Motorola announced the 2nd generation Moto G after almost a year since it’s original Moto G announcement. It’s come far from being the best budget phone under 200$ around in India and other emerging markets. Everyone who had waited for the announcement had expected huge upgrades with the next iteration but, the Moto G 2nd generation didn’t seem to bring much to the table. On paper, the phone seems rather similar with a few changes. I used the Moto G 2nd generation for over 10 weeks as my primary phone and here is what I think.
The first generation review was purely based on how the Moto G was the perfect budget phone. Does it remain to be the same ?
Build
Build quality has been maintained just as the previous generation of the Motorola Moto phones. It feels the same, the materials feel the same. The consistency has been maintained and with the similar curves and edges. The device is bigger than before but packs almost the same power. Anyone who holds this phone after having used the previous one can instantly tell the similar features and placements.
Display
The first thing I noticed when I switched on the device for the first time was, it had a great display. Even though on paper it meant lesser than 300ppi from the previous generation of a 332 ppi. It was expected to be less sharp but I found the display looked really good. A 5inch phone with 298 ppi isn’t what exactly will woo the pixel lovers. Then again the huge size of the display means, the almost possible one handed use of the phone is not possible.
The phone has almost the same design but bigger with the power button and volume rockers on one side and nothing else. The back shell design remains the same with possible different coloured shells available. It’s really the same design kept.
Camera
Camera was poor on the previous generation Moto G. It’s got an upgrade to 8 Megapixel rear camera and it failed to amaze me. Motorola has had poor camera on almost all their moto series phones. The low light images still are terrible to be useable. Pictures taken at 8 Megapixel seems to have low sharpness even though it has auto focus included. The images with wide-angle tend to have less sharp images in total. The images are generally very Color toned towards the cooler region like all the time. In a well-lit condition the camera delivered pretty okay from a budget phone standpoint. The front camera had seen some improvements from the previous generation, so that’s some news for the selfie obsessed peeps.
Battery
I noticed on my first day trial run that the battery was worse than the previous generation. The usual test is to see the standby time without installing any third party apps when the phone is taken out. Without installing any the phone had been dying out in 48 hours. The standby battery drain is way too much on this device. The standby time was much higher on the Moto E itself with just 2000mAh battery. This could probably be corrected with a software update of Android L which requires lower resources overall.
Most of the applications I tested played well with the Moto G which were optimized allowing me to use the phone for the entire day. The apps I used frequently were Inbox, Snapchat, Google Camera, Keep, Chrome, Instagram, Ping and a few more.
I used the Moto G along side with Moto 360 for a couple of days and I didn’t notice any significant battery drain and always gave me a decent battery life staying alive for a whole day while the moto 360 would be dead by evening.
Software
Motorola has been on the forefront showing other OEM’s what they actually should be doing with Android. Motorola delivers stock Android experience on the Moto G 2nd Generation just like in every other phone in the moto lineup. They’ve included Migrate, Alert and Assist which are the only apps bundled with this phone. The experience is the same if you’re coming from any other Android phone and works just as it is supposed to. Camera software from motorola could be vastly improved with some better functionality but the Google Play Store houses numerous alternatives for all the software that might need some extra juice.
Well the Play Store apps are in the transition state of apps before material design and apps after material design, until everyone updates to the new design guidelines. There is a huge design inconsistency throughout the entire Android experience, which at the most is the issues Google needs to sort with the developers.
Motorola has put forward a statement when Google announced the Android 5.0 Lollipop, which said that all the phones in the moto series will receive the update. Moto F 2nd Generation should be receiving the Android Lollipop update in time which is some amazing work by the Motorola team.
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