My pursuit for a nice mid range smart phone ended with the Moto G 2nd Gen.
My audacious old Nokia N8 decided to call it quits after having survived those unprecedented tumultuousness under its owner’s buttery fingers. A search for a no-nonsense smart phone ensued.
The obvious first choice was Micromax. Micromax has heating up issues, they say. That did not deter me much. I was still trying to finalize between Canvas Nitro and Gold. I was kindly made aware by one of my friends that he was still waiting to get back his Micromax from service after weeks of waiting.
And I have always had a fascination for Samsung. What doesn’t amuse me much is their pricing.
Moto seemed to fit in the price range I was looking for and with quite a handful of people using it in my workplace, it piqued my interest.
Moto X seemed to be a nice phone to own. But I was eventually charmed by the modesty of Moto G. Plus it looked like I will miss having FM in my mobile afterall. And having a spare slot for a external memory seemed sensible.Plus the prospect of playing music on those front dual speakers in near stereo effect sealed the decision. Ordered and received it through flipkart for 13 grand.
What’s good:
1) 3 months of fine music, movies, streaming, browsing and whatsapping experience has still not lost steam. There are no heat up issues, and anyway I am not subjecting it to any high tech gaming to overwork all of its Qualcomm quad cores. So no problems in this area.
2) The sound quality is quite good. The output volume is sufficient to be heard even with everything abuzz around and the front stereo speakers doesn’t disappoint while listening to music.
3) The HD display is sophisticated and the user interfaces Androidy.The speed and performance is quite alright and till date I haven’t seen any hangup issues.
4) The harshness of its owner’s buttery fingers has been meted out twice so far, with tumbling briefly down a flight of stairs once. No protests, no complaints. Atleast not yet.
What’s not:
1) It is charge hungry, for all its charm. Plug it up duly soon after your return home from work and fancy forgetting GPS on a long drive or lose direction anyway. And the 5 inch, 150gm odd device doesn’t make things much better for buttery fingers either.
2) You need to keep the volume really down if you want privacy during conversations. This is a significant minus in this phone. Often I have people asking me if am keeping the phone on loudspeaker during calls.
3) And I have seen it restarting few times, especially when I am on roaming.
I am neither a tech savvy nor an app junkie as far as mobile phones are concerned. And I am not into replacing phones every year, let alone on a half yearly basis.
So coming across as a’conservative’ user, despite the qualms I still feel this is a sensible smart phone in this segment.