Motorola Moto G4
The latest instalment in the Moto G saga is a superb phone. It’s a little bulky, but outstanding for the money
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE from motorola.co.uk
T£141 (£169 inc VAT) he Motorola Moto G4 follows a long line of successful budget smartphones that stretches all the way back to 2013, but it has its work cut out in 2016. With Samsung and others joining the budget fray, the Moto G4 must do something special to maintain its position at the top.
Lenovo (the new owner of the Motorola brand) hasn’t made life any easier for the Moto G4 by bumping up the base price. The cost of 2016’s model is £169 inc VAT, up £20 on last year’s Moto G (3rd gen).
What does that extra cash get you? For starters, a larger screen. The Motorola Moto G4 has a 5.5in display, making it a whole half-inch bigger than last year’s model. Motorola hasn’t simply upped the size without considering the consequences. At the same time as enlarging the screen, it has slimmed down the case; the device is 2mm thinner than last year’s Moto G. The Motorola Moto G4 is a mere 9.8mm thick, and best of all it feels sturdy, with curved metal edges adding to the high–quality feel.
In terms of the overall aesthetics, it isn’t as brash and loud as previous Moto G handsets and, for me, that’s a bit of a shame. I loved the rounded contours, ribbed rear panel and bold camera surround of last year’s model; the more subtle look of this year’s Moto G4 feels like Lenovo is playing it too safe.
Still, it’s possible to customise the Moto G4 via the Motorola Moto Maker website. You have eight rear-panel colours to choose from (including black) and five “accent” colours, which should provide ample opportunity to add some personality.
The only real downside to the design is that the Moto G4 isn’t IPX7 water-resistant like the previous Moto G. It’s still splash-proof, courtesy of a special coating – but don’t drop it in the bath.
It’s also mildly disappointing to discover that there’s no NFC or fingerprint reader – you’ll have to stump up for the Moto G4 Plus, which costs £229 inc VAT, if that’s on your shopping list – so you can’t take advantage of Android Pay.
Under the skin
The key reason for the Moto G family’s success has been the combination of sensible build quality with a keen sense of value, and the Moto G4 maintains that tradition. Inside is an octa–core Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 running at 1.5GHz, and this is backed by 2GB of RAM and either 16GB or 32GB of storage.
It’s pretty responsive, but with the odd glitch here and there. There’s some lag while zooming in and out of images in Google Photos, while scrolling quickly through imageheavy websites isn’t as smooth as on more expensive handsets with 8-series Qualcomm chips. However, there’s nothing here to make you curse under your breath, and in the benchmarks the Moto G4 is clearly faster than last year’s model.
In fact, of the budget models I’ve pitched the Moto G4 up against in the graphs ( see opposite), it’s the Honor 5X that gets the closest in terms of overall performance. The Moto G (3rd gen) is significantly slower across the board.
The G4 wins for battery life too. Although the Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 is only a 28nm part, it seems to be highly efficient and, coupled with a 3,000mAh battery, comfortably delivers a day of moderate use. When we ran it through our standard video-rundown test, the Moto G4 lasted 13hrs 39mins, which is almost three hours longer than the Honor 5X in the same test.
“I like how easy it is to drag the focus and exposure point around the screen and adjust the exposure compensation to suit”
Staring contest
The Moto G4 bolsters its “budget bargain” credentials with its screen. Its 5.5in IPS screen has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, and it’s sharp enough that you can’t see any pixels unless you squint hard (or reach for a magnifying glass). Best of all, though, Motorola has spent time perfecting how it performs.
In fact, for a phone that costs a good deal less than £200, the Moto G4’s screen is astonishingly good. Maximum brightness reaches right the way up to 540cd/m2, outstripping the best phones in this price bracket by a huge margin, and it’s almost twice as bright as its predecessor.
The contrast ratio is great, too, and although the sRGB coverage isn’t quite as good as phones with OLED displays (the Galaxy J5 and OnePlus X, for instance), it’s good enough that colours look vibrant and easy on the eye. This screen’s only weakness is that it dims to only 22cd/m2; if you’re in the habit of checking your phone in a darkened cinema, this will earn you the ire of your fellow movie-goers.
Snap happy
Happily, the camera is also great. You get a 13-megapixel rear camera with an f/2 aperture and a dual-LED flash for low-light indoor shots. There’s no laser or phase-detect autofocus here (for that you again have to move up to the pricier Moto G4 Plus), nor optical image stabilisation, but there’s no problem with image quality.
Photographs shot on the Moto G4 are packed with detail and well exposed. Noise is kept under control in all but the darkest scenes, and the HDR mode works well to equalise extremes of shadow and highlight (as long as you hold the phone steady).
I especially like how easy it is to drag the focus and exposure point around the screen and adjust the exposure compensation to suit. The only problem I had was that autofocus was somewhat slow to lock onto a subject, and occasionally jumpy and erratic.
And don’t kid yourself that you’re getting Nexus 5X or 6P levels of