Motorola Moto G Review
by Brian Klug on December 18, 2013 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola
- Mobile
- *VA
- Cortex A7
- snapdragon 400
- Moto G
Battery onboard mobile devices remains one of the biggest concerns for shoppers, and even in a mass market device like the Moto G it’s an important axis. Although Moto G has a removable back door, the battery isn’t designed to be user accessible and is sealed inside, there’s a sticker which pretty much explains the situation.
Inside, the Moto G has a 2070 mAh, 3.8V battery for a capacity of 7.9 watt hours. It loses the stacked 3D structure that was a highlight feature of the Moto X, but still is a relatively large battery for a device with a 4.5 inch LCD display.
To evaluate battery life we turn to our battery life testing suite, which we run over WiFi and all the cellular interfaces appropriate for the device. Here we see a good combination of regular spikes in CPU usage with idle time, hopefully simulating constant, reasonably paced usage. As always the display is set to exactly 200 nits and configured the same way we always configure devices for maximum consistency.
The Moto G starts out with an impressive result on 3G. There’s no LTE on the Moto G so we’re only looking at the subset of devices that I’ve tested on 3G with the new battery life test. Still it’s impressive that the Moto G can crank out just over 7.5 hours on here, considerably more than Moto X forced onto 3G.
The WiFi test opens up considerable more comparison points, and here I’m really impressed by what the Moto G is able to crank out.
Cellular talk time is self explanatory, and again the Moto G winds up with an impressive result. I remember when Motorola seemed to somehow always be able to dominate the call test, Moto G definitely reminds me of those days.
Compared to the Moto X, the WiFi and 3G battery life tests really wind up being a story of the power consumption tradeoffs between LCD and AMOLED that remain to this day. The display size to battery capacity ratio is pretty big with the Moto G, and of course there are further improvements to overall efficiency with the latest Qualcomm silicon and modem block inside.
I mentioned that the Moto G doesn’t come with a charger in the box, a choice which cuts down on cost and is starting to make a lot of sense give the ubiquity of cheap USB chargers.
Thankfully Moto G seems to be good about its charge signaling, as it can pull up to 2 amps on appropriate chargers. The Moto G seems to be compliant with BC 1.2, and seems well behaved with drawing whatever is appropriate from other chargers as well.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
120 Comments
View All Comments
ESC2000 - Monday, December 23, 2013 - link
I always appreciate the extensive numbers you guys collect to lend some objectivity to your conclusions rather than offering unsubstantiated impressions and opinions like all other reviews. That said it is interesting to me that people's responses to various displays are so individual-specific. Even though the Samsung phones don't seemto score well other than in black levels of course, I still prefer their displays over most of the other phones on which you gathered data. Overall it looks like the iPhone did the best (although it looks like in some categories - whiteness, grayscale - it regressed from the 5 to the 5s) but I've never liked the displays on iphones. It is hard to evaluate on the 5s because I dislike the color scheme of iOS 7, a strange mixture of pastels and bright red.a1exh - Saturday, December 28, 2013 - link
Nice review. But you missed that the Moto G doesn't have MHL (HDMI out over USB). This feature has been on all my phones for the last few years and is a must have when visiting relatives without a smart TV. I wonder why such an easy feature was omitted?BallGum - Saturday, December 28, 2013 - link
Does anyone expect an update to the Moto G sometime, with the new SnapDragon 410 SoC?Gothmoth - Sunday, December 29, 2013 - link
do you think writing "DELTA" all the time makes you look l33t3?you sound like a cheap wanaabe nerd repeating this "DELTA" over and over.
otherwise the article is nice....
Davidjan - Sunday, January 19, 2014 - link
Really cool! Nice gadget to add Moto G's storage- a tiny MicroSD reader: http://goo.gl/2iJ6gforenlevy - Thursday, January 23, 2014 - link
America ,iphone,nexus updates??? well i have xiaomi mi2s and every week there is ota update,hardware-beast, snapdragon 600 2G ram ,well updates with reach feature but android version change each year .but most kitkat updates already there for monthes, add cloud service includes apps & setting,gallery,logs,sms ect backup ,firewall ,antivirus, ftp server...2 paratiton each time the other update during system on! it is possible and it is hear for 300$ camera i have very nice shoot in darkness using night mode also video in club,i think the near feuture will be chinees company like that,service....updates....every week....
shmotog - Sunday, February 2, 2014 - link
I did my video review on the black flip shell for moto g here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsnWYpOjDzk&fea...Also here http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/RALAUPNHK9K8U/ref=c...
I also did a review on moto g itself here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP9dGAzfEso
jfelano - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 - link
G stands for GOOGLE duh. Google just bought Motorola.sephirotic - Wednesday, February 5, 2014 - link
No micro SD? "This is a new tendency"? That's ridiculous. This phone is automatically excluded from my next smartphone possible-upgrade lists. No quad core, 720p or "ultra-cheap price"can compensate for that. There has been 50USD phones from 10 years ago that already had micro sd support. This is utterly unacceptable. If you don´t live in US or EU you can´t count on unreliable and limited internet to rely on cloud services. Even so, you can´t install all applications or produce most content relying on remote files. What's the point of a fast processor, good gpu and large screen if you can´t install anything in it or fill it with movies and music? Net surfing and google maps? You don´t need a quad core for that... Only casual users would not see all the drawbacks of being completely limited on local storage. Cloud storage is not "the future", maybe for the casual illiterate user, but for us, power-users and non-US/EU residents, is just a nightmare. I rather expend 30% more on a similar spec phone (even a dual core) with external storage than buying this. I don´t understand how this can appeal to the "masses". Maybe the US "masses", because the rest of the world doesn´t have decent unlimited internet to rely on clound services at all.wolfram74 - Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - link
The camera review does not speaks about speed, time to focus, lag etc. I didn't get the whole information needed about camera.