Moto G4 Play Review: Budget Android, Full-Featured And Unlocked

To get a feel for how the Moto G4 Play compares to other smartphones on the market, we ran a few benchmarks that are currently available on the web and in the Android Marketplace. 

Unfortunately, the Moto G4 Play wasn’t able to run the WebGL 2.0 test, which is part of the Graphics Suite in the Basemark Web 3.0. After the rest of the components of this benchmark finished, the Moto G4 Play returned a score of 39.64 which is the lowest in our comparison chart.

In every component of the AnTuTu 6 benchmark, the Moto G4 Play returned the lowest score in comparison to other phones we’ve had in for testing. As you can see, the faster processor and GPU found in the G4 and the G4 Plus make a difference in this test.

The same story is true for Geekbench—the Moto G4 Play is at the bottom of the chart below both of its siblings, the G4 and G4 Plus.

The Moto G4 Play remains consistent, again returning scores at the bottom of both GFXBench charts and coming in behind the G4 and G4 Plus.

In all components of the 3DMark test, the Moto G4 Play returns scores that are significantly lower than its siblings. In fact, in many of the tests the G4 and G4 Plus return scores that are more than double the scores of the Moto G4 Play.

Although the Moto G4 Play is at the bottom of most of our comparison charts, real-world performance was still adequate, especially for a casual user who wants to make calls, send texts, and browse the web. This phone is not designed for anything over and above casual gaming, however.  If you want the ultimate graphics performance in a smartphone, the Moto G4 Play is not for you.

Battery Life

The Moto G4 Play runs on a removable 2800 mAh battery which claims to offer up to 24 hours of mixed usage. To get a better feel for how the Moto G4 Play’s battery compares to other smartphones on the market, we ran our two standard battery benchmarks.

The first test, AnTuTu's Battery Test, is a high-load benchmark that aims to drain the battery of a device as quickly as possible, setting the display brightness to high and cranking up workload for the processor, graphics core, and memory.

To offer a "best-case scenario" result, we also ran our own Hot Hardware web browsing test where we cycle a page ever few minutes with screen brightness set to 50% and Wi-Fi enabled. All other radios such as Bluetooth, NFC and geo-location are turned off and the phone is forced to keep the display on for the entire test. Phones are then monitored for uptime duration.

The Moto G4 Play performed well in the AnTuTu Battery test, earning sixth place. It also managed to survive for 487 minutes, or just over eight hours, in our Hot Hardware web browsing test. In average usage scenarios which included browsing the web, checking email, taking pictures, etc., we were able to use the phone all day without needing a charge.