It has been 2 months since I’ve been using Moto G Turbo and I have the experience to say that the upgrade from Moto G3 has not been worthy enough. Moto G Turbo can do all that Moto G3 could’ve, but not much more.
It has a True Octa Core Processor(Snapdragon 615 Soc), ’True’ meaning that all 8 cores can be active at the same time, so performance is not an issue. I’ve about 100 apps installed, including social network apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Skype, Viber, Hike etc. Such apps keep running in background to provide real time notifications, and the 2 gb RAM comes to my rescue. After all the heavy usage of my phone, the free RAM never went under 300 Mb or so which makes the phone lag free.
It supports fast charging, or as Motorola likes to call it, the Turbo Charging. It’s a massive selling point for someone with a busy lifestyle. The Turbo Charger that shipped with this device is a serious beast of a charger. Known as the TurboPower 25, the charger is capable of providing 25 watts of power output, which by any means is much more than any electronic device’s need. The charger outputs 2.85 A of current at 12 and 9 volts, and 2.35 A of current at 5 Volts, 5 Volts being the general standard for every USB device. So I would recommend to keep this charger real carefully, because in case you end up breaking it, the one that Motorola sells independently is TurboPower 15, which has 15 watts of power output, thus being considerably less powerful, even though it costs a fortune anyway.
There is however this one problem with Moto G Turbo, that it heats. Yes, it heats. Snapdragon 615 chipset is known to heat alright, but with heating, comes the downgrade in performance of Moto G Turbo. During Indian summer season, with room temperature being 30-35 degrees, the phone really becomes quite hot with slightly above average use. Yes, I agree that every phone that supports Fast Charging becomes quite hot while charging, but my point being, one the temperature reaches 45 degrees, the phone shuts off the 4 powerful 1.45 Ghz cores, seriously hampering the performance, and the charging speed too! The charging speed decreases as the temperature increases, thus rendering turbo charging ability of this phone almost useless during Indian summer! As far as the performance goes, if you end up using the phone outdoors under sunlight, the processor will most certainly heat, and be down-throttled, eating on performance of the device.
One major con that I experienced apart from this is that the phone lacks a magnetic sensor, which greatly limits the use of GPS navigation on this device. I’ve mentioned this point because it’s predecessor, Moto G3 had the magnetic sensor but Moto G Turbo doesn’t. Why Motorola decided to skip such basic sensor in a mid range device is not explainable.
Apart from the heating issue and the lack of magnetic sensor, the phone is a masterpiece for the price.
Overall, I’m very satisfied with Moto G Turbo independently, but when I compare it to the Moto G3, I guess this update is just not worth it, as for the cons of Moto G3 that this phone overcomes, it has a few of it’s own. If I would’ve rated Moto G3 4 stars out of 5 for the lack of raw power, I’ll still stick to 4 stars for Moto G Turbo for being not optimised enough to use it’s raw processing power, at least in a tropical country like India.