Contract Free: Moto G And Republic Wireless Review

Just as the Moto G’s underlying hardware ensures that the device isn’t trying to compete with high-end, super-powered handsets, the 5MP rear camera isn’t competing with higher-end smartphone cameras, either.

Still, it’s a camera with respectable features. There’s HDR, flash, panorama, slo-mo video, geo-tagging capabilities, the ability to toggle the 16:9 widescreen ratio on and off, and a “shutter tone” toggle.


You have essentially no granular control over important features such as exposure and ISO, though. However, there’s a clever feature called Control Focus & Exposure that lets you drag brackets to any object to automatically focus on it and enable the software to automatically set the exposure. What this does is allow you to quite easily shoot pictures with items in the foreground or background in focus.


We're fairly happy with the color richness and crispness we got from snapping pics outdoors, or indoors with good light. As you can see, the quality is solid for a 5MP camera.

You'll get essentially the same performance out of the Moto G when you're shooting video, too. We should also note that the microphone performance when shooting video is solid; it picks up rear and front sounds at more or less equal volume, and although you don't get much bass or midrange response--not that you'd expect to with a smartphone mic anyway--the sound is at least clear and crisp.

This is one area where you can get a tangible sense of where a higher-end device outpaces a budget handset like the Moto G. Just soak in the glorious onboard camera features of smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S5 or the Nokia Lumia Icon; it’s nearly heartbreaking in comparison.

Battery Life Stress Test Heavy Load Stress Testing With AnTuTu Tester

On the other hand, battery life is excellent. Motorola boasts all-day (meaning 24 hours) juice with the Moto G’s 2070 mAh battery, and anecdotally we can say that the claim isn’t a spurious one.


We also ran the Moto G’s battery through a controlled benchmark with AnTuTu; here you can see that the inexpensive handset does quite well, hanging tough with the big boys with a score of 495.