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It has a curved glass back and aluminium sides. Its back is Gorilla Glass, used in most top-end phones. It has an on-trend screen, letting it fit a 5.
Similarly, while top-end phones are starting to boast of HDR-capable displays, you have to question the point in a display smaller than that of the average airplane seat. As in previous years, Motorola has continued to trim out elements that might show up the Moto G6 as a cheaper phone.
It will even unlock by recognising your face, like an iPhone X. They are marginal improvements in app loads and interface transitions measured in milliseconds. For the last few years, megapixel sensors have been used in almost all top phones. They offered, and still offer, the best balance of resolution and low-light sensitivity.
Now they are so well-established, even the Moto G6 gets one of these sensors. With the added help of a little software tweaking, you get dynamic range comparable with some of the best phone cameras around. And much better low-light detail than the rival Nokia 6, which has a higher-resolution sensor with smaller sensor pixels. Is this a dream phone without issues? Like the Moto G5 range, the Moto G6 camera suffers from shutter lag.
It is particularly noticeable when the Auto HDR kicks in, as it involves merging multiple exposures. There are real differences between the Moto G6 and a phone four times the price. Of course there are. This uses a Snapdragon CPU, has a plastic rear, x pixel screen and a lower-end megapixel rear camera without a secondary background blur sensor. So it's up to you to decide whether you require this. But the most important thing is: you do have a choice. I did allow backups, but turned off photo sync you get unlimited storage for hi-res pics , as well as any photo recognition, sorting or tagging feature available.
Some of these need to tweaked separately from the system settings, so you do really need to pay attention to every single app and its functionality. Part of the privacy game was turning permissions off for pretty much every app out there. I did leave Google Play and such allowed, because what's the point. If you don't trust the operating system, don't use the product. To be frank, while the permissions are rather liberal, they are not wild. And things have improved a lot over the past few years. Maybe we should thank GDPR for this? Do note that you also have special permissions in addition to ordinary ones, so you can tweak those, too.
There's also usage access. All in all, you need some tech savvy to master this properly, but it's entirely doable and without adverse effects except things not being plug-n-play as you may expect them to be. There were three rounds of firmware updates from Motorola, incrementally going from last summer to now. Each one weighed about MB and needed a reboot. But the setup was fast, only about three or four minutes each time.
App updates were also really fast. In the future, Moto G6 will also have an upgrade option for Android 9. The old Moto G4 is breezing along nicely with the latest updates, so that's cool. You can hide sensitive content from notifications, and when you connect the phone via USB, you need to explicitly allow file transfer. There does not seem to be a trust option like in iOS.
Overall, this is pretty tight. Despite my due diligence, it took a while for the system to calm down and stop pestering me with suggestions and offers. I do feel this is annoying, because I didn't just randomly turn things off. So this does not help in any way. Thinking of my Windows Phone 10 setup, that one was far faster and less annoying.
Whereas the desktop side of things is quite noisy and pesky. Oh the humanity. There's very little bloat. The app list is fairly reasonable, and you do get a few handy tools. You also have Outlook for mail makes more sense than any other option really , but the rest of the Office suite is not installed.
Some of these apps cannot be uninstalled, but you can disable them, which is sort of half-okay. I decided to install Firefox as my primary browser.
The main reason is the ability to install an ad-blocker without any hassles. Now, one may argue that I will have a less optimized browser that is slower and uses more battery than Chrome. On the other hand, not seeing ads will remove a ton of useless Javascript code, which ought to make pages load faster and use fewer cycles, hence more speed and less juice.
Plus, take wide-angle selfies with fun face filters on the 8 MP front camera. Simply complete the form below to see the status of your device. New cameras, longer battery life, Night Mode, a goofy selfie feature and a price drop Retrieved May 25, Custom Kernels for Moto G6 Plus? The operating system is continuously improving, and I'm seeing a more refined interface, better privacy and security controls, better ergonomics, and more appeal.
I have to say that Firefox behaves quite all right. It supports voice and location, if you need those options, and I didn't encounter any incompatibility just yet. Now, you will also have an Android logo icon overlay shown if you visit websites that have their equivalent applications installed on the phone, like Youtube. This is another example of a little nudge toward native apps rather than websites, although in essence, there's really no reason to be using dozens of apps and share random data with so many entities.
This has always been true, and I've done as few app connections and integration as possible, on every single smartphone I've tried and used. Even in Firefox, you can turn a lot of the stuff off.
There's Firefox account nudge, Firefox suggestions, stats and data. You can turn these off. Part of the long game of trimming down the noise. But this is a solid choice for a mobile browser, and I'm quite happy. Both work quite well.
One thing that used to bother me for a long time in G4 was that if you picked up the phone, the screen would wake and show you notifications. This function could be triggered by pretty much any action, so you would have the screen constantly waking and draining battery. The feature to tweak this off is available in the Moto app rather than standard Android settings. Same here. Accessibility features are available, but not turned on. Adaptive brightness works really well, and I tested this even in glaring sunlight.
Font clarity is good - you can change this if you need, and it's ironic that Chrome on desktop would have such a bad UI layout , but on the phone, it's actually designed to look and work well.
The color and contrast are all dandy in Android. So this makes me wonder. Now, the calendar app looks like something designed by a child. And if you go for En US , which is in my view the only acceptable language for operating system interfaces, the weather thingie will suggest Fahrenheit as the temperature unit, which is sort of medieval.
I mean really?
The camera is okay. Not stellar but good. Again, the first thing you have when you launch the camera app is a whole bunch of unnecessary stuff - location, object recognition, facial recognition. Why the hell would I want these options? If I'm taking pictures of my friends, I know who they are, and if they are strangers, then I don't care who they are. Now, the actual quality of the photos. Do take into account that Microsoft took special care to add great optics to their flagship model, plus don't forget the price difference, more than twice what G6 costs, and this plays an important factor.
On the other hand, remember my Nokia E6 vs Samsung S5 experiment. Good quality is good. Anyway, let's see what gives here. First, the same shot I did with the other phones - a photo of a working lamp. Moto G6 right has more artifacts than the Lumia left , but the great thing is, it looks much better than the G4! Truer colors, and better separation of foreground and background. The sensor is also not as saturated by the strong light. I also took a few shots outside.
Now, the aspect ratio is a bit different, you will excuse me. Anyway, Lumia on the left, Moto on the right. The does truer colors even though they feel cooler. The Moto camera app also gives you a somewhat enhanced spectrum - you see things being brighter and more vivid than they actually are, so that can skew your perception.