Moto G Released by Motorola, Starts at ridiculous $179 Off-Contract

As expected, Motorola unwrapped its Moto G smartphone. The device is very similar to the flagship Moto X, but highlights availability outside of the U.S and an extremely competitive price.

On a design front, the G brings a near-identical design to the X, eye-popping color options and all. It sports the minimalistic Nexus-esque all black front and the soft touch back, like the Moto X. It will feature a host of different color options, like turquoise and purple, alongside the all-black model.

For those demanding more customization, the Moto G is available with a plethora of removable backs dubbed “Moto Shells.” There’s also a “Flip Shell” option that is a flip cover to protect the front of the phone when not in use. The wooden backed Moto X is due soon, however we don’t know if the same wooden option will be available for the G. Size-wise, it’s almost identical to the Moto X.

The smartphone’s 1280×720 AMOLED display is the same as the one found on the X as well. There is a slight size reduction on the G, 4.7 inches to 4.5 inches, which is why the G has marginally higher PPI, 329PPI rivaling the X’s 312.

The Moto G ships with a near stock build of Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. Since Motorola is a Google-owned company, I’m a bit surprised by the G doesn’t run KitKat out the box. However, Motorola is promising an upgrade to the sweetest version of Android by January of next year. The Moto X shipped with two unique features on top of stock Android to give the phone extra capabilities. These software features were Active Notifications and Touchless Control.

Active Notifications allows the device to “breathe” notifications by lightly powering AMOLED screen with the notification. Touchless Control allows for the user to say the words “Okay Google Now” to the device and control it from anywhere, without waking it from standby, all the time. It’s possible that Motorola packed the G with Active Notifications because it sports an AMOLED screen, but it may not feature Touchless Control because of the lack of a dedicated natural-language processing core in the CPU.

Under the hood, the G is rocking a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 CPU. This is a little bit of a different than the X8 Chip found in the Moto X, which is essentially a dual-core Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU and a quad-core Adreno 320 GPU with the extra two cores dedicated to the Touchless control feature. It has 1GB of RAM opposed to X’s two, and the clock speed is 500MHz less than the 1.7GHz Moto X, at 1.2GHz.

However, Motorola pushes real-world experiences rather than specs, so we’ll see how it performs in actual usage, rather than benchmarks. Motorola is also promising “all day battery” with battery-friendly tweaks found in the software and a 2,070mAh power pack. Sadly, the G doesn’t sport LTE, only 3G. It also doesn’t support 802.11ac WiFi, but it does tack on Bluetooth 4.0.

On the back of the device, Motorola packed in a 5-megapixel camera. Sure, it’s not as high-end as 2013-flaghship smartphones packing 41-megapixel sensors, like the Lumia 1020, but it should be able to snap decent photos that are without a doubt Instagram-worthy. The camera features an HDR mode, a panorama mode, burst mode, and slow-motion video recording. On the front, there’s a 1.3-megapixel eyeball for Google Hangouts, Skype, and of course, selfies. The camera app is very minimalistic, like on the Moto X, and focuses on actually taking a picture fast rather than playing around with settings.

With the Moto G, Motorola isn’t here to reinvent the smartphone wheel. They’re here to introduce a budget phone that isn’t, quite frankly, awful. The G is absurdly inexpensive at $179 for an 8GB model and $199 for a 16GB model. It will be available to purchase this week in Brazil and certain areas of Europe. Shortly after, come Latin America, Canada, and parts of Asia. In January, the U.S, Middle East, and more of Asia, should be able to get their hands on the G.

Source: Tech Crunch