moto G. The result? A high density screen that is much clearer and easier to look at. Higher resolution means a sharper picture, and in the case of Moto G, you will get a Retina-level (to borrow a term from Apple) of sharpness at 326 pixels per inch (ppi). Moreover, the screen on the Moto G is of the IPS kind, which offers superior colour reproduction as well as viewing angles.

The other ace up the QR600-priced Moto G is that it runs the latest Android 4.4 (dubbed KitKat). The phone was launched with Android 4.3 (JellyBean) and has since been updated. Its competitors are stuck on older versions of Android and given how phones in this price range are seldom updated, I wouldn’t have you hold your breath for their updates to come through. Even though details on the next version of Android (Android L) are sparse, your best chance of getting it in this price segment is the Moto G. Even if you are stuck on KitKat, you should not run into applications that no longer support your OS for quite a long time, much longer than if you go with other phones on older OS versions. 

Camera is one area where a cheaper phone means a substantial compromise on quality, and none of these phones will offer you much in terms of quality pictures (although they will be perfectly adequate for Facebook in good lighting conditions). That said, Moto G does lose out to Sony Xperia L and Huawei Ascend G630, with both offering 8mp units. Then again, Xperia L costs almost QR200 more than Moto G. Even the Huawai is QR100 more. The Moto G, however, has its rivals beat when it comes to the front camera, offering a 1.3mp module, when others max out at just 0.3mp (with the exception of Huawei G630 at 1mp and Huawei Honor 3C at 5mp). What this means is that your picture will be clearer during video chats and, of course, that you will be able to take better selfies. 

The GSMArena battery test shows that Moto G does well when it comes to battery life. It is good for about 13.5 hours of calls, 9 hours of web browsing, or over 6.5 hours of video playback on a single charge. What this means is that you should be able to breeze through a typical day without having to run around for a charging station. The Xperia M matches these figures (gaining on video playback while losing on web browsing) and G630 come close, but others are nowhere near these numbers. The decent battery life of the phone, thus, makes up for the bummer that the battery cannot be replaced by the user.

Moto G is a budget handset, and price makes up much of the reason to get it. The deal on the 8gb version is just that good. But can you live with 8gb, given that the actual memory available to you out of the box will be around 4gb, with the rest reserved for the operating system? The memory IS low. But unless you plan on using your phone as an MP3 player, you will find the space adequate for your needs (especially if you make good use of the various cloud services available to you).

A 16gb version of the Moto G is also available in the market for QR200 more, but to me the 16gb variant of the Moto G is just not worth the asking price. If your budget does extend that far, then consider the Huawei Honor 3C. Even though it is from Huawei, a Chinese manufacturer, it does offer you a pretty solid bang for your buck, upgrading on the Moto G on just about every count. And it runs the latest Android OS too. The propriety UI might throw some curve balls at you and the overall software experience may not be as smooth as you would expect from a known brand (going by online reviews), but the much better specs should make such anomalies rare.

If you are just not having any Chow Mein, however, wait out for the rumoured sequel to the Moto G. While it may not land close to the QR600 point, Motorola would have to be mad to price it substantially higher than the 16gb version. Will it make it to the Qatari market though? The 4G variant of the Moto G has been available elsewhere since June but is yet to make an appearance here. A wait for the Moto G2 (expected to be announced at the ongoing IFA in Berlin) might turn out to be a similarly arduous deal. 

*The author may be contacted at techknowbeat@outlook.com or followed on Twitter at @techknowbeat

Moto G specs at a glance

3G                                                                                               Yes (supports HSDPA with 21 Mbps download speeds)

Display                                                                                4.5 inch

Screen Resolution                              1280x720 pixels (326 ppi pixel density)

Protection                                              Gorilla Glass 3

Weight                                                     143 grams

Internal                                                    8gb (around 4gb usable)/16gb (around 12gb usable)

FM Radio                                                 Yes

Expandable storage                           No

Bluetooth                                               v4.0

USB                                                            microUSB 2.0

Camera (back)                                      5mp (can record 720p videos at 30fps)

Camera (front)                                                        1.3mp

Android OS                                             4.4.4 (KitKat)

Processor                                               1.2GHz quadcore (Snapdragon 400)

GPU                                                            Adreno 305

Battery                                                    2070mah