Gadgetory

two budget phones one big and one small but which is the better bye I'm Taylor Martin this is fucking now and this is the boost max versus the Moto G we've seen countless budget Android phones over the years but for the most part they all have come with a series of compromises last year Motorola showed us that doesn't always have to be the case it released the Moto G which doesn't exactly have the best specifications but provides consistent reliable performance and it sells for only a fraction of the price of other no-contract smart phones ZTE wants to apply the same concept to larger smart phones since practically every so called phablet to date has also come with a premium price tag and over-the-top specs the question is can the Boost max from ZTE compete with a similarly spec and price device like the Moto G let's find out from a design perspective these two phones have very little in common the Moto G is a lot like the Moto X with its quaint simple build as you would expect any $179 smartphone to be it's utterly bare-bones with no Flair just a blank front glass with a small cut off for the speaker grille and a removable backplate which can be replaced with various coloured aftermarket plates from Motorola the boost Mac seems to have taken a lot of its design cues from older HTC devices except it's made almost entirely of plastic not metal with a two-tone back featuring a matte finish silver and dark grey soft touch accents at the top and bottom that said it's a very nice faux metal which is easily mistaken as a lightweight aluminum and then there's the question of size the Moto G has a very manageable 4.5 inch display with respectable dimensions and weight 129 point nine millimeters tall 65.9 millimeters wide and eleven point six millimeters thick hitting the scales at just 143 grams the boost max as a self-proclaimed phablet featuring a 5.7 inch display will be a two handed device for most it's thirty point one millimeters taller 15 point four millimeters wider and 58.3 grams heavier however it is 2.2 millimeters thinner as far as build quality goes however we'd rate these two as comparable they're both incredibly solid for their comparatively small price tags the insides are where these two are most alike the Moto G comes with eight or 16 gigabytes of storage one gigabyte of RAM a Snapdragon 400 chips up with a 1.2 gigahertz quad-core CPU a 5 megapixel camera and a 20 70 milliamp hour battery the boost max also comes with 1 gigabyte of RAM and a Snapdragon 400 SOC the max inbuilt storage of 8 gigabytes but its processor is a dual-core Krait CPU it's camera is rated at 8 megapixels and the battery is 3,200 milliamp hours it also has a micro SD card slot where the Moto G does not both have Wi-Fi b/g/n lack NFC and the boost max has LTE support but is limited to Boost Mobile while the Moto G can be purchased unlocked and used on gsm networks globally the real difference here however is display quality and size both the boost max is 5.7 inch display in the Moto G's 4.5 inch display or 720p resolution the respective densities of those displays are 258 and 326 pixels per inch and the difference is largely visible to the naked eye the Moto G's display isn't quite as vivid as some panels but it's far more accurate and color reproduction than the boost max which airs heavily on the warm side the Moto G's display is noticeably sharper has deeper blacks wider viewing angles and looks better all around apart from size and display there isn't much separating the Moto G in the Boost max but that story changes once you get to the software and performance the Moto G originally shipped with jellybean version 4.3 but what's quickly updated to KitKat 4.4 the Boost mag ships with jellybean 4.1 and that should mean something to anyone who has experience with budget Android devices KitKat has been optimized to run well on low-end hardware with a minimum requirement of 512 megabytes of RAM it only takes a few minutes with each device see those effects but we'll cover performance in more detail in a minute outside the versions of Android these two devices ship with somewhat similar software experiences which are very close to stock Android they feature a virtually unchanged launcher and each comes with a small helping of pre-loaded bloat the Moto G comes with helpful features like trusted devices and motorola assist with pre-loaded services like motorola my great help and motorola privacy trusted devices allows you to keep the device unlocked when connected to select Bluetooth devices to be concise motorola has added just a few features on top the stock experience to keep bloat down and boost user experience boost max doesn't deviate too far from that but it comes loaded with a handful of bloat from boost mobile such as boosts on music store boost zone airg lumen toolbar Kingsoft office mobile ID sound tracking touch pal ex and swipe the built-in features include a dolby digital plus eq app and what ZTE calls Smart View for a split screen mode for running two applications simultaneously this works with any installed application and works almost exactly like Samsung's multi window feature the only other notable changes ZTE has made are to the quick settings toggles in the notification shade for lockscreen and some custom icons and widgets so how noticeable are the benefits of KitKat on the Moto G lest we forget the Moto G also has a quad-core CPU compared to the dual-core CPU in the boost max but it's hard to believe that these are both powered by a Snapdragon 400 moto G is smooth snappy and consistent you can definitely bog the phone down if you're doing a lot of app switching and graphic intensive gaming but the overall experience is one of if not the best in a budget phone it's very impressive at first I thought the boost max may offer a similar experience but just a few days into using the phone it was clear that wasn't the case phone constantly hangs and freezes when loading apps it stutters when flipping through home screens or pages in the app drawer and even on Wi-Fi webpages and streaming videos take ages to load other times the boost max works well but it doesn't take a lot of effort to conjure up some serious lag we still haven't done our full testing of the battery life on the boost wax but we're already certain it will provide much more stamina per charge than the Moto G the 3200 million power battery has constantly powered us through a day and a half with ease the Moto G will likely need to be charged every day and the boost max provided you can find some service well not camera performance isn't stellar on either of these devices but when you consider the price they're not horrible both the Moto G's 5 megapixel camera and the Boost maxes 8 megapixel camera have the tendency to wash out images and in certain situations it's as if the Moto G artificially boosts colors and provides unnatural saturation however we had less trouble with the Moto G than with the Boost max with autofocus and taking blurry shots even with a hardware shutter key on the boost max rest assured neither of these phones cameras will blow you away but you can expect a more consistent and controlled experience on the Moto G even if the boost max has more software options in the stock camera app so which of these budget phones is a better deal it depends on a couple of different things like service plans and the preference in device size the boost max is available for $2.99 and currently comes with unlimited calls text and data for $35 per month boost service typically starts at $55 per month and eventually drops to just $40 for unlimited everything the catch is that boost service is not necessarily available everywhere the Moto G starts at just 179 and works on practically any bring-your-own-device prepaid service but at the end of the day the Moto G is by far the better bargain it costs just over half the price of the boost max and it offers a much more consistent reliable experience with far fewer performance hiccups we're hopeful the KitKat update will help the boost max but we're not sure if or when that will ever happen thanks for watching everyone if you enjoyed the video want to see more videos like this one in the future be sure to click the thumbs up button below and subscribe to the channel find this in all the usual places twitter facebook and google+ at pocket now I'm Taylor Martin you can find me on twitter at casper tech and i will see you next time you