Moto G (3rd Gen) Review

Back in 2013, Motorola announced the first generation Moto G which went on to become a huge success in India and many countries were it was available. The second generation Moto G went official in September last year with upgraded specs. Few days back, the company has launched the 3rd generation Moto G or Moto G3 with upgraded specs.

The Moto G 3rd generation comes with the same 5 inch HD (1280 X720p) display along with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 Quad core processor clocked at 1.4Ghz. Here is our detailed review of the new Moto G (3rd Gen)

Related Reading: Moto G (3rd Gen) Unboxing

Design and Build:

Design wise, there are lots of similarities with the second generation Moto G and the new Moto E. The rear panel comes with a textured finish which gives a good feel to the device. The design of the 13MP camera, flash and the Moto logo also looks great. The curved rear panel also gives good grip to the device. The power and volume keys are on right side, the micro USB charging slot at the bottom and the 3.5mm audio jack at the top.

The front panel has the front 5MP camera, speaker unit, 5 inch HD display and the usual set of sensors. Overall, the build quality looks very good on the device and gives a solid feel.

The phone also comes with IPX7 water resistance which means you can use it under water for almost 30 minutes upto a depth of 3 feet. While previous generation Moto G was water repellent, the IPX7 certification is a welcome move especially in the mid range segment.

Related Watching: Water Resistance test on Moto G (3rd Gen)

Display:

The phone comes with 5 inch HD display (1280 X 720) IPS LD panel and its the same what we saw on second generation Moto G. There is also corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection and the touch response was good. The viewing angles are also very good with no change in colors when you tilt the display. But having said that the display is slightly warmer and the colors look a bit dull to our liking and we feel Motorola could have done better in the display aspect. The display quality is one of the downsides of the device.

There is also the Moto Display feature which shows notifications even when the display is turned off.

Software:

Motorola devices are known to run on stock Android and the new Moto G is no exception. The Moto G (3rd Gen) comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop which is the latest version of Android and it offers stock experience. Motorola hasn’t done any customizations to the software and there isnt any bloatwares included in the phone. The notification center is also stock.

In short you get Nexus like experience on Moto G (3rd Gen).

The phone does not come with any file manager included, so you need to install from Play store. Motorola has included FM radio app on the device along with Moto Migrate which helps in migration from other devices.

The includes a Moto app which has three main functions- Moto Assist, Actions and Moto Display. Moto Assist helps in managing your activities and also places. The actions menu has gestures for enabling flashlight and also for quick capture.

Moto Display wakes up the screen when there is new notifications. You can also customize how much details need to be displayed on the display. Moto Display is already available on Moto E 2015 version.

Performance:

Moto G 3rd Generation runs on Snapdragon 410 Quad core 64 bit processor with 2GB RAM. There is also a variant with 1GB RAM, but we tested the 2GB RAM variant. The overall performance of the device was good and we didn’t experience any lags or issues which running apps or switching between apps. The gaming performance of the device was also good and it was better than what we saw on Galaxy J5 with same processor. The heat generated while playing games was considerably low.

Related Video: Moto G (3rd Gen) Gaming Review

The phone supports 4G LTE, but we could not test it as our region does not have 4G. The call quality on the phone was decent and we didn’t notice any issues with calls. The speaker output was decent for a mid range phone.

The phone comes with 16GB of internal storage and out of which close to 11.05GB was available in first boot. You can expand the storage via micro SD card, but you cannot install apps directly on to the SD card. But having said that there is an option to move apps to the SD card.

Overall, Moto G (3rd Gen) showed great performance in almost all tasks.

Camera:

Motorola has improved the camera on the Moto G (3rd Gen) and now it comes with 13MP rear camera and 5MP front camera. The rear camera also sports a dual tone LED flash. The camera interface hasn’t changed in the new Moto G and comes with basic features and is a simple interface. There is decent amount of features including HDR, Panorama and the camera now has the ability to control the exposure in the camera viewfinder. There is no touch to focus, but instead it has the option to select the area of focus.

While most of the time the focus worked fine, there were some issues taking close up shots. The camera processing is very fast and you can take pictures pretty fast.

Now talking about the camera quality, the 13MP rear camera performs very well and the photos taken have great colors (in fact one of the best in the category) and good detailing as well. This is one area where the Moto G (3rd Gen) is truly an upgrade. The overall clarity of the photos taken in daylight looks very good and the close up shots too have great colors and sharpness levels. The low light mode helps in taking low light captures and does a decent job. Since this is a mid range phone, we cannot expect a flagship like experience, but nevertheless the new Moto G lives up to the expectations in terms of camera.

The new Moto G also can record videos in full HD (1080p) and the quality looks good. The front facing 5MP camera also has HDR mode and performs very well for selfies taken in good light. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.

Here are the samples taken with front camera.

Battery Life:

Moto G 2015 features a 2470mAh battery and this is decent capacity for a 5 inch device in the mid range segment. The battery is non removable. The phone does give good battery life in normal usage which includes calls, browsing, email,causal gaming and social networking apps. We tested the battery on two instances and found that if you are an average user, you can get more than a day of battery life on this device. We haven’t tested the battery life on 4G, so we cannot comment on the performance.

There is also battery saver mode which helps you to improve the battery life.

Verdict:

The new Moto G comes in two variants, the 8GB/1GB RAM variant priced at Rs 11999 and the 16GB/2GB RAM variant priced at Rs 12999. The Moto G (3rd gen) with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage is a great buy specifically for the stock Android experience, great performance, good camera and also IPX7 certification. We can always say, the new Moto G is definitely a phone worth investing. If you are looking for an all round mid range phone, go get the new Moto G!

We would suggest our readers to pick the 2GB RAM variant with 16GB storage for overall better performance.