Motorola Moto G 5G Plus: It won't blow your mind, but at £300 we're struggling to find much to grumble about The Motorola Moto G 5G Plus sits among the inaugural sub-£300 5G handsets. While the Lenovo-owned phonemaker is happy to tread that unfamiliar ground, the handset doggedly sticks to the tried-and-tested Motorola playbook, with decent performance and photography alongside a pristine stock Android experience. Motorola seeded The …
Though I prefer a metal frame to protect the screen from bending forces, I'm a big fan of plastic backs. My phone has just survived a metre drop onto concrete - the glass screen protector was destroyed but everything else is perfectly intact and I really think that a glass backed phone would have been landfill.
My one annoyance with 5G, however, is that the phones seem to be huge even when, as in this case, the mm bands are missing. I assume that this is because a lot of room is needed to fit all the antennae. The reason this isn't on my replacement list for my wife's phone is simply that she wouldn't have anywhere to put it.
Just stick it in a phone pouch style holster on a lanyard around the neck & wear it like that old rapper Flava Flav. =-)p
On a more serious note, I bought a shoulder holster for my phone; exactly like what a policeman might wear for their weapon, but designed for a cellphone instead. It does multiple duty as it also holds a tablet, extra battery pack, or any other small item I want to carry with me but don't want to risk in a pocket with my keys.
I just spent £600 on a 5G phone (I wanted the 7.2" screen), I was also getting extremely concerned that most well-spec'd budget phones were Chinese, such as Honor, Xioami etc - So fact Moto can do this, gives me some relief - This will be my wife's next phone!
Are there any phones that aren't manufactured in China? Or at least depend on Chinese made components?
(Turns out, yes, a few).
FWIW, despite everyone doing their best to convince me that Moto drops their phone support the day they release, they've kept up with both security updates within 1-2 months and major OS updates within a year for me. (Just got Android 10 on my G7.) Samsung isn't even close to that.
They will do one OS update and I believe security updates for 2 years.
After that you get no more cover from them.
I like my Moto G4 plus, but was very disappointed when the security patches stopped coming. I wouldn't buy another Moto device again, unless they have a revelation and start providing ongoing OS upgrades and updates.
My experience with Moto was that they did one major OS update and security patches but never fixed critical bugs. Critical as in: the cellular radio worked only intermittently, VoLTE went from "yes" to "coming soon" to "won't fix", and a proximity sensor bug caused it to butt-dial emergency services. Thankfully the broken cell radio and broken proximity sensor cancelled each other out on some butt-dialing.
I guess I'm going to be holding on to my phone for a long time to come. Seriously 6,5" is the normal for a phone these days? My Sony X Compact is 4,6". I cannot imagine having a larger phone then that. I dont need to carry a brick with me, everywhere I'm going.
Amazing how we used to laugh at the very first generation of mobile phones, "Oh how large and brick like they are! Hahaha"! Well it seems we've progressed from Brick to Tile phones, Jokes on us!
Anyone able to recommend a sensibly sized phone (say under 5")? Or do they just not exist anymore?
I just switched from an Xperia X Compact to a Samsung Galaxy A41. (I switched to Smarty and custom APNs were completely borked on the Xperia, which forced my hand.) I'm happy with the shift, aside from having to spend some quality time with adb to clear out the bloatware.
I'd've preferred something smaller, but there are essentially no options. I imagine that phone manufacturers will copy Apple's behaviour and produce their analogues to the iPhone SE in the coming years.
It's worth a look. With the trade-in on the Xperia, I got it for something like £190 directly from Samsung.
"My Sony X Compact is 4,6". I cannot imagine having a larger phone then that"
Shrinking bezels and the taller/skinnier 21:9 screens mean phones with bigger screens are often the same size as their smaller-screened forbears.
If in the market for a new phone I'd recommend popping into a store and comparing the size to your current one.
The model mentioned measures 129 by 65 mm. Even if there were no bezels on a phone, it could only have a 5.68-inch (144.5 mm) screen and still fit into those dimensions. The iPhone SE 2020 has made that 3 mm wider, and it's one of the smallest options out there. True, the growth in screen size doesn't mean the same increases in case size, but it has been accompanied by increases in case size. The phone mentioned in the article, for example, is still 9 mm wider as well as being 39 mm taller.
The Moto G range is excellent compared to almost all the competition.
Good sized screen, good screen resolution, decent cameras, USB-C charging and a headphone jack are all present and areas in which other devices scrimp on.
The 5000mAh battery is the standout feature - significantly more capacity than most rivals and, as the review noted, they don't scrimp in 'invisible' places like storage speed.
The only thing I would fault it on is that the naming schemes are kinda confusing when researching purchases online :)
Nice phone, but it might be worth checking that Bluetooth works properly before you buy.
A lot of people on the Moto/Lenovo forum are complaining that the recent "upgrade" to Android 10 has borked Bluetooth on G7s and G8s. It's certainly borked it on my G7 Plus, which won't pair with any of four cars I've tried it on.
My old G4 and an even older HTC One M7 (remember those?) pair flawlessly with all four.
Since the Pixel 4a is taking damned near forever to get released, and I really need a new phone (the top 3rd of my Pixel 2's touchscreen isn't detecting inputs and my mic decided it doesn't want to work anymore), this is what I'm looking at, mostly because of it having stock Android, 5G, and not costing a thousand dollars.
The only thing that makes me hesitant is that it's a Lenovo product as I have some issues with them after a suspicious experience on a notebook a few years ago, but I may well give this phone a shot unless Google gets the 4a out within the next month or so.
On my Galaxy S5 I have to remove Apps on a regular basis because the updates keep eating more and more space.
As far as I can tell there is no way to remove old patches and keep the App.
It has just occurred to me that if the base App is updated with the new code an uninstall followed by a reinstall might work but I am not hopefully.
So I am now being pushed towards a new phone because my old one is suffering drift accretion.
Yes, I have moved what I can to the SD card.
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