With its blinding speed, excellent camera and superb battery life, the Moto G4 makes all other budget smartphones utterly irrelevant
How do you beat the Moto G? Many budget smartphones have tried and failed over the years to claim the Moto's throne, with only a few even coming close. There's the Samsung Galaxy J5 and the Vodafone Smart Prime 7, but that's about it as far as worthy competitors go at this kind of price. This year, though, Motorola's made sure that even the second-best budget smartphones don't even come anywhere close to its brand-new Moto G4, as its specs are simply beyond belief for something that costs just £169 SIM-free.
It's so good, in fact, that it effectively eliminates nearly every mid-range smartphone of the last six months – including Motorola's own Moto X Play – as the G4's octa-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 processor and 2GB of RAM offers exactly the same amount of processing power for almost half the price. It also utterly wipes the floor with its budget rivals, providing a substantial upgrade even for current 3rd Gen Moto G owners.
Performance
The difference in speed is palpable, as apps not only open much quicker, but the whole Android operating system feels incredibly slick. It showed in our Geekbench 3 results, too, as the Moto G4 scored 717 in the single core test and a massive 3,107 in the multicore test. Give or take a few points, that's roughly the same scores produced by the HTC One A9, which costs £420 SIM-free and £32-per-month on contract, and the Samsung Galaxy A3 2016, which costs £250 or £15.50-per-month, which is incredible for such a cheap smartphone. The 3rd Gen Moto G, by comparison, only produced respective figures of 532 and 1,598, giving the Moto G4 a clear lead in terms of overall speed.
Battery life
All this power doesn't come at the cost of battery life, either, as the Moto G4's large 3,000mAh battery lasted an impressive 13h 39m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our usual brightness of 170cd/m2. That's fantastic for a budget smartphone and a full two hours more than the 3rd Gen Moto G and 30 minutes longer than the Moto X Play.
Even better, the Moto G4 supports Motorola's TurboPower quick charging technology, which Motorola claims will give you six hours of power in just 15 minutes. The only downside is that it doesn't come with a TurboPower charger in the box, so you'll have to buy one separately for around £25 (from Motorola) to take advantage of it.
Design & Moto Maker options
So far, so good, but the one thing that might put people off the Moto G4 is that it's much bigger than its predecessors and bigger than any other budget handset out there. Motorola has taken the odd decision to move from a 5in display to a 5.5in display, taking the Moto G4 into phablet territory. Measuring 153x77x7.9mm, compared to 142x72x11.6mm for the Moto G 3rd Gen, this might be a step too far for those already hankering for the more compact designs of a few years ago.
It's really quite a handful as a result, and the move to a flatter back isn't quite as comfy as the 3rd Gen model's curved, albeit fatter dimensions. As a result, you might want to get it in your hand before you buy, but having moved from a 4.7in phone to a 5.5in phone myself over the last year, it really doesn't take long to get used to.
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