Gadgetory

hey what's up guys I'm VHD here and usually when you see a piece of tech that is way cheaper than the others in the category like way void cheaper you just a fall to thinking it's probably inferior in every way but the Moto G 5 and the moto G 5 plus are the result of Motorola and not really cutting down from high rent flagships but more building up as high as they can for a certain price and they've come up with this this year for 230 bucks they're still killing it in the budget game so I want to shine another light on this because of the fact that I keep coming back to that good phones are getting cheap and cheap phones are getting good probably the biggest difference between this gen Moto G and a last one is just the outside the design and the hardware the Moto G has always been this shameless lee apologetically plastic but this year it steps up to metal so all around the back and the side and the frame and it feels a lot better and more durable as a result now the looks are a little more polarizing it definitely still looks a little bit better because of the metal but it also definitely still looks like a budget phone it's the bezels that are still big on the sides and the forehead and the chin no doubt about that and it's a pretty basic design from top to bottom nothing too crazy about it button placement is standard the headphone jack still at the bottom all that is great but one thing that makes this steel a little more teeth is actually the chrome rail like all the way around the bezel you don't see that really in like the renders but in real life it actually does make a difference I feel like on the more premium phones the bezels are usually just more shrinking down or much more dark to sort of fade out the way but the chrome here around the rails is much more reflective kind of reminds me of the Galaxy Nexus just a little bit less curvy but that's not really a bad thing is just something you notice about the phone the one thing I would say I don't really like about the design on the outside of the new Moto G is that the old camera lump on the back I really think if this phone was the exact same size but didn't have that big bump sticking out it would look pretty clean but this sticks out of it so much that it's a defining feature of the way this phone looks the Moto Z had that big old camera bump because it was a fitting spot for all the Mota mods that fit on the back I don't think you had to have this big camera bump on the back of the g5 because there are no Mota mods for this one either way though overall the build quality and feel in the hand is a step up from last year and when you compare to other smartphones under 300 bucks which there aren't many of this sits up at the top pretty clearly in my book so the specs of the new moto G are also decidedly mid-range about what you'd expect a 3000 milliamp hour battery in this g5 plus and there are two versions of it one with four gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of storage that's 300 bucks and then this $230 cheaper version of the phone has 2 gigs of ram and 32 gigs of storage that is expandable though since the phone does keep that rare micro SD card slot and the software experience of the Moto G is pretty classic motorola mostly pure stock Android but with some enhancements that they feel will make it better and I really like that about them that's something they've kept where they really don't they don't have a whole skin on top of Android I don't have a whole suite of redundant apps it's nothing too crazy it's again near stock but when they have certain software or hardware features they like to integrate them to take advantage of each other so when they have an OLED display for example they like to take advantage of that with software so one main place they saw for enhancement on this phone was the home button and it kind of stems from a weird place from a being budget but this phone has a weird home button situation there's one big physical home button with a quality fingerprint reader down at the bottom but then there's no back or multitasking buttons on either side of it it's just blank space and wasted chin but then on the screen you can have fully normal software buttons your back home and multitasking but of course they take up screen real estate and not everybody wants that so their unique solution for people who want to use all off screen buttons is what they've called home button gestures apparently the home button is actually big enough to use sort of like a big glass trackpad it's actually sensitive enough to figure out what you're doing if you're doing a button press versus a gesture and they seem to work fairly well so when you turn these on it's a tap to go home then it's a hold for a second to turn the screen off then you can hold a little longer to get into Google assistant then you can swipe right across the home button to go back and then swipe left across the button to go to recent apps and you can actually interchange those last two if you want to swipe right or left another enhancement here in stock Android to the Moto G is gestures to go into multi asking you basically just drag the window up to the top I actually think this is better and easier to remember them before so you kind of dragged into the multitasking experience and dry out of it makes sense and then there's other little things like a slightly transparent theme in the app drawer and the Moto widget so you get on your home screen that show the battery and the time and all that stuff the screen off gesture that came with the original Moto X you have the double chop to turn on the flashlight which is familiar you have the double twist which launches the camera really quickly that's still there so all those gestures and all those enhancements come down to the Moto G again and they're awesome so I've said a lot of good things about this phone but it's not your perfect flawless fantasy phone it's definitely not quite perfect in order to get a phone down into the price that you get this one into you got to make some trade-offs obviously to cut costs for one thing it's still using microUSB down at the bottom which isn't a huge deal you could say that it's really just fine if most people don't use USB type-c yet but I would have liked to have seen USB C and then this is also missing NFC which was a bit of a bigger deal on a certain other phone but that phone was claiming to be a flagship killer this one's not claimed to be any of that it's just a lower priced phone so it doesn't have the NFC chip that may or may not be a big deal to you based on how often you use mobile payment and then the speaker up at the front if it's decent it's definitely not the loudest and not the clearest out there but the thing is it's better than most of the high-end flagship smartphone speakers nowadays strictly because it's front-facing so it doesn't have to be as loud because it's pointed right at you I just wish it was a stereo pair since its kind of weird holding the phone sideways and then having the audio come from one side of the phone and I think the camera is the area will you'll see the biggest drop off the quickest drop off from when you had a high-end flagship phone to this lower price on paper it's still a 12 megapixel smartphone with an S 1.7 aperture but it doesn't have optical image stabilization so you can get pretty good shots out of this camera when you're really well lit and when you're outdoors only you have a lot of light but as soon as you start to lose light you're going to see a lot more things like noise in the frame because it's raising the ISO to shorten the shutter speed to keep that motion blur down you're going to see chromatic aberration you're going to see a lot less dynamic range a lot more contrast and overall just a lot less natural colors it's not quite as good as an image processing and Motorola's struggled with high-end cameras and their best phones so this is definitely not going to be the phone you buy for the camera quality but at the end of the day when you start comparing moto G to a lot of the other phones you can get for the same price for $250 or less it becomes really obvious that this still falls as a complete package at the top of the heap so can we give the budget crown back to the Moto G I think so yeah I think it's going to deserve that this moto G 5 plus takes a lot of the cues from the bigger more expensive brothers but is also coming from the low price that the Moto G has always been and sort of elevating it into a phone that kind of feels a lot more like a premium flagship or at least tries to I'd even say the budget flagship has previously gone for me two phones like the one plus three and the one plus three T but now those are sort of creeping up into like 400 $450 price ranges they're kind of edging up there and starting to compete with flagships now so for the best foam that you can get under 300 bucks it's kind of a no-brainer moto G is holding that crown so if you're ballin on a budget this is the phone to check out because the one that's been pretty much it thanks for watching I'll leave a link to this phone below I'll leave a link to all my other phone reviews and other stuff below as well talk to you guys the next one peace