Motorola Moto G (3rd Gen): Good on price, Good on features

The latest Moto G impresses us on looks and even though it is not so slim yet it carries an elegant form factor. It comes with front speakers and and the same 5-inch IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. a 5 inch display, but still has a slightly bigger bezel. Since it uses on-screen buttons, you don’t find touch buttons. On the back side it has a slant matte-finished design with chrome-finished Moto logo at the center which looks decent. On the right edge it has power and volume rocker keys, a 3.5 mm audio jack on the top and a micro USB charging point at the bottom edge. The smartphone has a chrome finished rim on the sides. This smartphone feels perfect in hand, perfect in pocket and easy to use with a single hand. The matte-finished design provides grips to avoid slipping of the phone. This is the first Moto G which is waterproof to IP67 standards, so it can drop into 1m deep water for 30 minutes without any harm.

Good visibility in sun light and fluid touch response

The multi-touch screen supports a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels and a pixel density of 294 ppi which is visible clearly even in direct sun light. While playing movies and games we found that the phone does not lag even while viewing from extreme angles. The Moto G(3rd gen) has the same fluid touch response as the previous iterations.

Camera still needs some work to be done

Moto G has a 13 MP rear and 5 MP front camera. It can record videos at 1080p resolution. The camera is supported by autofocus dual-LED (dual tone) flash and has features like Geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection, panorama, auto-HDR which is not so impressive on practical note of taking a picture.

We used the various modes of camera and found the camera is lagging on taking a low light image, and produces noise on taking selfies. One more issue with front camera is it takes more shutter time to process the clicked images. Although the rear camera is good for taking pictures in day light, the camera has one good feature that when you focus on any object you can rotate the focus circle that appears on screen to adjust the exposure directly. The Motorola camera app can be rapidly activated by a twisting gesture even when the phone is locked.

Image taken by Moto G

Image taken by Moto G in HDR mode

Image taken by Moto G in day light

Good hardware and software performance

It is powered by a 1.4 GHz Quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410, The performance is smooth without any lags. This smartphone runs on Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop),which has been customized by Motorola for superior notification and usability. It also has a microSD card slot which is expandable upto 32 GB. You can also move apps to the SD card, but it doesn’t have the option to install apps in the SD card by default.

On call connectivity it supports 4G which works great and there is no lag in it like call drop or low voice in crowded area. Talking about the functionality it has some good apps of Moto that work well like Moto Migrate. It supports good multitasking and you can run heavy games like Asphalt 8 and Dead trigger 2 without any heating issues. However, it doesn't have the single touch button to kill all the running apps together, which is a slight drawback.

Benchmark performance

Antutu-24951

3D mark-4473

Quadrant-15536

Vellamo -1564

Why you should buy this phone:

1.Waterproof body

2.Gesture control to light up the flash directly

3.10 colorful replaceable back covers for the smartphone at Rs. 999

4.The Motorola Migrate App lets you easily migrate media, contacts, text messages from your old phone

Moto G smartphone bundled with 2,470 mAh built-in battery. In our video test (playing a continuous HD video online through WiFi on full brightness and volume) the Moto G battery lasted for 9 hour.