Review: Moto G

The best thing about the Moto G is that its ludicrous, you've-gotta-be-kidding price of just $179 (unlocked!) isn't the only good thing about it. There’s so much more to like. It's waterproof. It has a removable, swappable back and an SD card slot. It runs an almost completely unadulterated Android. It's a nice size and gently curved, standing out in a sea of gargantuan black rectangles. I could keep going.

The Moto G is a very good phone. Not a great one, but a very good one. And the fact you can buy four of them for the price of one iPhone is just a bonus. Does it unseat the iPhones and Galaxies of the world to take the title of Grand Usurper of Smartphone Dominance? Nah. But it does prove that the differences in smartphones—what separates the good from the bad, a success from a flop—aren't about processors and screens anymore. They're about size, and software skins, and small features with outsized importance in your life. All smartphones are awesome now. The only decision you have to make is which one's for you.

Price is more important in other countries, of course. The Moto G is the best-selling smartphone in Brazil, for instance, largely because it's so cheap. Of course, Motorola hit that magic price by making some very obvious sacrifices. You notice them as soon as you pick up the phone: It feels cheap. Not bad cheap, just inexpensive cheap. It's plastic, which just doesn't offer the the premium feel and precious character of an aluminum iPhone or Galaxy S6, or even the leather LG G4. There's no mistaking the G for any of those. That's not to say the design's a problem (except in the one spot on the white model where the silvery edge becomes a simulacrum of metal), and you can customize the back and accents in the Moto Maker software, too, so you can get exactly what you want. I love the ribbed back on my dark blue model, and I quite like the size of it too. It's fatter than your average phone, a little over 11mm at its thickest point (that's almost two iPhone 6's), but it’s solid and comfortable in my hand.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Part of the rationale (and upside) for the build quality is that the G is waterproof. IPX7, to be exact, which means you can submerge it in a meter of water for a half-hour. (Make sure the back is completely on, by the way, or else, um, it's not waterproof anymore.) It's not a scuba companion, but it'll survive a shower or a toilet bowl.

Going through the specs, it’s clear Motorola is making smart decisions about what we need from a phone. The G may only run a Snapdragon 410 processor, but it runs nearly flawlessly. Its 2470mAh battery isn't huge—or even as big as you'd expect in a body this hefty—but it lasts all day and occasionally a little longer. The G doesn't support 5GHz Wi-Fi, which is annoying, but it has LTE support by default since every phone now needs LTE to work right. It only comes with 8GB of internal storage (for $40 more you can get 16GB of storage, and double the RAM, too), but it has a slot for an SD card, because in places where bandwidth is expensive, that's still how a lot of sharing and storage happens. Smart.

Also smart: The phone runs an almost stock Android 5.1. It's clean, it's fast, and it doesn't have all that freakin' bloatware. It's Android as Google intended. There are just a few enhancements to the software (and that's the first time I’ve ever written that without air quotes). The Moto Display feature, which makes the lock screen blink on when you have a notification or pull the phone out of your pocket, is one of my all-time favorite customizations. There are the funny gestures, too—the screwdriver motion that launches the camera or the new double-chop to turn on the flashlight—that work well when you remember to use them. And there's Moto Assist, which can automatically silence your phone when you're in a meeting or asleep. (I never use that one, but I don't really know why. It's great. Maybe I should turn it on…)

Motorola gets so many things right, that it's all the more frustrating when it gets small, seemingly avoidable things wrong. The fact that the G only has a 5-inch, 720p screen, in a world where four times that resolution has somehow become normal, doesn't have to be a bad thing. The resolution is fine; unless you're sticking the screen in a Cardboard holder and using it as a VR headset, you won't notice the lower resolution in any meaningful way. But the screen is set far below the glass, far enough that you get that ineffable but disturbing feeling that you're not touching the screen—you're touching the thing that touches the screen. The protective covering can also make the screen look slightly blurry.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Motorola made a big deal at the G's launch about how much it's improved its cameras. That's true, to a degree. The G's 13-megapixel camera is much better than before. That doesn’t mean it’s great. It shoots fairly sharp photos in good light, but colors are muted and dull, like you're shooting through Instagram's Nashville filter. Low-light photos can be incredibly noisy, and dynamic range is pretty weak, so you'll either blow out the whites or make everything else too dark. And if you want to shoot quickly, with almost no delay after hitting the shutter, the focus can get soft. Shooting with the Moto G is the one time the phone feels like what it is: decent, but low-end.

This is the part where I've always said, "Well, yeah, sure, it has some flaws, but what do you expect from a $180 phone?" But we're reaching a point where you should expect quite a lot from Motorola, and the Moto G in particular. This phone has been boundary-shifting since from the start, and it is sooooo close to proving once and for all that you don't need to spend $650 to get a great phone. In fact, the entire industry is on the cusp of proving that—just look at the OnePlus 2 or the Alcatel Idol or the phones coming out of China from companies like Xiaomi and Oppo. Great phones can be cheap and cheap phones can be great. Almost great, anyway. Give it a year and we can start holding every phone to the same standard no matter its cost. We're really that close.

The Moto G punches above its weight in almost every way, and is without question the best phone you'll find at anything approaching this price. It's not an iPhone killer yet, but it does allow the millions of people who cannot or will not pay top dollar for a phone to get a truly first-rate device. It's the clearest indication yet of the great things to come from truly affordable phones. But for now?

Well, yeah, sure, it has some flaws, but what do you expect from a $180 phone?