SlideShow: Google's Moto G smartphone and first impressions

Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

The Moto X's younger brother, the Moto G, is Google's attempt at capturing customers in emerging markets and covering the feature phone void once dominated by Nokia.

The Moto G is an impressive smartphone which looks and feels very much like the Moto X except it is slightly heavier and thicker. Performance is surprisingly speedy for most functions and call quality is superb on the TELUS network.

The Moto G runs on Android 4.3 and features a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage space (around 5.2 GB of which is usable) although users automatically receive 50 GB from Google Drive. No contract price for this smartphone is $200 without a contract.

On the flipside, Moto G has no LTE connectivity, no NFC, one less microphone and lacks all the gesture-based controls, the Just Talk voice functionality and the active notifications that were showcased with the Moto X. You don't even get a wall adapter, just the USB cable to charge. Motorola has had to make choices on what to keep and what to feature and so far, it looks like they made the right choices.