Contract Free: Moto G And Republic Wireless Review

Performance Summary: Okay, so the Moto G isn’t a performance monster. It simply does not compete with the high-end smartphones in our test bank, nor its bigger brother the Moto X, but then again, it’s not trying to. We found that in use, the Moto G was relatively fast and fluid whether we were browsing a website, shooting off a text, or playing a game. The camera performance and features were unimpressive, but the battery life was excellent.


What Motorola is going for with the Moto G is a budget phone that outperforms its price class. Remember, it costs a piddly $149 on Republic Wireless’ service with no contract; contrast that with so many souped-up smartphones that cost up to $199 with a two-year service contract, and heaven help you if you lose or break your phone before that two years is up and you have to drop hundreds more for a new one.

Even the Moto X ($299 off contract), which is a good phone with decent value on its own, is twice the cost of a Moto G.

There are downsides to the Moto G, though. The camera isn’t up to snuff--5MP, 720p capture, and no granular exposure and ISO (etc.) controls is not what we want to see on any smartphone these days--and the screen resolution is a shrug-worthy 1280x720. Further, on this particular version of the Moto G, there’s no expandable storage option; this won’t bother some people at all (especially with 50GB of free Google Drive storage to dump files onto), but it may be a dealbreaker for others. Further, it only supports 3G, not 4G LTE (although that's changing soon).

Still, the Moto G feels like a sturdy, well-made device, and in daily use--calls, texts, web browsing, maps, gaming, and so on--we found it to be enjoyable and useful.

This is technically a low-end phone--but you’d never guess it, and that’s exactly what Motorola was going for. This is $149 very well spent, and coupled with a $25 per month unlimited (3G) from Republic Wireless, the whole package is remarkably inexpensive--and unbound by contracts.