Motorola, which is now part of Lenovo for a couple of years, did not had the patience until the 2019 Mobile World Congress to reveal their new Moto G7 mobile phones lineup. Not only that, but the new phones have been already launched in South America, and they should appear in North America and Europe very soon.
Moto G7 Play is the cheapest variant of the three models costing about $200. It is built of plastic and has a 5.7 inch screen. The next one, the Moto G7 Power comes with a bigger screen, 6.2 inch, more RAM, and most importantly a 5000mAh battery. All these for just $50 more than the Moto G7 Play. Last but not least, for $300 we get the Moto G7. It comes with just 3000mAh battery (too bad considering the G7 Power comes with more), 4GB of RAM and the same 6.2 inch display, but supporting a bigger resolution. All these three phones use the same CPU, the Snapdragon 632.
The phones use Android 9 Pie by default and it is mostly stock Android, with few bloatware. They also come with gesture navigation enabled by default. All three models include headphone jacks, rear fingerprint readers, USB type C ports and SD card readers. The biggest feature that they’re missing thought is the lack of NFC, none of the models feature a NFC chip which is something of a must have in a phone by today’s standards.
Motorola appears to count on the extra camera features that come with all the three phones thinking that users will upgrade to the G7. The Moto G7, the top-end phone from this lineup, has an extra 5MP rear camera for depth sensing, along with (straight from Motorola):
8x digital zoom, Burst shot, Auto HDR, Timer, High res Zoom, Auto smile capture, Cinemagraph, All in focus, portrait mode, cutout, panorama, manual mode, raw photo output, active photos, spot color, best shot, 4k video, slow motion video, time lapse video, hyperlapse video, electronic video stabilization, YouTube live, Google Lens integration.
The big downside of Motorola phones was and still is the device update policy. Motorola promises only one major OS update for these mobile devices, and of we take into consideration past experience the update will come at a very slow pace. Google made it a must that OEMs manufactures offer at least two years of security updates, but this is not the case of Motorola as they only ship these updates every two moths or so.
This policy pales in comparison to Motorola’s competition, especially with the competition from HMD’s Nokia phones. Nokia releases monthly security updates and two years of major OS updates.
As mentioned before, the phones are available in the South America market, and we can expect to see them hitting the European market somewhere around “mid-February” according to Motorola, and the US and Canad somewhere in “spring” of this year. The good thing about these phones is that they will not be stores specific, they will be sold “unlocked” at Walmart, Amazon.com, Best Buy and B&H Photo.
Here is the complete specs of the new Moto G7 lineup:
| MOTO G7 | MOTO G7 POWER | MOTO G7 PLAY | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $299 | $249 | $199 |
| Screen | 6.2-inch 2270×1080 LCD | 6.2-inch 1520×720 LCD | 5.7-inch 1512×720 LCD |
| CPU | Snapdragon 632: Eight 1.8Ghz Kryo 250 (semi-custom Cortex-A73) CPU Cores, 14nm | ||
| GPU | Adreno 506 | ||
| RAM | 4GB | 3GB | 2GB |
| Storage | 64GB | 32GB | 32GB |
| Camera | Rear: 12MP (f1.8, 1.25µm pixel) + 5MP depth sensorFront: 8MP (f2.2 1.12µm pixel) A million extra features | Rear: 12MP (f2.0, 1.25µm pixel)Front: 8MP (f2.2, 1.12µm pixel) | Rear: 13MP (f2.0, 1.12µm pixel)Front: 8MP (f2.2, 1.12µm pixel), Front flash |
| Ports | USB-C, headphone jack | ||
| Battery | 3000mAh 15W fast charging | 5000mAh 15W fast charging | 3000mAh 10W charging |
| Material | Gorilla Glass | Clear plastic | Opaque plastic |
| Notch | Small | Medium | Large |