Damn, it was a good mobile phone, with the likes of HotUKDeals going into rapture over it's features and affordable price tag.
The Moto G 1st Generation (2013)
- How does it perform in 2015?
I commented recently about Apple's hypegasm iThing launch event, and how this time of year I get very nostalgic due to the number of great phones I've bought each August/September, which made me decide to write this article about how the original Moto G handles the world two years after its release.
I bought one of these great little phones this time last year for just over £100. I'd been using Windows Phones for about nine months, but was feeling the need to have something a bit more functional as I rarely had access to a PC last year.
I'd tried to go back to my Samsung Galaxy S3, but its awful battery life was really dogging me, so I decided to give Android a fair chance by buying this budget lovely.
The Moto G impressed me right from the start. The screen was very bright and crisp, the phone rarely lagged and the battery life was, by comparison with the S3, simply amazing.
I was very happy with my Moto G for several months until February this year when it upgraded to Android Lollipop 5.0.
Android Lollipop has completely turned me off the whole operating system.
Simple tasks such as checking notifications now require a range of taps, double taps and a series of swipes.
Android Lollipop now "thinks" for you and pushes certain notifications to you at the expense of others.
To make matters worse, Android Lollipop has also introduced a massive amount of lag to my Moto G - which I still hold onto as my only remaining Android device.
My affair with Android Lollipop was short lived. I was excited when my Moto G was first upgraded, but over the course of one torrid weekend this relationship turned very sour.
My once trusted Moto G now saw fit to wake me up in the middle of the night because an email had arrived, rather than dutifully letting me sleep by using the "Silent Hours" feature.
My phone was turning against me and making my life uncomfortable. The sporadic night-time notifications even started to make my wife suspicious, as the once previously silent mobile was now pushing "important" notifications to me 24 hours a day, keeping us both awake.
I couldn't trust my Moto G anymore.
Within two days of having the sickly new version of Android's sugary operating system on my Moto G, I relegated my Moto to the bedside drawer and returned to my trusty Nokia Lumia 620.
Why did it go so wrong for such a great mobile?
Google is keen to make every new version of Android more "compatible" with more devices, and Google keeps telling us that their OS will work on devices with less than 1GB of RAM, yet this is not the case. Android Lollipop slowed my previously swift Moto G to a crawl, and that doesn't even include the additional time it takes to navigate the now extensive and incomprehensible menu system!
The original Moto G has been updated to a modern version of Android, and is now more up to date than many (much cheaper) Android handsets that are still being sold by retailers, so this example proves, once more, that Android really is an arms race that you can't win: You constantly need to upgrade to a higher-specced handset on an annual basis.
