Is the Moto C Plus a phone you should buy at Rs 6999?

By Team Asianet Newsable | First Published Jul 1, 2017, 11:39 AM IST

It gets a big removable battery which means it is user replaceable, and the SIM slots are separate from the microSD card
The proximity sensor in the Moto C Plus is missing
It has an irritating touch screen and a buggy interface based on which the user experience on the Moto C Play is anything but ‘Cool’.

Making a phone under Rs 10,000 can be tricky. You need to get the specs right, the form right, and offer one or two very exciting features that would make the phone stand out. On the other hand, if you make something very simple and workable, it won’t sell bad either.

Moto C and Moto C Plus launched this month are the latest phones from Motorola priced in the lower segment still that is trickier to capture. At Rs 6,999 the Moto C Plus with a better display, more RAM and bigger battery would be an obvious choice over the Moto C. But is Moto C Plus in itself a nice phone to buy right now?

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When you hold it in the hands, the look and feel of the Moto C Plus doesn’t disappoint. Though it is surely thick, doesn’t feel premium like the Redmi 4 does and appears to be an absurd mix of Lenovo and Moto designs. But it is build tough, a feature much needed in a phone of this segment, and you get a big removable battery which means it is user replaceable, and the SIM slots are separate from the microSD card which also a true dual SIM phone.

But Lenovo (or Moto) misses out on several things that cannot be ignored. For starters, the phone doesn’t come with a fingerprint scanner that Xiaomi Redmi 4 has. You might say it isn’t much needed, which is fine. But what’s with not putting in a proximity sensor?

A proximity sensor shuts down the screen when bring you bring the phone to the ears while on a call and automatically turns it back on when you take it away. This doesn’t happen on Moto C Plus, because the sensor in question, is missing. You need to press the lock button every time to toggle the screen.

One more thing that might not be clear from the specs is the quality of its touch screen. Moto C Plus has a 5-inch display with HD, 720p resolution. It is seemingly a better and brighter display than the Moto C, the viewing angles are narrow.

But more importantly, the touch screen is not smooth at all. You may say that it’s okay, for the Moto phone sells for a meagre Rs 6,999. But it is worse than what you would expect, worse than Motorola’s previous budget phones Moto E and Moto E2, and definitely worse than the Redmi 4 or other Chinese phones for that matter.

The only advantage of the Moto C Plus, as per the company, is that it runs the stock Android and in fact the latest version of it –the Android 7.0. It is true that there are very few phones, rather close to none in this price that have it. But during our testing we found that it hasn’t been put to a good use. The interface is not at all optimised and lags with almost any app you use, even the browser or the play store.

It could be due to the underpowered chipset, a 1.25GHz MediaTek processor that it runs along with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage. But it could also be due to the fact the Motorola did not ready the software fighting fit for the Moto C Play. Coupled to an irritating touch screen and a buggy interface, the user experience on the Moto C Play is anything but ‘Cool’.

The phone comes with a 4000mAh battery which pretty competent and adheres to what company claims. Lenovo says it offers a battery backup of over 30 hours. We got more than that during the review period, despite spending more time than usual for downloading apps or surfing web. And occasionally watching YouTube.

Talking about the cameras, Moto C Play comes with an 8MP shooter in the rear and a 2MP shooter at front. Both perform well in well-lit conditions like most cameras do. The autofocus is not that fast, but you can touch to refocus and it works. There is an LED flash for both front and rear cameras that supports the camera in low light.

And the cameras need it badly. The usability of the low light pictures take from Moto C Plus is questionable for they are dark and grainy. You would need to be very ingenious with light, focus and angle sometimes to take a useable shot. A slow shutter, which becomes ultra-slow in HDR mode, is another issue which renders most shots blurry.

Verdict

What is sad about the Moto C line up is that the company has tried to recycle a Lenovo design instead of bringing in one that of its own G series, which would have been a fresh thing for this price segment. The company has, instead, done this to the new Moto E4 series (which may launch in India sometime later but at a higher price). For now, the new Moto C series, paired with a low-grade hardware, stands ruined. Xiaomi on the other hand didn’t make this mistake. The Redmi 4 is handed down the looks, build material and in fact many features of the more expensive Redmi Note 4 and that pushed it miles ahead in comparison.

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