Moto G4 2016 review

 

What is the Moto G4?

What can £169 get you in the smartphone world of 2016? Certainly not a Samsung Galaxy S7, iPhone 6S or Huawei P9. It'll get you a new Moto G, though, and that's plenty.
The budget phone of choice for many has received an impressive update and while it’s now officially a Lenovo phone, that hasn’t had the detrimental effect many were expecting.
It’s fast, has a great camera, bright screen and Nexus-like software. I do have some reservations about the size, but honestly every other affordable phone maker should be worried. Seriously worried.

Moto G4 – Design

The Moto G has never been a flashy phone. It’s grounded, durable and functional. It also has to meet a substantially low price, so unnecessary extras and luxuries have to be ditched.
It’s still made almost entirely out of plastic, but it far outweighs its £169 price-tag. The front is simple and clean, with no branding and no buttons of any sort. There’s the smallest hint of flair with a silver-rimmed speaker opening at the top, but that’s it.


I’m not at all a fan of the dodgy-looking faux-metal sides – they remind me of a budget Samsung phone circa 2013 and I’d also like some tougher, less plasticky, buttons. The volume and standby keys on the sides require a good hit of force and they’re a bit mushy, but I’m being overly picky.
The rear panel has been a bit divisive in the TrustedReviews office, and I’m not completely a fan. Gone is the heavily ridged, almost rubbery, feel of the 2015 version and it’s been replaced by a soft-touch textured plastic. It’s grippy, but it feels strange and seems to get oily and greasy very quickly.
The once iconic ‘Moto Dimple’ is getting less and less pronounced with every phone. On the original Moto X it was the perfect spot to place your finger, but now it’s barely noticeable. Above the batwing logo sits the camera and flash, encased in glass and surrounded by a silver oval.
Like previous Moto Gs, the back pops off to allow some colourful customisation through sold-separately backplates. This is also where you access the microSD card and SIM slots, meaning you don’t need an annoying SIM tool to access them. Interestingly, the SIM slot works with both a Micro and a Nano card – a nice touch I haven’t seen before.
Even though the back comes off, the battery is firmly attached. Sorry to those of you who love replaceable cells. The Moto G4 has also lost its predecessor's water-resistance powers, though it still should escape a trip through the rain unscathed.



My biggest issue with the Moto G4 is the size of the thing. It’s well and truly a phablet, and it’s as wide as the iPhone 6S Plus (though not as tall) making it cumbersome to hold unless you have large hands. It’s a two-handed phone for sure, and my thumb can’t easily move from the top of the screen to the bottom unless I grip it with my palms.
The jump from a 5-inch to a 5.5-inch display is clearly the main factor in this growth, but in doing so I feel it loses some of the mass-market appeal that made the previous iterations so great. It’s not heavy or particularly thick, but I have passed it between friends and the vast majority have said it’s too big for them.
With Lenovo releasing two versions of the G4 and one boasting a ‘Plus’ branding, it seems odd they’re both 5.5 inches. I’d have much preferred one to stay at a more manageable 5-inch size, or even 4.7-inch, and the other sitting higher above.

Moto G4 – Screen

The screen might be large, but it’s also fantastic. There isn’t anything better out there for the price.
While previous Moto Gs have been stuck at 720p, the G4 bumps it up to Full HD 1080p and it’s all the better for it. The LCD panel is bright, colourful and pixels are impossible to pick out. Viewing angles too are fine – obviously not as good as on pricier competition, but great for the mid-range.
It’s a very warm panel, with oranges and reds looking particularly rich. This makes it great for videos and it’s fantastic for gaming. Whites aren’t muddy and while blacks certainly aren’t as deep as on an AMOLED panel, they’re still very good.



Another point I have noticed about the display is just how precise and sensitive it is – something which you rarely see on more budget offerings. It reacts instantly to my touches and doesn’t miss the target. Impressive stuff.

Moto G4 – Performance

Keeping the Moto G4 chugging along is Qualcomm’s older mid-range 617 CPU paired with another middle-of-the-road GPU that seems to handle even graphically intense games very well.
You’ve got 2GB of RAM to play with too (up from 1GB last time) and the base storage is again boosted from 8GB to 16GB. They’re similar specs to the Samsung Galaxy A5's, which retails for about £140 more than the Moto G4.
There's no NFC, though, so you won’t be able to use Android Pay here.
The bump in all areas means this is a very smooth phone to use. Apps pop open almost instantly and even bulky, image-heavy websites don’t cause issues. To be honest, the performance on this £169 phone is as good as, if not better than, that of the £469 Sony Xperia X. That shows you just how much phone you’re getting for your cash.



In our usual benchmarking tests the Moto G4 scores 3,190 in the multi-core test in Geekbench 3, putting it in the same space as the Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016).
The 5.5-inch 1080p display is great for games and they run impressively well. You won’t be surprised to learn that simple titles play without a hitch, but even Asphalt 8 and Hitman Sniper don’t suffer from any noticeable dropped frames. Loading times can sometimes be quite lengthy, but that’s something you probably won’t notice unless you have this side by side with a Samsung Galaxy S7.

Moto G4 – Software and Android

One of the best, but also downright simplest, ways the Moto series has become such a cult hit is because of its approach to software. During a time when heavy, ugly and cartoonish skins were all the rage, Motorola took a different approach and gave us Android as Google intended. Even though Motorola Mobility is now owned by Lenovo, this mantra hasn’t changed.
The objective here is simplicity. There are no duplicate apps, no bloatware, no skinned menus and no superfluous features. It’s vanilla Android, the way Google designed it. This also means you’re more likely to get newer versions – Android N for example – and security patches first. Both of which are huge bonuses.
As it’s Android Marshmallow – Android N is coming later in the year – you get features like Now on Tap and Doze. Having the latest software is far from a given on budget devices – the Galaxy A5, for instance, still comes with Lollipop – so I’m happy to see it here.



There are a couple of small additions added by Lenovo, but they only really add to the experience rather than detract from it. The display glows, showing off the latest notifications and the time when you pick it up, while a quick shake opens up the camera. There’s a basic Help app too, and an FM radio, which is probably a welcome feature for a few.
The only other additional software feature is a time and weather widget that’s fairly underwhelming.
Support is included for Marshmallow’s nifty Adoptable Storage that lets you format the microSD card as internal storage. Bung in a 64GB card, follow the setup instructions and you’ve boosted your 16GB to nearer 80GB.

Moto G4 – Camera

The biggest difference between the Moto G4 and the G4 Plus is the camera, but that’s not to say the cheaper brother is a slouch in the optics department. In fact, it’s the best camera you can get on a phone at this price. By a sizeable margin.
It’s the same Sony-made 13MP sensor as last year's, but the faster processing and streamlined software make it much quicker and easier to use. Daylight shots are superbly detailed and the dynamic range is fantastic for a mid-ranger. Colours are mostly accurate, though it does often add too much punch to reds and greens, and the auto-HDR mode means 99% of the time when I pulled out the camera I was confident I would get a useable shot.

Colours can look a bit oversaturated, but only in certain cases
For a budget phone, the photos look great
Detail is impressiveThe slightly beefed-up 16MP camera in the G4 Plus has a much larger sensor and that helps it push those extra pixels even further for much improved night-time performance – an area in which the regular Moto G4 isn’t that great. There’s no optical image stabilisation here, so once the lights go down blurry details and fuzzy outlines are commonplace. Still, no phone that costs £169 is good in low light, so it'd be unfair to count that against the G4.
For years Moto’s main camera issue was its downright awful, painful, dreadful app. It had an annoying tap-to-shoot system, plain design and the options were hidden away in a pesky dial that was virtually impossible to navigate. I can happily say that it’s been laid to rest, in favour of something much better.
Focusing is easier now and the most important settings – flash, timer and HDR – are front and centre for easy access. There isn’t anything as snazzy as pro or manual mode, but you can alter the exposure and this can help if the conditions aren’t great.
Sometimes capturing HDR snaps takes a second or two longer, and on a few occasions the app took some time to load, but that aside this is a solid camera.
The 5MP selfie camera is as good as can be expected and matches most of the competition. It captures skin tones well, focuses quickly and has decent head tracking.
Video maxes out at 1080p 30fps, and there’s slow-mo support at 540p.