Moto G5 first look: The latest Moto smartphone screams value

Design

While the was expected to be smaller clone of the Moto G5 Plus, we were in for a surprise when the phone was finally revealed in India. It is actually smaller, though only slightly. But many people would be able to use the phone edge-to-edge with one hand; the Moto G5 Plus they cannot.

 

Motorola’s design language has evolved over the years and this is what you would expect the phone to be as a true successor, not the G3, not the G4. Though it no more has a curved back, it is thinner and smaller which makes it as handy as the original Moto G5, but only more premium.

The phone is all metal, including the back cover which is, to your surprise, is removable. After a long time, we see a phone that has benefits of unibody design –thin form factor, nice look, splash resistance and all metal built – along with a removable battery. If you didn’t know already, phones with removable battery are easy to reset/repair/replace the battery of vis-à-vis sealed unibody phones. So in a way, the design of Moto G is better than the G Plus.

 

Among other things, the home button (with fingerprint sensor) at front is one amazing change compared to the Moto G4. It is wider and slightly depressed so that your thumb finds it easily and fits smoothly on it. With the Android Nougat, Motorola has put added functionality to it wherein you can navigate (go front/back in menus/pages) by sliding left and right on it. Pretty neat.

 

Display

Both Moto G5 and the Moto G5 Plus use the same full HD IPS panel. As mentioned earlier, it has a smaller 5- inch display size that only makes the phone easy to handle. The colours are nice and well-balanced while the brightness is sufficient for outdoors viewing.

 

The display is topped with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3, which isn’t the best Motorola could fish from the market but does the job. It is smooth and scratch resistant, but not very immune to falls from waist height on concrete which the Glass 4 is.

 

Software and Performance

If there is something to lose buying the Moto G5, when you select it over the XiaomiRedmi Note 4, or the Moto G5 Plus for that matter, it is the performing hardware. The phone uses Snapdragon 430, which is several notches below what both smartphones use.

 

Combined with 3GB RAM and a puny 16GB storage, the chipset is fine only for basic stuff – messaging,surfing the web or maybe reading mails and listening to music. Thanks to the light stock Android interface, the works seamlessly for day to day use.

 

But heavy multi-tasking or filling the phone to the brim with apps and data would slow it down. Then there are Android updates every now and then that take the internal storage space. Its 2017 and we expected a higher storage on the phone.

 

Still, Moto G5 ships with latest Android Nougat 7.0 software and you can be free of worries for a year (or maybe two).  It is the most advanced pure stock OS Google has to offer right now; and a rare thing at this price.

 

Camera

Moto G5 also loses out in the camera department to the and many other phones in this segment. The 13MP sensor on the rear is quite average and sometime patchy with the auto focus. You need good light to get good photos from both the phone’s front and rear cameras.

The colour reproduction is nice, though and appears fairly accurate when you view the photos on computer. But it is not a phone you would buy for photography or carelessly clicked selfies.

 

Our final thoughts

Launched almost a month after the Moto G5 Plus, Moto G5 is arguably the best phone to be in the sub-15k price range priced at ₹11,999. Not only because it looks like the premium Moto Z and handles better, but it clearly offers more value for money than any phone the Lenovo-owned company has launched in the recent times.