Moto G5 first impressions: Affordable smartphone with decent camera and design

After launching the Moto G5 plus, Motorola has now announced Moto G5, the younger sibling of the Plus variant. The device runs on Android 7.0 Nougat and supports 4G VoLTE. The smartphone is already available on Amazon India at a price of Rs. 11, 999.

We were present at the launch event and tested the handset for a brief period of time to find out what Motorola is offering this time. Here's what we think of new device- the Moto G5.

Design and Display

Motorola has come out with a different design scheme unlike the previous devices. This time the company has come up with metal body casing with a removable back panel. The battery unit is also removable in the Moto G5. The smartphone is compact and is very comfortable to hold.

The microSD and SIM card slots are positioned inside the back panel. The smartphone comes in two colour variants- "Lunar Grey" and "Fine Gold" and we got the Lunar Grey variant.

Power button along with volume rockers are placed on the right side of the smartphone, the headphone jack is at the top and the microUSB port is located at the bottom. The circular camera module is positioned at the back and you will find the oval shaped fingerprint scanner right under the display.

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The front camera, earpiece and sensors are placed above the display.

The smartphone has a 13 megapixel rear camera with phase detection autofocus along with LED flash light to brighten up the pictures in low light conditions. The 5 megapixel front camera has a wide-angle lens for selfies. It also comes with signature Best Shot software, beautification mode, and professional mode.

Overall, the smartphone has a sturdy design and looks premium.

Talking about the display, Moto G5 comes with 5- inch Full HD display with a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The display is quite responsive, seems decent and colours also look quite vibrant.

Camera

The smartphone sports a 13-megapixel rear camera with an aperture size of f/2.0. The sensor uses1.1-micron pixels and also comes equipped with Phase Detection Auto Focus (PDAF). The front has a5 megapixel selfie camera with a wide angle lens that works on a aperture size off/2.2.

In our brief usage, the camera did a decent job and took some good photos. The colours look vibrant on the full HD screen and images have good detailing. We will evaluate the camera performance in detail while reviewing the handset in the coming week.

Battery and Connectivity

The smartphones is powered by a removable 2,800mAh battery unit. The packaging also offers a 10W rapid charger, which gives you hours of power in minutes of charging. .

Comparing the Moto G5 battery to its competitors, the smartphone is a no match as the Redmi 3S Prime and Lenovo K6 power comes with 4,100mAH and 4000mAh battery respectively.

This can be a deal-breaker for consumers, however it's too early to comment on battery performance and we will give the final verdict in our comprehensive review of the smartphone.

On the connectivity front, the smartphone supports 4G, VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2, NFC, GPS/A-GPS/GLONASS, microUSB with USB OTG and FM Radio.

Hardware and Software

Moto G5 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor, which is an octa-core CPU clocked at 1.4 GHz The CPU is paired up with Adreno 505 GPU and 3 GB of RAM to take care of graphic intensive tasks and multitasking respectively. For storage there is 16GB of internal memory which can be expanded further using a microSD card by up to 128GB.

It is worth mentioning that you can get same specification with Redmi 3s Prime that offers a better 32GB storage option, a metal build, for just Rs 8,999

On Software front, the smartphone comes with latest Android 7.0 Nougat. Interestingly, Nougat allows users to treat SD card memory also as system memory, so 16GB storage on the Moto G5 is enough to start with.

The smartphone also comes loaded with pre- installed apps like Amazon Prime Videos, Amazon shopping and a widget to get all the latest deals.

Verdict

There is no doubt that Moto G5 is a feature loaded affordable smartphone with decent camera and premium design. However smartphones like Redmi Note 4, Redmi 3S Prime and Honor 6X also gives similar features at low-price point.

We will evaluate Moto G5's complete potential to give our final verdict in the comprehensive review. Stay tuned on GIZBOT.