Motorola Moto G4 review: A better buy than the Moto G5, but should you wait for the G6?

The Moto G4 was the best budget handset you could buy when it launched – and it retained that prize when the follow-up handset, the Moto G5, failed to live up to expectations. While we await a rumoured Moto G6, there are other options you could consider – best amongst them is probably the 2017 version of the Samsung Galaxy J5, which offers more bang at a competitive price and an attractive handset. Alternatively, if you’re set on a Moto G, then the Moto G5 Plus is the pick this year. It’s better in every way – but it is £80 more. 

But what about the Moto G4? Is it worth considering in 2018? Well, it’s still a great little handset, but it’s showing its age a little as you’d expect. Probably best to hang on a little longer and see what Motorola has in store for 2018, if you can.

Jon’s original Moto G4 review continues below.

Motorola Moto G4 review 

The Motorola Moto G4 is the latest in a long line of successful budget smartphones for the company, stretching all the way back to 2013, but it has its work cut out in 2016. With rival manufacturers upping the quality of their budget handsets over the past 12 months, Motorola needs to do something special to maintain the Moto G4’s position at the top.

Lenovo (the new owner of the Motorola brand) hasn’t made life any easier for the Moto G4, however, by bumping up the base price. The cost of 2016’s Moto G is £169 inc VAT, up £20 on last year’s Moto G (3rd gen). That might not sound like much – it’s the price of a small round of drinks in central London, or a Domino’s Extra Large pizza – but it represents a 13% rise, which is not an insignificant increase when potential customers are likely to be on extremely tight budgets.

Motorola Moto G4 review: No argument, the Moto G4 is big

What does that extra money get you? The big gain is a larger screen. The Motorola Moto G4 has a 5.5in display, making it a whole half-inch bigger than last year’s model. It’s now up there with the giants of the smartphone world such as the OnePlus 2 and the iPhone 6s Plus in terms of its dimensions and, there’s no denying it, it’s one hell of a slab.

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Rather impressively, however, Motorola hasn’t just upped the size without considering the consequences. At the same time as enlarging the screen, it has slimmed down the case significantly, and it now measures 2mm thinner than the Moto G3. The Motorola Moto G4 is a mere 9.8mm thick, weighs 155g (that’s seriously light for a 5.5in phone), and best of all it feels sturdy with it, with a softly curved metal frame surrounding the screen adding to the high–quality feel.

In terms of the overall aesthetics, the Moto G4 isn’t as brash and loud as previous Moto G handsets either and, for me, that’s a bit of a shame. I loved the rounded contours, ribbed rear panel and bold camera surround of last year’s model, and the more subtle look of this year’s Moto G4 feels like Lenovo is playing it a bit safe.

Still, if the plain black and silver finish you see in the photographs here doesn’t float your boat, it is at least possible to customise the Moto G4 via the Motorola Moto Maker website. In all, you have eight rear-panel colours to choose from (dark fig, foam (a kind of pastel green), chalk white, raspberry, deep sea blue, pitch black, cobalt blue and lava red) and five “accent” colours (metallic fine gold, metallic pink, metallic silver, metallic ocean and metallic dark grey) which should give you ample opportunity to add a bit of personality.

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The only big downer when it comes to the design is that the Moto G4 isn’t IPX7 water-resistant like the Moto G (3rd gen). It’s still splash-proof, courtesy of a special coating, but don’t go dropping it in the bath.

It’s also mildly disappointing to discover that there’s still no NFC or fingerprint reader (you’ll have to stump up for the Moto G4 Plus if that’s on your shopping list), so you won’t be able to take advantage of the wonders of Android Pay.

Still, there is at least support for dual SIM, a feature I find useful handy for travel abroad. Pop a second SIM in and you can set which SIM is the default for data, thus avoiding potentially expensive roaming costs. And yet you’ll still be able to receive phone calls and SMS messages as normal on your day-to-day phone number.

You’ll find the second SIM card slot right next to the primary one beneath the clip-off rear panel, and settings for the two cards in Android’s settings menu under SIM Cards.

It’s worth noting at this point that, if you don’t buy your phone from the Moto Maker website, you may end up with a model with only a single SIM card slot. If this is a priority, make sure you buy your phone from the Moto Maker website, or at the very least check with your network or retailer before committing the cash.

Motorola Moto G4 review: Specifications, performance and battery life

The key reason for the Moto G family’s success has been the combination of sensible design and build quality with a keen sense of value, and the Moto G4 maintains that tradition. Inside is an octa–core Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 running at 1.5GHz, and this is backed by 2GB of RAM and either 16GB or 32GB of storage.

First impressions of the phone are that it’s pretty responsive, but with the odd glitch here and there. There’s some lag while zooming in and out of images in Google Photos, while scrolling quickly through image-heavy websites isn’t as ultra-smooth as on more expensive handsets with 8xx-series Qualcomm chips.

There’s nothing here to make you grind your teeth or curse under your breath, however, and in the benchmarks, the Moto G4 is clearly faster than last year’s model.

In the Geekbench benchmark, the difference between last year’s third-generation phone and this year’s Moto G4 amounts to a 49% advantage in the multi-core test and 26% in the single-core test. Those are both significant differences, and should keep the phone responsive for some time to come.

In GFXBench gaming tests, it’s a similar story with the Moto G4 gaining a 43% advantage over its predecessor in the onscreen (native resolution) test and a huge 71% gain in the offscreen test. In fact, of the budget models I’ve pitched the Moto G4 up against here, it’s the Honor 5X that gets the closest in terms of overall performance. The Moto G (3rd gen) is significantly slower across the board.

On battery life, however, the Moto G4 has overall performance sewn up. Although the Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 is only a 28nm part, it seems to be highly efficient and, coupled with a 3,000mAh battery, comfortably delivers a day of moderate use. When we ran it through our standard video-rundown test, the Moto G4 lasted 13hrs 39mins, which is an above-average score and almost three hours longer than the Honor 5X lasted in the same test.

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Motorola Moto G4 review: Display

In terms of its speed and battery life, the Moto G4 is a budget tour de force, and it continues that trend with the display, which is, quite simply, magnificent. It has a 5.5in IPS screen with a Full HD resolution (that’s 1,920 x 1,080), and it’s sharp as anyone really needs at this size.

You can’t see any pixels unless you squint really hard (or get out the magnifying glass), and unless you plan on using your phone for VR, you’ll never notice the difference between its sharpness and that of a higher-resolution phone such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.

Best of all, though, Motorola has clearly spent some time in the lab tweaking, polishing and perfecting how it performs.

Indeed, for a smartphone that costs a good deal less than £140 on Amazon UK (or $199 on Amazon US), the Moto G4’s screen is astonishingly good. Maximum brightness reaches all the way up to 540cd/m², which is better than the best phones in this price bracket by an enormous margin, and it’s almost twice as bright as its predecessor, which was no slouch itself.

In terms of maximum brightness in smartphones below £200, the only handset we’ve reviewed that gets close is the Honor 5X, and even then it’s a significant 70cd/m² behind.

The contrast ratio is highly impressive, too, and although the sRGB coverage isn’t quite as good as on phones with AMOLED displays (the Galaxy J5 and OnePlus X, for instance, cover 100%), it’s good enough that colours still look vibrant and easy on the eye.

In the case of the Moto G4, the average Delta E is a mere 1.3. What does this mean? Essentially that, for most colours in the sRGB colour gamut, most people would struggle to tell the difference between the intended colour (shown on the left half of the table above) and the one shown on the screen (shown in the right half).

To make problem areas easy to spot, the table above has a small bar to the right of each colour indicating how far away it is from what it should be, and each bar is colour coded: green and yellow are acceptable, red is not.

You can see that the only problematic area in terms of colour accuracy, in fact, is pale green, which the Moto G4 shows as slightly more saturated than it should do; even then, the problem isn’t huge. Photos, graphics and video content all appear pretty much as the creator intended – as long as that content was created with the help of equally colour-accurate hardware – and to my eyes, there’s no significant weakness here.

What may have more impact on usability than that slight weakness with recreating subtle green tones, is that it dims to only 22cd/m2 (measured at minimum brightness on a white screen). This may not sound like much, but it’s still bright enough to shine like a beacon in a darkened room compared with the best phones I’ve seen. The Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, for instance, dips below 2cd/m². So, if you’re one of those people (you know who you are!) in the habit of checking your phone in the cinema, be aware that the Moto G4 will earn you the ire of your fellow movie-goers. Otherwise, it’s an absolute cracker.

Buy the Motorola Moto G4 now from Amazon

Motorola Moto G4 review: Cameras

Happily, the camera is also great. You get a 13-megapixel rear camera with an f/2 aperture and a dual-LED flash for low-light indoor shots. There’s no laser or phase-detect autofocus here (for that you have to move up to the pricier Moto G4 Plus), nor optical image stabilisation, but there’s no problem with image quality.

Photographs shot on the Moto G4 are packed with detail and well exposed. Noise is kept under control in all but the darkest of scenes, and the HDR mode works well to equalise extremes of shadow and highlight (as long as you hold the phone steady).

I especially like how easy it is to drag the focus and exposure point around the screen and adjust the exposure compensation to suit. The only problem I had was that autofocus was somewhat slow to lock onto a subject, and occasionally a little jumpy and erratic.

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And don’t kid yourself that you’re getting Nexus 5X or 6P levels of quality here. The Moto G4’s photographs lack the fine detail and low-light performance of those phones.

For the money, however, what the Motorola Moto G4’s rear camera is capable of is nothing short of stunning, and it’s significantly better than the Moto G (3rd gen), capturing far cleaner, sharper and less noisy images.

The front camera is accomplished as well. With a resolution of 5 megapixels, it captures colourful and crisp selfies. There are no gimmicks here, such as the skin-smoothing, eye-enlarging craziness of Honor’s phones, but the wide-angle lens does mean that you don’t have to stretch out your arm to get in a decent chunk of background, or a group of friends.

Motorola Moto G4 review: Software

Of course, what usually puts the Moto G head and shoulder above its rivals is the quality of its Android skin, and the refreshing lack of any irritating or unnecessary eye-candy. Fortunately, nothing has changed on this front. The Moto G4 runs on a base of Android 6 Marshmallow, and it looks largely as Google originally intended it to look.

That means it’s clean, clearly laid out and sharply tailored. The pull-down notification menu looks and behaves exactly as it should, and has all the same toggles and switches as you’d expect to see on a Nexus handset. Google Now on Tap is in place, as is the new more granular permissions system, and everything else that makes Android 6 so good.

Naturally, there are some of Motorola’s own features here, too, but they’re mostly highly useful and unobtrusive. The Moto G4’s gestures are my favourites. These allow you to access some basic functions by waving or waggling the phone around in a specific way while it’s on standby.

Want to quickly switch on the torch? Simply do a double karate chop with the phone in your hand (you don’t actually need to hit anything) and it will switch on. Another double-chop and it turns off again.

Need to get into the camera app quickly? Simply twist the phone in your hand twice in quick succession. If you haven’t used a Motorola phone before, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to get used to doing this – and you’ll really miss it if you ever move to a different brand.

The Moto G4’s Active Display is just as handy. The phone senses whenever you pick it up, and displays the time and the date, plus recent notifications, so you may not have to turn on the phone at all. And if you do need to read more, simply touch the notification displayed on the screen, drag it up and the Moto G4 will unlock itself straight to the app in question. It’s all sensible and very, very useful. Don’t ever stop doing it, Motorola.

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Sadly, Motorola’s record for Android updates has suffered under Lenovo’s ownership. When the first Moto G was launched, Motorola had a decent record of issuing updates nearly as quickly as Google issued them for Nexus devices, but that’s no longer the case.

Also, interestingly, although it comes with Marshmallow the Moto G4 doesn’t ship with full disk encryption enabled by default. That’s odd, because it was always supposed to be one of the big new features of Marshmallow when it was first released. You can enable it yourself by delving into the settings, though.

The question on everyone’s lips right now, however, is when will the Moto G4 get Android N, especially given that Google has now officially released the software? The answer is it’s not likely to arrive before Google’s annual smartphone refresh, and that means probably not until mid October at the very earliest.

I’ll be updating this review with more information whenever I get it, but for now, you can keep tabs on when this momentous event is likely to take place by bookmarking our When will I get Android 7.0 Nougat on my phone? page and checking in periodically.

As I’ve highlighted above, though, Lenovo’s record in updating its existing Moto phones hasn’t so far been as good as in recent years, when the firm was owned by Google. That’s a shame as the the new OS brings with it a host of new features, including inline replies for message notifications and the ability to split-screen applications. Read our full review to read about these changes in more detail, and to find out about what else is new in Android Nougat.

Motorola Moto G4 review: Verdict

As an all-round package, it’s hard to find fault with the Motorola Moto G4. It may be a touch more expensive than last year’s Moto G, but since it’s better in most ways – with superior battery life, a better camera, a brighter, bigger screen and a sleeker, more grown-up design – you won’t find me complaining.

There may be some who complain that the Moto G is now too big, and yes, for those with smaller hands and pockets it may be a stretch too far. But let’s not get too hung up about what the Moto G4 isn’t and celebrate what it is: it’s one hell of a smartphone, and delivers more bang per buck than any smartphone to date. If you’re looking to spend less than £200 on your next handset, there’s simply no better choice than the Motorola Moto G4.

	Motorola Moto G4 specifications	Motorola Moto G4 Plus specifications
Processor	Octa-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 617	Octa-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 617
RAM	2GB	2GB/4GB
Screen size	5.5in	5.5in
Screen resolution	1,920x1,080	1,920x1,080
Screen type	IPS	IPS
Front camera	5 megapixels	5 megapixels
Rear camera	13 megapixels	16 megapixels
Flash	LED	LED
GPS	Yes	Yes
Compass	Yes	Yes
Storage (free)	16GB (10.8GB) / 32GB	32GB / 64GB
Memory card slot (supplied)	microSD	microSD
Wi-Fi	802.11ac	802.11ac
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 4.2 LTE	Bluetooth 4.2 LTE
NFC	No	No
Fingerprint sensor	No	Yes
Wireless data	3G, 4G	3G, 4G
Size	153x77x7.9mm	153x77x7.9mm
Weight	155g	155g
Operating system	Android 6.0.1	Android 6.0.1
Battery size	3,000mAh	3,000mAh
Warranty	One year RTB	One year RTB
Price SIM-free (inc VAT)	£169	£229 (32GB); £264 (64GB)