Glastonbury

Festival Season is here, does the Moto G save the day?

Moto G AppsWith the ‘Festival Season’ now is full swing and Glastonbury now just a faint memory, music lovers now look forward to ‘T in the Park’ on the 11th July.

What people can expect for certain is that the coming weeks are going to provide people with the chance to see their rock idols in amazing locations and share that experience with thousands of other fans!

Unfortunately the downside is that many of these people are likely to lose their smartphones as some point during these festivals. With so many people and the high change of wet weather, there is little chance that if you do lose your phone you are ever going to see it again.

The problem with Smartphones is that they are very very expensive to replace. A problem made worse by the fact that most are bought on contract, further decreasing their perceived value. The fact remains that they will cost a pretty penny to replace. Even if you have insurance on these devices, you are still highly likely to be expected to stump up around £150 in excess!

Google AppsMotorola think they have the solution, they believe that paying for a second ‘off contract’ phone is the solution. Instead of taking your top of the range £500+ smart phone with you, you buy a low cost Motorola Moto G smart phone instead.  I think they have a point. The Moto G is a very worthy second phone, in many ways you feel you have got a lot more for your money that the £130 would indicate.

Don’t be under any illusions here, you are NOT getting a charger, your are NOT getting headphones, Motorola believe that you probably already have these accessories and by not providing them it serves to keep the cost down for you.

What you do get is a pretty highly spec’d handset with an IPS LCD screen able to display 16 million colours at a HD resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels on a 4.5″ Goriila glass 3 coated screen. The back of the phone is has ‘soft touch’ coating which feels great which houses the camera and led flash. To insert the SIM card, you ‘simply’ pop open the phone by depressing the Motorola logo and slide the phone.

Camera wise, you have a 5MP camera with LED flash and a 1.3MP shooter at the front great for selfies. Both photos and videos can evidently be taken in HDR mode, which gives you a more dynamic range of colours.

The phone is driven by a Quad Core 1.2 Cortex process, which again is pretty high end for such a low cost device. 1GB of ram is provided with either 8 or 16GB of storage for saving your videos, photos or music.

Power is from a non-removable 2070 mAH battery, which again is pretty impressive and gives 24hrs of talk time. Don’t expect this kind of performance if you start streaming video or audio, but it seems that Motorola have crammed an incredible amount of high end technology into this device.

OS wise, you are looking at Android 4.4 (KitKat) in a near enough stock state. This means you are not wasting valuable processing and storage running additional ‘skins’ such as HTC Sense. Motorola have included some additional apps to allow your phone to be located if lost or remote wiped. Again, Motorola have the accident prone user in mind.

To sum up, if you are thinking of travelling to a music festival over the next weeks, you could do far worse that purchase a very capable phone in the form of the Moto G. In some cases, you might find it is a update friendly replacement to your existing handset, if you decide not to keep it, then eBay prices are likely to remain close to RRP for some time to come.

Finally, BIG thanks to Lucy at Weber Shandwick for the loan of the device!

Motorola Moto G
  • Value For Money
  • Usability
  • Lifetime
4.7

Summary

Blatantly aimed at the ‘festival set’, this is a phone that quite simply leaves everything standing simply for sheer value for money. A great 2nd phone.

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