The Moto G (2015) Review
by Brandon Chester on August 19, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Display
Since a smartphone is primarily a large display that you interact with, it's important that manufacturers prioritize including a high quality display. As smartphones advanced we first saw increases to display resolution to improve sharpness, as well as a shift from TN displays to VA or IPS panels in order to improve viewing angle. With specs like resolution reaching a point where there isn't much more improvement to be made, manufacturers have moved on to improving display accuracy. While some have begun to focus on the color accuracy of their mid-range devices, others have not. To evaluate the various aspects of a display we use X-Rite's i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer along with their i1Display Pro colorimeter, and SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software.
The Moto G has a good peak brightness, although the black level is higher than most recent devices, including the 2015 Moto E. What makes the Moto G somewhat difficult to use outdoors despite its brightness is the fact that the display seems fairly reflective, and the capacitive touch sensors show up very easily in the light which creates a pattern that obscures the content on the LCD.
The Moto G's gamma is very accurate, but the overall greyscale accuracy is let down by the panel's blue shift. The white point average is 7627K, which is noticeably more blue than the desired average of 6504K. From 20% grey onward one can notice the blue tint in grey shades, and in the end the average error is a somewhat disappointing 4.5532, with the error in the lightest shades being even higher at around six. In all of these aspects, the 2015 Moto G's display actually regresses significantly from the 2014 model. It's not clear if this is just model variance, or if this is applicable to all versions, but in any case it is disappointing.
In our saturation sweep test we see that blue has a degree of over-saturation at all points, with saturations past 60% overshooting significantly. Red demonstrates some saturation compression, and there's general inaccuracy in yellow, cyan, and most of all, magenta. This is another situation where the 2015 Moto G's display regresses compared to the 2014 edition, and it's to a much more significant degree than the greyscale test, with the older 2014 Moto G having achieved a result that rivals high end smartphones.
Due to the inaccuracy in the greyscale and in rendering primary and secondary colors there's not much hope for accurate reproduction of color mixtures on the 2015 Moto G's display. Shades of green tend to have a decent level of accuracy, but most other colors and shades of grey suffer from over-saturation or under-saturation depending on what primary/secondary color they most relate to, and are just generally inaccurate. When using the Moto G this was fairly evident to me throughout the UI, particularly on icons that I see very often such as those for Google's own apps.
While I don't know how consistent the calibration across Motorola's devices is, based on the results measured for our samples of the 2014 and 2015 Moto G it's clear that the display of the 2015 model regresses in most respects. Peak brightness increases substantially which is appreciated, and maintaining black level has boosted contrast. Unfortunately, the display is far too blue, and this causes significant greyscale errors despite the display's relatively straight and accurate gamma. The inaccuracies in rendering primary and secondary colors combined with the greyscale errors means that there aren't many shades the display actually does render accurately outside of some that primarily consist of a green component. Ultimately I'm let down by the Moto G's display, because this year's model saw no upgrade to resolution, and I had hoped that there would be some improvement, or at the very least no reduction in the display accuracy.
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kmmatney - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
They are in the $115 - $130 range on Swappa (at least the Sprint version). Of course that is used - but the phones I've bought from Swappa all looked brand-new when I received them. You can also get a used Galaxy S4 for ~$130, and will come with 2 GB of RAM and 16GB of storgae, and will be faster.Moto1 - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
Nope, sorryamdwilliam1985 - Thursday, August 20, 2015 - link
Moto G 2015 will probably beat Galaxy S6 and Note 5 in general phone usage speed test, lol. So Galaxy S4 is probably not a good comparison to.3DoubleD - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
It is not clear in the charging section whether the Moto G is limited to 2.75 W charging internally, or whether it is because a 2.75 W charger was used (because it was shipped with one). Could one conceivably use a 5 W or 10 W charger and cut the charge time in half or a quarter? This is not clear. I honestly didn't know they made 2.75 W chargers, the smallest charger I've ever seen is 1 A @ 5 V.Also, how crippling is this GPU performance? From what I can tell, an Adreno 305 is about 1/4 of the speed of the Nexus 5 (2013) in offscreen testing with Basemark X. But this doesn't describe the context of what it is like to use an Adreno 306 device. Does the UI studder? Does video playback work flawlessly? Does it play most games? Are there any notable games it does not play?
Also, I take issue with the comment that waterproofing is not a desirable feature because you can't use the display while wet. That is an insane comment to make! Most people would like some piece of mind that if their phone gets a little wet it won't become an expensive paper weight. That is a huge feature, especially considering the target market for this phone - a group that may likely be careless with their phone that it needs to be inexpensive and waterproof. So I'll say this in the comments since it wasn't said in the review: Motorola, good job making this phone waterproof.
Lastly, I don't think Motorola was praised enough for adding a bigger battery at the cost of not decreasing the thinness of the device. Phone manufacturers frequently shift the balance the wrong way, and finally Motorola stepped up and did it right.
Despite all of my question and critiques, I really appreciate the timely review! Thanks!
hans_ober - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
Yeah, nice to see Moto worked on the battery and didn't go for 'omg 7mm slim' type of device.Thick phone > dead slim paperweight.
Brandon Chester - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
1. It's just that the phone is shipped with a 2.75W charger. I will be listing a charge time using a 5W charging block, but to my knowledge there's no quick charge support so there's no additional advantage to using an even higher wattage QC 2.0 block2. You can play 2D games and very simple 3D ones like temple run, but there's not much hope for what one would call AAA mobile games. My big issue is the lack of GPU performance in mid range Android devices ends up limiting the availability and quality of those games on Android as a whole.
3. At no point did I ever say that waterproofing was not a desirable feature, or anything of that sort. I said it's nice to have, but I don't think it's a selling point. There's no evidence that any significant number of consumers are buying devices specifically because they're waterproof, so I don't think my observation was incorrect.
4. Not everyone shares the opinion that devices should get substantially larger to fit bigger batteries.
hans_ober - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
Thanks. Yeah, theres no QC 2.0 support, but using 5W and even 10W chargers has reportedly cut short charging time. No harm in adding QC 2.0 to the graph too; it will show max possible charge rate, with the phone as bottleneck.Brandon Chester - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
I'm just trying to kill the phone's battery now so I can charge it.hans_ober - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
Having a bad time? :)hans_ober - Tuesday, August 25, 2015 - link
Update on charging time?