The new Moto G5 Plus may not set any speed records, but it’s a solid, useful Android phone with no bloat and a pleasingly low price.
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By Dan Rosenbaum
Contributing Writer,
Computerworld | March 24, 2017
When I book a plane ticket, I fly economy, but I always cast an eye over the prices in the business class column. For three to four times the cost, I could get better food, more room, a more comfortable seat and more personal attention. What I wouldn’t get is a faster trip. So although I’ll pay a few extra bucks for a little extra legroom in coach, I forego business class, because the luxuries aren’t worth all the added money.
To an increasing extent, smartphone buyers are being asked to make similar calculations. As high-end phones reach the $800 mark (rumors have it that the next iPhone will have a shocking $1,000 price ), name-brand vendors are carving out economy-class price niches at about a quarter of that. And in the same way that the less expensive airplane ride will still get you to Fargo or Paris, the cheaper phone will give you what you want just as safely and almost as quickly.
The latest economy-class phone is the Moto G5 Plus. It’s built with the same style language of the Moto Z : aluminum body, slightly rounded back and a distinctive.87-in. circular, .08-in.-high bump on the phone’s back for the camera. It’s immediately recognizable as a Lenovo-owned Moto phone (as opposed to the design of the Google version of Moto, or that of the original independent company). Unlike the Moto Z, there are no contacts on the back for expansion modules; the G5 Plus rides alone. The phone feels sturdy and is pleasant to hold.
At 5.9 x 2.9 x 0.3 in., the G5 Plus is among the smaller contemporary phones, roughly the same size as the Huawei Honor 6X , with which it competes. Moto’s engineers did not strain themselves to shoehorn a particularly big display into that space — its 5.2-in. LCD screen with a 1080 x 1920 resolution is smaller than the Honor’s 5.5-in. screen, although both phones have the same pixel count.
Power and volume buttons are along the right edge, the drawer for dual SIMs and a microSD card are along the top, and the headphone and micro-USB ports are on the bottom. The single-port speaker fires through the same aperture used for listening to phone calls. It’s nothing to write home about.
There’s a fingerprint sensor on the phone’s chin, below the phone’s Back/Home/Recent soft buttons. There is no provision for left-handedness. The phone runs a stock version of Android 7.0 (Nougat).
The Moto uses an eight-core Snapdragon 625 chipset, and comes with either 2GB memory and 32GB storage or 4GB/64GB. (I reviewed the latter.) Performance was on the low end of so-so, scoring around 64328 on the Antutu benchmarking suite. That’s below the top 50 currently available phones, but a bit ahead of the Honor 6X’s score of 57055. I noticed that, particularly in the 3D graphics part of the test, the G5 Plus’ display looked choppy. This is not a phone made for heavy-duty gaming.
On the other hand, the 3,000mAh battery is quite substantial. I wasn’t able to complete a full-drain battery test — the G5 Plus’ system software seemed to short-circuit it — but the partial tests that I was able to complete indicated that the battery would last a full day and then some under a steady load.
