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.
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haukionkannel - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
True, but this is not power user phone. The Noto X is for that purpose. For normal mister Smith this is very good phone indeed. But so is/are allso Lumia 52x phone(s), so comparison would be nice as someone above allready said.fic2 - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
My girlfriend has a 521. It is a nice phone, but the HUGE problem is having to do a hard reset every time there is an upgrade. A hard reset looses all settings. And MS seems incapable of doing a backup that actually backs up everything. The stuff they do backup has to go to "the cloud" (to be datamined by them and the NSA). And when you do a restore it is a one-shot and can only be done over 3G since wireless isn't enabled at the time.Because of this I am thinking about getting her a Moto G.
skiboysteve - Saturday, December 21, 2013 - link
What are you talking about? WP updates are OTA incremental and never require a hard reset...shaduck007 - Saturday, January 4, 2014 - link
thanks for Mentioning the Lumia, it's 1/3 the price of the MOTO G.Thinking of what is the best value!!
Sam
sephirotic - Wednesday, February 5, 2014 - link
If this is not a power use phone then why add quad core, instead of a dual core processor, and a 720p screen? Witch is cheaper and more usefull, that or a SD card slot?grayson_carr - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
Are power users interested in this phone as their main device? If 8 or 16GB was fine for the flagship Nexus 4 13 months ago, I think it's fine for a low cost phone now.grayson_carr - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
Lets not forget, the average consumer still buys a 16GB iPhone or 16GB Galaxy S4 and doesn't put in a microSD card in the case of the GS4.fokka - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
source? regarding the s4 i mean.flyingpants1 - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
The average consumer doesn't actually use their phone for more than an hour or two a day, leaving it in sleep state 95% of the time and somehow assumes this means it has "good battery life".The average consumer does not store hours of movies on their phone, or watch movies on their phone at all.
The average consumer also can't see the difference between a 5mp camera and a 13mp camera.
The average consumer sees almost no benefit from 7mbit HSPA+ to 30mbit LTE.
The average consumer doesn't care about front speakers or waterproofing.
The average consumer doesn't use a wireless charger.
The average consumer CANNOT. SEE. The difference between a 540x960 display and a 1080p display.
The average consumer doesn't run more than a couple apps at the same time.
The average consumer doesn't care about read/write speeds of the NAND on their phone.
The average consumer doesn't know the difference between LCD and AMOLED.
Smartphones are ubiquitous now. Every grandma has a $0 iPhone that they don't know how to use. This doesn't mean we should stop making things better. For god's sake don't make us all suffer on behalf of your demented relatives.
apertotes - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
it was not fine for nexus 4. And I explicitly said that it was not a poweruser scenario at all.