The Moto G has been the best budget phone for years. Now it’s facing a new battle to hold onto the crown.
The G5 looks more like a high-end handset than previous Motos, with a removable aluminum rear panel. It feels hefty in hand, and it’s an attractive design.
Display
The Moto G5 is the latest entry-level handset from Motorola, and it has some decent hardware to boot. It has a near-stock Android Nougat UI, a nifty fingerprint sensor, and great gesture controls.
The display of the Moto G5 is a 5.0-inch Full HD IPS LCD screen with a resolution of 1080×1920 pixels. It is coated with Corning Gorilla Glass, which means it’s solid and resistant to cracks and scratches.
The display of the Moto G5 is not as accurate as other budget smartphones, but it’s still a good enough performance for an entry-level phone. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot more accurate than the display of the G5 Plus and has an excellent color temperature value of 6504K.
Camera
The Moto G5 Plus is a great budget-friendly smartphone with a good camera. It produces well-detailed pictures in good light and supports options to shoot videos in HD or 4K resolution.
The G5 Plus’s camera has a 13-megapixel primary sensor with a fast f/2.0 lens and phase detection autofocus software for speedier focus and sharper photos. It’s not relatively as quick as the Samsung Galaxy S7, and the image quality isn’t exactly top-notch, but the results are still very pleasing.
It has a 2MP depth sensor and a dedicated macro camera, neither of which is particularly useful, and it lacks optical image stabilization. It also has a 5MP front-facing camera with a wide-angle lens for group selfies.
Battery
The Moto G5 Plus is an excellent phone for people who want a high-performing telephone with plenty of battery life. It’s the latest in the company’s budget-friendly series, and it has a great screen, good performance, and a fast camera.
Its non-removable battery isn’t massive, but it lasts a day and a half on moderate use. The Moto G5 Plus does have a slightly larger battery than its predecessor, though, so this isn’t a deal-breaker.
Compared to other phones, the G5 Plus has excellent battery performance. That’s reflected in the fact that it lasted 13 hours 11 minutes of video-playback battery test, which is 2 hours longer than the smartphone average and a half an hour longer than the Honor 6X’s mark.
The Moto G5 Plus has a 10W rapid charger, meaning it can charge from 20% to 50% in just 20 minutes. It’s not as quick as the 15W TurboCharger used with higher-end Motorola devices, but it’s still good.
Performance
The Moto G has been the gold standard for budget smartphones for four generations. Its design was always gorgeous, its screen and performance punched above its weight at a price.
This year though, the company seems to have misunderstood what made the Moto G series great. Its screen, performance, and camera all get weaker for the Moto G5, even though the phone has been given a makeover.
Compared with last year’s model, the Moto G5 has a smaller 5″ display with a lower resolution, a significantly less powerful processor, and half the onboard storage.
Nevertheless, the display is still a decent 1080p affair with crisp colors and plenty of detail. The octa-core processor is capable enough for everyday tasks, but it’s not entirely up to the standards of the Galaxy S8 or LG G6, and games don’t run as smoothly as they could.