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Motorola’s new Moto G, the follow up to one of the best-ever budget smartphones, has a bigger screen, better camera and costs just £145.
The new Moto G has a 5in screen – 0.5in bigger than last years 4.5in screen – but the thin bezels mean it maintains “pocketability”.
“With the new Moto G we’re trying to bring a premium experience to the next billion people ready to buy a smartphone,” Brian Metha, head of North American marketing at Motorola told the Guardian. “The trend is for big screens, but we didn’t want to compromise the pocketability of the phone so we made everything else as small as possible.”
The new model has an improved eight-megapixel camera, front-facing stereo speakers, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and comes in 8GB and 16GB storage options, with a microSD card slot for adding up to 32GB more storage for music, movies and photos.
Motorola has made the Moto G dual-SIM – a feature more common outside of developed markets like the UK – so it can use two SIM cards for different mobile networks, simultaneously allowing different tariffs, numbers and options to be used at the same time. It offers 3G connectivity only.
‘Back on the map’
The first Moto G, released in November 2013, was a surprise hit for Motorola in the US and Europe, principally due to its low price and comparatively high specifications. After six months, Motorola said it was its best-selling phone ever, and it looked as though it could pull the loss-making division – then owned by Google – back towards profit after years of losses. Though profits have not materialised, and the division is now concluding a sale to China’s Lenovo, expectations are high.
“The original Moto G put Motorola back on the map,” Simon Collinson, international general manager for Motorola told the Guardian. “It propelled us from zero to 6% market share in the UK, and became the best selling Motorola smartphone ever.”
The smartphone is available today for £145, but it should cost less as mobile phone networks begin to sell it like the old Moto G before it. The Moto G will ship with the latest version of Android “KitKat” with a guaranteed update to the next version, Android L.
• 2013 Motorola Moto G review – the best budget smartphone is just £135
• Motorola Moto E: review – is this the best smartphone under £90?
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