The only flaw I can find with this phone is that, like all other cell phones, they cannot stand up to the abusive lifestyle I tend to demand of my personal communications gear. This is my third. The two before it both broke because of my own carelessness. I have broken many phones over the years, including a Gzone and a particularly rugged Kyocera, which is why I've gone back to owning cheap phones. But the price keeps going down!
With Verizon you can get this phone activated for about $30 a month with 1G of data and unlimited voice. Why sign a contract to pay three times as much? Well, for one, you will be shunned from visiting the Verizon store like a plague carrier; stores only cater to contract holders. They will not answer questions about your account, take payments, or even sell you a case (but the Moto G is old enough that they wouldn't have one to sell you anyway.) You will also get somewhat degraded service in some markets. Where I live, there is no performance difference between this phone and the iphone I used to have on contract.
There is no card slot on this phone, and the battery is not removeable. But if you aren't planning on watching HD movies on a transoceanic flight, you will not have much trouble from those aspects. I have run out of app space once or twice, but I just deleted a bunch of apps I wasn't using and things were back to normal. I keep a couple gigs of mp3s in there for car trips and mowing the lawn.
Like any carrier-based phone, this one comes with a bunch of apps you won't want and can't delete, like the NFL app or the "my verizon" app that just loads and loads, but you can disable these apps in Android and at least not see them on the menu. If you unlock/jailbreak the phone you can then install a file manager that will allow you to remove them completely and open up a little more space in flash, but I'm not the kind of person who needs gigabytes in a phone.
The GPS in this phone is pretty responsive and nearly good enough for turn-by-turn directions in all but the most crowded environments. In Manhattan, my dedicated Garmin Nuvi outperforms the Moto G, but nearly anywhere else I go they are equivalent. The voice prompts are nice and loud and clear. Unfortunately navigation kind of sucks in a car, because ALL audio goes through bluetooth. You cannot hear the voice prompts unless you're also listening to your phone on the BT audio system. If you want to do something so preposterous as listen to a CD or a USB stick that you use instead of loading down your phone with mp3s, you have to disable BT and listen to prompts through the speaker. But see my notes below about Android as an OS.
My only complaints about this phone are Android-specific. For example, since I got the phone, Google removed the ability to lock screen rotation from the settings menu, and they added this ridiculous feature whereby if you scroll up from the bottom (or just try to click an icon or link near the bottom), a new app loads up which searches the web for something you don't want and didn't ask for, and then you have to click "back' three times to get back to where you were. The calendar defaults to viewing a single day, rather than a month or week or whatever you want. The alarm clock and camera keep reverting back to "first use mode," so if you want to take a photo of something quickly like a laughing child, there is always a chance that you'll have to click through ten or fifteen seconds of tutorials before you can actually take a photo (likewise for muting the alarm clock if you're crashing at a friend's place and in a hurry so as not to wake your hosts).
I downloaded some apps to compensate for some of these issues, but using up more CPU and disk space to fix Google's ignorance doesn't seem like the optimal solution. In many cases, I just assume that somebody smarter than me knows better how I'd like to use the phone.
There is not really a deal close to this from any other manufacturer, in terms of equipment cost or service cost. Except maybe not smashing them all the time.
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Still a Great Phone In 2015
I had some doubts when deciding on buying this phone, like if it would be fast enough, if the battery would last long enough or even if itwas durable enough. Those thoughts went away quickly as soon as I got this phone, but still have some problems with it.Pros: It has plenty of battery life to last full day with with moderate use, but sometimes I don't take it easy on this phone and it gets around 3 hours of battery life (On a Full Charge).The camera is better than I expected taking clean and clear pictures. I suggest usingHDR mode for cleaner photo, but to get the best picture you need to be outside in sunlightThe speed of this phone is decent for many task like checking Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and light Web browsing is quick and snappy with gaming being smooth on MOST games unless they are graphicly intense like asphalt 8, goat simulator and some emulators.The durability is above my expectations as I dropped this on the side walk and it still didn't crack I also carry this in my pocket with some coins and the screen doesn't scratch up the so the screen.The screen looks really good for the price of this phone at a 720p display with 329 ppi you could say it's on par with the iPhone 5 but I couldn't tell me the difference.The speakers are pretty loud, louder than I expected but the sound is still distorted when you get the volume high, but other than that it's pretty good.Call quality is decent from the other end people said I sounded clear and I had no problems with dropped calls.Cons:There are no 5 ghz bands on this phone and this phone is 3g onlyThis phone has no nfcWhenever you return to the home screen some times the apps need to take a second to load which is which constantly annoyed me.This phone may not get a lot of scratches but it gets a lot of smudges which makes the phone hard to see in direct sunlight and without the smudges the daytime visibility is still terrible.There are some dead pixels on my moto g and this may be a result of manufacturing errors and only extends to this phone but it is a problem.There is no way to get a battery percentage on this phone and I have looked and can't find oneThis device hasn't gotten lollipop yet as of this review and still has kit Kat, but Verizon plans to get it on this phone.This device can't be rooted and the bootloader can't be unlocked on Verizon.No expandable storageOverall this phone has really good speed and can handle everyday task decently it may not have the best specs and have the latest software, but if you want a phone that gets things done I recommend this phone.
