Motorola recently released the extremely budget-friendly Moto G in India through an exclusive partnership with Indian e-commerce giant, Flipkart. Despite being an obscure brand in India, such was the demand for Motorola’s latest offering, that the handset sold out in less than an hour! But is all this hype surrounding the Moto G really justified? Well, read on to find out!

Technical Specifications:

Model Number: XT1033

Operating System: Android 4.3 Jelly Bean; upgradeable to Android 4.4 KitKat

Display: 4.5” 1280 x 720 IPS LCD display; 329 PPI

Chipset: Snapdragon 400

Application Processor: 1.2GHz quad-core Cortex-A7

Graphics: Adreno 305

RAM: 1GB

NAND: 8/16GB; non-expandable

Rear Camera: 5MP sensor; 720p@30fps camcorder

Front Camera: 1.3MP sensor

Connectivity: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, GPRS/EDGE, HSPA+, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n 2.4GHz, Bluetooth 4.0, FM Tuner, GPS/GLONASS

Sensors: Proximity Sensor, Ambient Light Sensor, Accelerometer, Magnetometer, Hall Effect Sensor

Battery: 2,070mAh

What it lacks: Gyroscope, NFC, WiFi 802.11 5GHz, 4G LTE, IR Blaster

Out Of The Box:

Unlike its international variants, the Indian Moto G ships with a 2.5W power adapter and a pair of earphones. The handset runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean out of the box, but Motorola has already pushed the KitKat update for our dual-SIM variant like it had promised. The Moto G dons a black Shell out of the box, but you can buy Shells of other colours from Flipkart. With the Moto G, you also get 1 year of free 50GB Google Drive storage, so don’t forget to redeem that.

Design: A-

While not the sleekest phone around, the Moto G does manage to sport a premium-enough look, especially for a phone of its class. The phone’s back, which is a removable “Shell” (as Motorola calls it), has a brightly-coloured, matte finish, which can sometimes act as a fingerprint and dust magnet, and while it looks really nice, it certainly looks distinct from a Lumia. The disproportion between the top and bottom bezels is a noticeable design inconsistency (further fuelled by the lack of capacitive keys), but it’s easily overlooked, especially if you have been using the phone for a while. And people shifting from smaller or thinner phones who feel that the Moto G might be too bulky for their tastes needn’t worry. I used to use a 5th Generation iPod touch, which is arguably the thinnest, lightest and sleekest handheld around, as my daily driver, and even I found myself comfortable using the Moto G before I knew it.

The power button and the volume rocker are found on the right side of the phone. These hardware buttons jut out a bit and also feel a little lose, which is one constant source of annoyance. Their placement, too, is rather awkward, and since the buttons jut out and wiggle, they sometimes really get in the way, especially while typing. But it’s not the worst thing in the world — and besides, a cover can always fix these little annoyances.

The headphone jack is on the top and centrally placed, which I personally like. Next to it is the microphone for the video camera. The micro-USB port is found on the bottom, antipodean to the headphone jack and right beside the mouthpiece microphone. The Proximity and Ambient Light Sensors are found to the right of the earpiece, the LED notification light and the front camera to the left. I quite like the LED light on the Moto G. It isn’t multicoloured, but it has right size and intensity so that it doesn’t become too obtrusive. I previously used a Galaxy Nexus, and, while it had a multi-coloured LED light, I found it to be patchy and very, very obtrusive, especially at night.

The loudspeaker is located on the back of the phone, right next to the main camera. It’s quite loud — louder than what’s usually found on most phones — to ensure that you never have to miss another phone call ever again, but it occasionally produces a crackling, static-like noise accompanying the sound.

Performance: A

The Moto G is blazing fast and (almost) completely lag-free. No matter what I threw at it, it was very snappy and superfluous. Part of the reason for its flawless performance is, of course, pure, unadulterated Android, specially optimised for the hardware it’s running on, making the OS lightweight and improving performance. But the major reason for such a superfluous UX is the file system. The Moto G uses the F2FS file system for the user data partition. F2FS stands for Flash-Friendly (F2) File System (FS), which, like its name suggests, is a file system that has been specially designed for use on NAND flash-based storage, like the eMMC internal storage in the Moto G. This is an open source file system which, rather ironically, was developed at Samsung, but for some reason, they’re just not using it on their phones (yet).

Gaming on the Moto G, too, was great. Games just fly on the Moto G, from Subway Surfers to Asphalt 8. I’ve been playing Asphalt 8 on my Moto G for the past few weeks and I have yet to experience a single frame-rate drop(!). Adreno 305 may be the younger brother of Adreno 330, but you might wanna remember that this isn’t an overkill 1080p display, so the GPU has to compute for 56% less pixels.

I don’t think anyone will find him- or herself complaining about the call quality either. It’s not HD, but it’s just fine and definitely clear enough to understand what someone on the other line’s saying.

Despite such a near-flawless performance and UX, though, every once in a while, I would run into these weird, almost cryptic-looking visual glitches. Other times, I would even experience some erratic behaviours and navigation malfunctions. Rest assured these issues were very occasional and some of them are pretty much characteristic of Android.

Another complaint I had was with the stock browser, Chrome, which was horribly unresponsive. The primary complaint was the perennial half-second scroll delay. The other main issue was that it would eat up a lot of memory and push the launcher out of RAM, even in instances of extremely light browsing when only one or two tabs were open, causing the icons and widgets to reload on returning to the home screen.

Display: A+

The Moto G display is absolutely stunning. The 720p display, which is stretched over a 4.5” canvas, produces a pixel density of 329 PPI, which even supersedes the iPhone 5s’ 326 PPI Retina Display. What this means for the end user is that that they won’t be able to resolve individual pixels when the handset is held at normal distances.

Colour reproduction, too, is fabulous; it’s neither too saturated nor too washed out. I even did a side-by-side comparison of my Moto G and a friend’s Nexus 4 and I actually found colour reproduction on the Moto G to be better — colours on the Nexus 4 seemed a little washed out in comparison.

While not the brightest, I still found the Moto G’s display to be sufficiently bright. When indoors, I was almost always on the standard 34% brightness level (37% after installing the popular Power Toggles widget). Outdoors, though, I had to max out my brightness level, and even then it sometimes wouldn’t be enough and I would have to cover my phone, but that’s true for almost all phones.

All in all, this phone has such a captivating display, it’s impossible to tell that it’s a midrange knocker.

Battery: B+

This one is a little tricky to quantify. There were times when I got really amazing battery, and then there were other times when it failed, even if slightly, to live up to the high marks it itself had set — battery life seemed to have diminished a little after upgrading to KitKat. On KitKat, on mixed WiFi/3G usage and 37% brightness, I could generally squeeze out about 4-5 hours of screen-on time out of 13-14 hours of total time (although that could vary drastically depending on standby time) on a single charge. That is actually considered to be reasonably decent, especially in the realm of Android.

One rather peculiar issue that I had with my Moto G, though, was the charging rate. Since Motorola had shipped the Moto G with a 2.5W charger, I decided to use my old Galaxy Nexus charger, which is a 5W charger, to charge my phone. It would take this charger somewhere between 6-8 hours to completely charge my Moto G from 0% to 100%! So I then tried my old iPhone 4 charger, which is also a 5W charger. Same result. So I finally tried charging it with my old Galaxy Tab charger, which is a 10W charger, and my phone would take about 2 hours to charge from 0% to 100% with this charger. The Moto G accepts a maximum current of 1.5A, and the 10W charger can push a current of up to 2A, so of course, a faster charging rate with this charger was to be expected, but it still didn’t answer why it took 7+ hours for it to charge with my other, standard 5W smartphone chargers. Needless to say, I’ve been using this charger to charge my Moto G every day.

Camera: C

I’m just going to cut to the chase: the 5MP camera is absolutely underwhelming. Sure, every once in a while, it /can/ snap a nice picture or two, but that’s only in light-rich ambiences (i.e. outdoors), and even then its performance is just okay. Another disappointing criterion is the time it takes to snap and process a photo before allowing you snap the next one. I also don’t like Motorola-designed camera app — it’s a little sluggish and I don’t like the UI. Another thing about the camera that grinds my gears is the inability to create Photospheres, which requires a gyroscope to function, which the Moto G lacks.

The Moto G camcorder captures video in 720p@30fps. Lacking OIS, there’s no image stabilisation mechanism to negate hand-shake and bumpiness. The camcorder also features a special “SLO” mode that captures video in 720p@60fps for slow motion video capture, which, admittedly, can be a very nice feature to have. Elsewhere in the mainstream, slow motion video capture is natively found in the iPhone 5s only.

What’s Missing

Being a budget-friendly phone with a display and performance that rivals the iPhone, Motorola has had to make several trade-offs in other areas to reduce costs as much as possible. Aimed towards the working class of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India & China) countries and people switching from feature-phones and dumb-phones, Motorola has added features that best match their lifestyle while eliminating some of the fancier features of a standard smartphone. To this effect, the Moto G has been endowed with an FM Tuner and, in India and several other countries, a second SIM card slot, but on the other hand, it lacks a Gyroscope, an IR Blaster, a microSD card slot, NFC, WiFi 802.11 5GHz, 4G LTE and support for Miracast and MHL/SlimPort. Furthermore, and this is important if you’re an international reader, Motorola hasn’t even provided a power adapter and a pair of earphones with the handset in other countries.

So, will you miss these features? Well, unless you’re one of those geeks who likes to have all of the latest and greatest features, and everything else you can possibly have, in a smartphone, even if it’s overkill and gimmicky, then this isn’t the smartphone for you, but none of the other midrange smartphones can satisfy you either. Besides, as much as I hate not having some of the features mentioned above, like, for example, Miracast and MHL/SlimPort support, there’s never actually been a single instance where I absolutely needed them. If a techie like me could make do with these inadequacies, I don’t think the average user would even notice the absence of these features, let alone care.