The Moto G series has been easy to recommend every year since its beginnings in 2013. The phones don’t cost too much, they're always reliable and there's a mix of specs and price points to choose from.
This year we get four options, the crowd-pleasing Moto G7, higher-end Moto G7 Plus, cheap Moto G7 Play and the long-lasting Moto G7 Power.
If you’re not tied to a very specific, low budget, one important question is: how close can the Moto G7 Plus get you to the experience of a Samsung Galaxy S10? It’s likely to command three times the outlay when it's officially announced later in February.
The notch comes to Moto phones
This year Motorola has actually tamed its designs a little. The Moto G7 Plus has curved glass back, 2.5D glass on the front and aluminium sides. However, the light reactive finish of the last generation has gone.
Our version looks black in most lighting, and a bright light reveals the blue tint. The Moto G6 Plus has an additional layer under the glass that reflects light in a distinctive pattern, carving an “S” across its back.
The off-black Moto G7 Plus looks so sober, it’d consider orange squash an extravagance. But boring? Not quite. The phone will also come in white and red as well as this off-black, and the red in particular is about as bold as phones come.
Motorola has also switched from a front fingerprint scanner to a rear one, in all these phones. It says this is a result of market research, which suggested people just see them as “different”, one no better than the other. We tend to agree, but at the launch of the Moto G6, Motorola reps also told us the cheaper models had back scanners because they are cheaper to implement. Make of that what you will.
These are also the first Moto G phone with notches. The Moto G7 Plus has a teardrop notch, usually considered among the smallest and least obtrusive. However, this one is surprisingly deep, almost Pixel 3XL like in proportions, which is a shame. The G7 Power has a wider notch, but it’s less distracting because it digs into the display far less.
Perhaps we don’t need design perfection at £270, though. This is also still the best-looking Moto G generation, on a level with last year’s.
Read more: The best budget smartphone and cheap phones in 2021
And the other models in the range? The Moto G7 looks almost exactly the same as the Plus. It has the same size screen, the same notch. Dropping down a level, the G7 Power swaps rear glass for plastic, just as the Moto G6 Play did last year. It’s slightly thicker too, but is impressively slim considering it fits in a huge 5,000mAh battery.
Motorola says this should last up to 2.5 days. It calls the Power the new model in the range. However, look at the tech rather than the naming and it’s actually the Moto G7 Play that has changed ideals.
The Play is smaller than the others, and the single one that drops below £150, if only by a penny. The rear here is textured plastic too. It looks a little like the matt glass some OnePlus 6T variants use, but feels like plastic.
Don’t get too hung up on how well the Moto Gs treat your fingers, though. All four phones come with a slim silicone shell. Put it on and you can’t tell whether there’s glass or plastic underneath. All four also have a water-repelling nano coating and a 3.5mm headphone jack. That these phones don’t nudge you towards buying new wireless headphones is a relief.
Sharpish screens
All of the Moto G7 phones have 6.2-inch screens apart from the Moto G7 Play, which has a smaller 5.7-inch display. The two higher-end models have Full HD-grade resolutions, the cheaper two use less impressive 1512 x 720 pixel panels. There is some minor pixellation to the Moto G7 Power in particular. However, all four are reasonably sharp.
Looking at them all in a row, like a family get-together, is a reminder that panel batches can simply look different to each other. The top-end G7 Plus and entry-level G7 Play have a cooler, cleaner-looking white balance. The middle two have a slight warm/yellow tint. What you end up with may well be a case of pot luck, but the differences here are not huge. A sharper image is one of the best reasons to pick a G7 or G7 Plus, though.
Go Plus for performance
All four Moto G7s run Android 9.0, and have Motorola’s very clean and simple custom interface. You could mistake it for “vanilla” Android, although it doesn’t have the digital wellness features that were the most striking part of 9.0’s release.
That three of the four also use the same processor is something of a surprise. All but the Moto G7 Plus have a Snapdragon 623, an octa-core CPU with the Adreno 506 GPU. The G7 Plus has a Snapdragon 636, which has eight cores and the Adreno 509 GPU.
The difference? Very little, according to some benchmarks. In Geekbench 4, the Plus scores 4909 points, the G7 4787, Power 4579 and the Play 4229. The low-end phone’s lower result may be down to its use of 2GB RAM, rather than 4GB. That the RAM seems to make more of a difference than the CPU cores shows how close they all are. And the Play’s score is excellent for a sub-£150 handset.
Sometimes processors in the same class can only be separated by a pure gaming test, though, which largely isolates the GPU. 3DMark is one of the most popular GPU-testing tools and sure enough, 3DMark’s Slingshot Extreme graphics test shows a far more pronounced difference.
The three Snapdragon 632 Moto G7 phones score 513-515 points (OpenGL), far less than the 945 points of the Moto G7 Plus. As such it looks like the best option for gamers, although all four can handle impressive 3D games fairly well.
Varying camera credentials
If you’re looking for a reason not to make do with the Moto G7 Play, the cameras provide it. A quick play with these cameras shows the Play is easily the weakest. Night images from its 13-megapixel rear camera look soggy, and indoors shots lack much of their punch and colour saturation. The 8-megapixel selfie camera is poor too.
Both the G7 and G7 Power have a primary 12-megapixel Omnivision camera, so you’d expect their performance to be similar. However, the Moto G7 is significantly better at night, seemingly thanks to its faster f/1.8 lens. It also has a depth sensor for background blur images.
The Moto G7 Plus is, no surprise here, the best performer of the four. It takes the sharpest selfies and is the only phone with a Sony sensor, the most popular brand among phones. It’s the Sony IMX519, a fairly large 16-megapixel chip.
This camera has optical image stabilisation too, a first for the range. OIS used to be considered essential for good low-light performance. However, we have moved on. Mid-range phones now have clever AI modes that let you shoot handheld night shots with good dynamic range. The Moto G7 Plus does not have such software, and isn’t even that skilled at brightening dark scenes.
For £269 the Moto G7 Plus camera is not bad. However, given the hardware improvements over the standard Moto G7, that the two often output similar results is a mild disappointment.
Good battery, fast charging
The batteries of three of these phones are quite conservative. 3000mAh is considered the baseline for current phones, and that’s what you get in the Moto G7, G7 Plus and G7 Play.
Don’t expect the two larger variants to last more than a day. This is where the Moto G7 Power earns an advantage that may outweigh all others for some of you. It has a huge 5,000mAh battery. Motorola claims it lasts longer than two days. That Motorola fits such a battery into a phone that isn’t obviously heavy or chunky impresses.
All four Moto G phones come with Turbo Charger adapters. And while the G7 Plus’s is quicker than the rest, with 27W output, the Moto G7 Power is clearly the one to pick if battery life is your main concern.
Still the affordable alternative
The Moto G7 range is a true family of phones. Their resemblance may initially seem confusing. Four budget phones, all at once? But each member has its own appeal.
For tight budgets and those with limited interest in the tech, there’s the Moto G7 Play. The Moto G7 Power is here for those who just want a phone that won’t die at 8pm.
Those after an affordable phone that doesn’t look or feel cheap should investigate the Moto G7. And for the enthusiast the Moto G7 Plus is the best buy. There are only two top choices here, though. The long-lasting Power and the gamer-friendly Moto G7 Plus are those we are most likely to recommend.
These Moto G7 phones don’t have the disruptive effect of the Honor View 20 or OnePlus 6T. However, the range - and the Moto G7 Plus in particular - serves as a useful reminder that £500 is still a lot to spend on a phone when the budget alternatives are this good.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
