Motorola Unveils Low Cost, High Performance Moto G Smartphone

If you’re on a budget, but wanted a smartphone, it used to be that you resigned yourself to using last generation’s technology, or a current generation phone that has been drastically scaled back. Thankfully, it looks like those days are coming to an end, with the Motorola Moto G, unveiled earlier this morning in Brazil.

The stable mate of the Moto X released earlier this year, the Moto G will sport a 4.5″ 1280×720 LCD display, which drops active notifications found on the previous model, and a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 SoC, which loses the “always listening” feature of the X model as well. There’s also 1GB of memory, either 8GB or 16GB of storage, and a 5 mega-pixel rear-facing camera capable of capturing video in 720p, paired up with a 1.3 mega-pixel front-facing snapper.

Those are some impressive specs for a mid-range phone, but there are other bells and whistles too. The phone will ship with an as-close-to-stock-as-possible version of Android 4.3 Jellybean, and a promise from Motorola of an update to 4.4 KitKat in January. Also, instead of the usual 15GB of storage through Google Drive, Moto G users will get a whopping 50GB!

There’s also the option to separately buy different coloured rear covers, but who cares if you can’t afford the phone in the first place, right? Well, how about $179 straight up for the 8GB version, and $199 for 16GB? Not too shabby.

If this is what Google continues to do with Motorola after acquiring the company back in May of 2012, it bodes well for all of us.