Motorola Moto G is a quad-core, colorful smart phone for $179 - CNET ~ Electronic Gadgets

Motorola's Moto X brightened up our lives with its numerous colour options, its decent lineup of specs and its reasonable price tag. As a US-only phone however, it was a bit of a let down for those of us living outside of America.

Motorola's new Moto G brings a near identical design, a host of colours, a 720p 4.5-inch display and a ludicrously cheap price tag.

It'll start at $179 for the 8GB model or $199 for 16GB of storage. In the UK, the Moto G will be available on pay as you go rom O2 from £130 and will be available from 28 November.

Design and display

With its curving, minimalist back panel and plastic ridge around the front screen, the Moto G looks basically the same as the Moto X. It's a simple design, that eschews the industrial, almost aggressive look of the kevlar weave-coated Razr phones.

It has a 4.5-inch display, rather than the 4.7-inches of the Moto X, but its body is almost exactly the same size. We found the Moto X to be very comfortable to hold so hopefully the G will feel similarly nice, although it would have been nice to see a slight reduction in size to make it slide a little easier into those tight jeans.

The Moto G will be available in a variety of garish colours, including turquoise and purple, or you can opt for a plain black version if you don't want to stand out too much. The Moto X is highly customisable with numerous different colours and finishes available -- including a rather smart wood casing. It's not known yet whether the Moto G will have similar personalising options.

Like Google's Nexus 4, the Moto G will come with either 8 or 16GB of storage. It doesn't have external SD card support, so if you store a lot of music locally, or download massive games then you should seriously consider opting for the larger capacity model. You'll also get 65GB of free online storage through Google Drive.

The phone's 4.5-inch display has the same 1,280x720-pixel resolution as the Moto X, but the smaller screen size means the pixels are more tightly packed. The Moto G therefore has a slightly higher pixel density of 329 pixels per inch, edging out the Moto X's 312ppi. In everyday use however, I seriously doubt you'd notice much difference.

Software and processor

The Moto G comes running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. Although quite a recent version of the software, given that Motorola is now owned by Google it's a little surprising not to see the latest Android 4.4 KitKat on board, although Motorola is guaranteeing an update to the new software by January next year.

The Moto X came with touchless voice control that allowed you to dictate messages, emails, set calendar appointments or search for information simply by saying "Okay, Google Now" to the phone, followed by your commands. It's likely that the Moto G will have similar voice control features.

It's powered by a quad-core processor, rather than the dual-core chip found in the Moto X, although it has a slower 1.2GHz clock speed, as opposed to the 1.7GHz of the Moto X's chip. How much of a difference that makes in everyday use remains to be seen.

Camera and battery

Around the back of the Moto G is a 5-megapixel camera. That's a big step down from the cameras you'll find on the top-end smart phones -- the Sony Xperia Z1 has a 21-megapixel sensor and the Nokia Lumia 1020 boasts a ludicrous 41-megapixels -- but considering the massively lower price, that's probably a fair trade off.

So long as the camera is good enough to snap instagram pictures of your food or capture your cat doing something utterly adorable to share on Facebook, I'll be satisfied. The camera does have a few tricks up its sleeve including an HDR mode, panorama mode, burst mode as well as the ability to shoot slow-motion video. There's also a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calling over Google Hangouts or Skype.

The camera app looks very minimalistic, but Motorola reckons it makes it very simple to flick between settings and shooting modes.

Providing the juice for the phone is a 2,070mAh battery, which Motorola promises will get "all day battery". As always, your own battery life will depend completely on how you use the phone. If you play demanding games all day with the screen brightness on max, you shouldn't expect much or any battery left when you go to bed.

Outlook

With its 720p screen and 1.2Ghz processor, the Motorola Moto G isn't challenging the smart phone elite, but those specs are seriously impressive for a phone with such a cheap price tag. I'll have to wait for the full review before giving a final verdict, but on paper it looks like an astonishing buy for anyone not wanting the biggest, best hardware in their pocket.

This is a developing story and this page will be updated as more information becomes available.

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