Lenovo Moto G Plus (5th gen)

This month saw a glut of new Android phones go on sale in the UK, so which should you ignore and which are worth buying?

Lenovo Moto G Plus 5th generation SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £208 (£250 inc VAT) from shop.lenovo.com

Living up to its name, the G Plus is a big improvement over the Moto G, albeit one that costs an extra £80. Where the name misleads is screen size: yes, it’s bigger, 5.2in to be precise, but what you’re really paying extra for here is the camera.

It’s the same hardware that lives inside the Samsung Galaxy S8, a 12-megapixel unit with a bright f/1.7 aperture and phase-detect autofocus. And in good lighting conditions, the Moto G5 Plus is almost a match for its much more salubrious competition. The colours aren’t quite as vibrant as the Samsung, but the captured photos are excellent. Even in low light, the G5 Plus maintains good control over image noise, and hardly any detail is lost to over-compression.

Unfortunately, to get the most out of these beautiful snaps, you’ll want to find another screen to enjoy them on. Even with the display set to Vibrant, the G5 Plus’ 1,920 x 1,080 screen never lives up to that description. Brightness topped out at a respectable 401cd/m2 but it covered only 73.4% of the sRGB colour gamut – a big drop from the 90.6% of the G4 Plus.

More positively, it’s a speedy phone thanks to a 2GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor, backed by 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. If that’s not enough, the phone supports microSD cards up to 256GB. It feels nippy in day-to-day use, outscoring rivals such as the P2 and Honor 6X with a score of 3,852 in Geekbench 4’s multi-core test. A 10fps result in GFXBench’s offscreen Manhattan benchmark is par for the budget course.

As with the plain Moto G5, the Plus has a thin metal chassis, with the only sign of its budget being plastic caps at the top and the bottom of the device. It’s a good look, but unlike its cheaper sibling you can’t remove the battery. The 3,000mAh unit sealed inside the G5 Plus should cope well with the daily strains of smartphone usage, though, lasting for a respectable 13hrs 13mins in our video-rundown test. Lenovo sticks with the same microUSB connector and 3.5mm headphone jack found on the Moto G, but Android Pay fans will be pleased to see that NFC is present.

Despite the mediocre screen, this is a good choice for the price and it offers the best camera we’ve seen in a sub-£300 phone.

KEY SPECS Octa-core 2GHz processor 3GB RAM Adreno 506 5.2in IPS screen, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution 32GB storage microSD slot 12MP/5MP front/rear camera 802.11n Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 NFC micro-USB 3,000mAh battery Android 7 74 x 7.7 x 150mm (WDH) 155g

LG G6 SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £542 (£650 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com

The LG G6 stands out courtesy of its taller, narrower 18:9 aspect ratio screen. You get the luxury feel of a large screen, measuring 5.7in across the diagonal, without the cumbersome width that makes plus-sized phones sit awkwardly in your hand.

LG offers three colour choices (Astro Black, Mystic White or Ice Platinum) and all come with 32GB of internal storage; if you need more, a dual-purpose slot will take either a second SIM or microSD cards up to 2TB.

With its stylish metal frame and glass back, it certainly looks like a high-end handset. LG promises it’s well protected too, with Corning’s Gorilla Glass 5 for the rear and Gorilla Glass 3 on the front. An IP68 rating means the G6 will also survive an accidental drop into water. Note that the power button, which doubles as a fingerprint reader, is located on the back of the phone, beneath the camera, as with the LG G5.

The IPS panel features HDR 10 support, allowing you to enjoy HDR videos from Amazon Prime and Netflix with stunning visual dynamics – once the necessary app updates roll out. Even for everyday use, it’s a great display. We measured a maximum brightness of 492cd/m2, with fantastically deep blacks.

The quad-core 2.35GHz Snapdragon ARM 821 processor feels slow for the price, managing 1,777 in Geekbench 4’s single-core test, 4,137 for multi-core. It’s easily outpaced by the Huawei P10 and Galaxy S8, as the graphs on p75 show. There’s plenty of graphical power, scoring 49fps in GFXBench’s offscreen Manhattan test, but we found its rivals smoother in games – perhaps due to their standard screens.

A 3,300mAh battery kept the phone going for 12hrs 52mins in our battery test, but the best news is the support for Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3: it hit around 50% in 30 minutes. One compensation for the high asking price is that there’s a fast USB Type-C charger in the box.

The G5’s excellent dual-lens camera is retained for the G6: at the rear there’s one 125-degree wide-angle lens, and another standard lens with a 71-degree field of view. The main camera has a wide f/1.8 aperture, allowing it to work brilliantly in low light, while the wide-angle lens is slightly narrower at f/2.4.

There’s no doubt that the LG G6 is a good phone. It’s just outflanked by the Galaxy S8, and badly needs a price cut.

KEY SPECS Quad-core 2.35GHz/1.6GHz processor 4GB RAM Adreno 530 5.7in IPS screen, 2,880 x 1,440 resolution 32GB storage microSD slot dual 13MP/13MP rear camera, 5MP front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 NFC USB Type-C 3,300mAh battery Android 7 72 x 7.9 x 149mm (WDH) 163g

“Even with the display set to Vibrant, the Moto G5 Plus’ 1,920 x 1,080 screen never lives up to that description”