Moto G5

£169 inc VAT • motorola.co.uk

Premium for All’ is Lenovo’s new motto for its G5 phones, the Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus, which aim to offer the build quality and feel of a flagship device at decidedly non-flagship prices. That’s especially true of the G5, which offers a metal body, rapid charging, and fingerprint sensor controls – all at a sub-£200 price.

Price

The Moto G5’s best feature is arguably its price: the handset will retail in the UK for just £169 for the 2GB RAM model, and £179 for a version with 3GB. That puts it firmly at the low end of the mid-range

smartphone market, and right in line with the usual pricing for the Moto G range.

The G5 will release in the UK some time in March 2017, and the 2GB model will be available from Carphone Warehouse, Tesco, Argos, and John Lewis – O2 will also sell the 2GB G5 in an exclusive blue colour. Meanwhile the 3GB version will be sold by Amazon and the Motorola online store.

Design

Design is where the G5 has seen the biggest overhaul from its predecessor, the Moto G4. The G5 features an aluminium body – instead of the G4’s plastic – which means it immediately feels like a more expensive phone than it is. The 5in display stretches most of the way to the sides of the body, though there’s still plenty of bezel at the top and bottom – it’s not quite that premium.

The rear of the phone is dominated by the large camera aperture, which sits above a brushed metal Motorola ‘M’. At 144.5g, it’s a comfortable weight (though has that reassuring heft of any metalbodied device), while it measures 144.3x73x9.5mm - small enough to very comfortably use in one hand. It’s available in grey or gold (and that O2-exclusive blue model) – we spent our hands-on time with the Lunar Grey model, which is attractively understated.

The G5 doesn’t boast the sort of striking design that’s likely to turn heads - at least not until you tell someone how little you paid for it. It’s mostly straightforward, unassuming stuff, but it’s the feel of the phone, and its build quality, that really sells it. This is a phone that feels and looks well-made – ‘cheap’ never once sprang to mind. It’s simple,

it’s elegant, and there aren’t many better looking phones that will cost you this little.

Hardware

Offering that sort of design and build quality at less than £200 comes at a price of course, and the Moto G5’s internal specs aren’t going to blow anyone’s mind. Still, it should offer very solid performance – and it has a few bells and whistles that can still impress.

It’s powered by a Snapdragon 430 with a 1.4GHz octa-core CPU and 450MHz Adreno 505 GPU. That’s the same processor that’s in the new Nokia 6, which costs about £50 more than the G5, though it’s also in the Lenovo K6 and some Xiaomi Redmi models around the same price. It’s not going to blow away any benchmarks, but in our time with the G5 it felt snappy and responsive, and offers plenty of power for the average user.

The 5in display is full 1080p and 441ppi, with crisp, bright colours. Below that you’ll find the fingerprint sensor, which doubles up as a replacement for Android’s on-screen buttons. In the UK, the G5 comes with 16GB of on-board storage, along with support for microSD cards up to 128GB. You’ll also get a choice between 2- or 3GB of RAM – with only a £10 price difference, we’d find it hard not to recommend opting for the higher-specified model, as it’s likely to offer a noticeable performance improvement for a pretty negligible extra cost.

The rear camera is 13Mp with LED flash and phase detection autofocus, while the front camera is 5Mp. Taking photos with the autofocus was

almost instantaneous, and it held up well even in the challenging lighting of a trade show like MWC.

There’s a 2800mAh battery, which should provide a full day’s usage pretty comfortably, and it also boasts rapid charging via Micro-USB – another luxury for this price range. It should provide four hours of battery life after just 15 minutes of charging, though we didn’t get a chance to test that out in our hands-on time.

There’s also Bluetooth 4.2, 5GHz Wi-Fi, and a water-repellent coating. What you don’t get is NFC, so you won’t be able to use Android Pay or its equivalents. Don’t worry though – you do get a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Software

The G5 comes loaded with Android 7.0 Nougat, and runs a version that’s close to stock, with

a few ‘Moto experiences’ added on. What that means is that if you’re looking for something not far from the pure Android experience, but don’t want to splash out on the Google Pixel, the G5 could be a good option.

It’s also one of the first phones included in Google’s new expansion of the Google Assistant services, previously limited to only a handful of handsets. Eventually you can probably expect the new AI assistant to be ubiquitous across Android, but for now this will be one of the cheapest ways to get your hands on it.

Finally, one welcome addition to the Moto G5 is the way it makes use of the fingerprint sensor. Lenovo has already experimented with using the sensor to replace Android’s on-screen controls – the Lenovo P2 is a good example – but the G5 and G5 Plus take it one step further. You can now swipe left across the sensor to go back, tap it for home, and swipe right to open the list of apps for multi-tasking. It’s a much more intuitive system than the P2’s, which relies on combinations of tapping, holding, and pressing the sensor button, and within seconds we were comfortably swiping away. It’s an especially welcome addition given the G5’s relatively petite 5in screen – the extra screen real estate gained by removing the onscreen buttons makes the display feel much more expansive than it really is.

Verdict

There’s fierce competition in Android’s mid-range market, but the Moto G5 looks like a clear standout. The build quality, and battery all feel like they

belong on a much more expensive phone, while the fingerprint gesture controls genuinely improve the Android experience, while making the most of the smaller screen size. And with all that at £169, you just can’t argue with the price. Dominic Preston

Specifications

• 5in (1920x1080, 441ppi) touchscreen, 441ppi

• Android 7.0 Nougat

• 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 CPU

• Adreno 505 GPU

• 2- or 3GB RAM

• 16GB storage

• 13Mp main camera, LED flash, support for 1080p video at 30fps

• 5Mp front camera

• 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi (2.4 and 5GHz)

• Bluetooth 4.2

• 4G LTE

• Nano-SIM

• 2800mAh removable battery

• Micro-USB rapid charging

• MicroSD support up to 128GB

• Water-repellent nano-coating

• 73x144.3x9.5mm

• 144.5g