Moto G4 And Moto G4 Plus Review: Quality, Budget Android Handsets

Name: Moto G4
Brand: Moto

by Chris Goetting, Brittany Goetting — Monday, August 22, 2016, 11:15 AM EDT

Moto G4: JetStream & Rightware

Page 4: Moto G4: JetStream & Rightware

Smart phones are ever increasingly becoming the way people access the Web. A phone needs to have a responsive web browser to render complex pages quickly, ans a reliable radio to ensure content is downloaded as quickly as possible. We can’t quantitatively state how well the radios perform in the phones as the variables are too difficult to lock down, but we can investigate browser performance. For our tests we use the JetStream benchmark for Javascript and RightWare’s BrowserMark for comprehensive web performance analysis, including HTML5.

JetStream and BrowserMark

JavaScript and Browser Testing

Unfortunately, the Moto G4’s bring up the bottom rung in both tests. The only phone they beat out is the now "ancient" Samsung Galaxy S4. Complex pages do render a little slowly in practice, but the process is smooth enough that it is not a nuisance.

Connection speed is still the limiting factor for most phones. To that end we feel the Moto G4’s radios do perform very well even if their Wi-Fi lacks support for the 802.11ac standard. Both phones picked up good Wi-Fi signal in corners of our home that typically cause other devices to buffer or drop off entirely.