Motorola Moto G4 Play
A budget smartphone proving that you don’t always have to pay to play.
The new G4 Play is a bit thinner, lighter and sleeker than what we’re used to seeing from Moto. In fact, we’d go so far as to call this the best-looking budget phone the company has produced and it’s one whose textured back and 5-inch size make it comfy to hold, too. At the time of testing, the G4 Play was running Motorola’s largelyuntouched version of Android 6.0.1 — so it’s nice and speedy without any bloatware. Motorola has said it’ll get the Nougat upgrade down the track.
Inside, there’s an entrylevel Qualcomm CPU (the 1.2GHz Snapdragon 410 CPU — effectively the ‘Core i3’ of the Snapdragon range) plus 2GB of RAM, an Adreno 306 GPU, 2,800mAh battery and 16GB of onboard storage. Generally, that hardware handles all the basics fine — web surfing, email, Facebook and the like were smooth and lag-free. The display is only 720p, and does struggle with visibility in bright sunlight, but that’s par for the course at this price. The one area where the hardware does fall over is in gaming — somewhat ironic, considering the ‘Play’ name. In a word, it’s pretty dire, managing about 10% the speed of what you’ll get on a flagship device from Samsung. It’ll hold up for Candy Crush... just don’t expect to be able to do real-time 3D VR experiences.
If you can handle that, there are other features to like, such as a microSD slot for expanding your storage and a removable battery. In short, if you don’t have a lot to spend on a phone, this one still delivers almost everything you’ll need in a fairly pleasing package.