Motorola has made minor changes to the design in the front and a significant one behind. On the front, the thing that is different is that in the place of metallic grille which stood out on the earpiece speaker and base, you now have two depressions. While they may look good, the limited space easily attracts dust that is difficult to remove. The bezel on the top and bottom certainly looks thicker for a 5-inch phone. The Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection is a definite plus point, helping to keep the scratch and smudge marks away.
The edge has a shiny metallic finish to it, with the power/standby and volume rocker button located on the right hand side. On the top you have the 3.5mm audio jack in the centre and the base has the microUSB port for charging and data transfer. At 155 g, the phone is reasonably light, although with the curved back, the sides measure 6.1mm on the edges and 11.6mm in the centre.
As we have been seeing in the last couple of generations, Motorola has not added any skins on the Moto branded phones. With the Moto G(3rd gen) you get a stock Android 5.1 OS. However, Motorola has some software flourishes in the form of proprietary apps such as Help, Migrate and Moto. Motorola Migrate lets you transfer content from or to the phone wirelessly. The Moto app lets you customise your phone according to your preferences by using Assist, Actions and Display.
5-inch HD display that was seen on the Moto G(2nd generation) along with the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The display looks decently well and only on very close observation will you notice pixellation when you look at the phone from a certain angle. But holding at an arms distance, the display is quite crisp. It comes with the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection, just like its predecessor. There are two cuts – on the top for the earpiece speaker and the base for the audio speaker. Overall it is a pleasant display with a slight blue tinge to it. While watching movies on the phone, we did not notice any backlight bleeding.
The third generation Moto G is certainly a well made phone and even in terms of performance, it did impress. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC may not be a high end chip, but paired with 2GB of RAM, the phone really does give a decent performance. The clock speed is slightly bumped up as compared to the 410 chip on the Moto E. In terms of user experience, the phone delivers the goods. Features such as Moto Display, Quick capture and chop twice to activate the flashlight add value to the user experience. And thanks to the stock Android experience, there are no unnecessary slowdowns. Yes, you will experience a slight lag while opening some apps, for instance the Chrome browser among them, but nothing slow enough to mar the overall experience.
Camera on the Moto G has got a significant bump – going from 8MP on the second gen to 13MP on the third gen. The front camera has also been increased to 5MP from 2MP on the earlier model. The camera comes with an f/2.0 aperture, has a dual-tone LED on the rear side and the user interface on it is quite spartan. You can tap on the screen to click an image or in case you want to tweak the focus and exposure, you can activate the touch to focus. Swiping from the left brings up the tweaking options such as panorama mode, HDR mode, flash, location and so on. There aren’t many manual features to talk about.
Motorola has bumped up the battery capacity of the third gen Moto G from 2070mAh on the second gen to 2470mAh on the third gen. We could easily get close to a day’s worth of usage on regular tasks such as calling, messaging, updating social media and watching a couple of videos. The PC Mark for Android test gives around 10 hours 7 minutes of on-screen time. Apart from the Android battery saver mode, there isn’t a proprietary battery saver mode on the Moto G.