Motorola Moto G4 review – CNET

The Good The Moto G4’s big, bold screen and junk-free software make it a pleasure to use throughout the day. Its ability to survive a dunking will appeal to the clumsy among us.

The Bad Processor performance is great for everyday tasks, but gamers will want to shop elsewhere.

The Bottom Line With its big, bold screen, water-resistant design and rock-bottom price, the Moto G4 is a dazzling deal.

Visit manufacturer site for details.

The Moto G has always been among the top dogs when it comes to “cheap but good” phones and the new G4 — and slightly fancier G4 Plus — have kept up that tradition.

Competition in the budget arena has never been more fierce, but the newest fourth-generation Moto G continues to hold its own thanks to a host of hardware upgrades, including a larger and brighter 5.5-inch, full HD display and faster octa-core processor, without shedding last year’s water-resistant construction and expandable storage (you can add up to 128GB by adding ultra cheap microSD cards).

And then there’s that price. In the US, you’ll pay $199 for the unlocked phone, which will work with all major US carriers when it hits on July 12. (You’ll find more details here. You can also buy the phone at a deep discount from Amazon, if you accept ads.) In the UK, the standard 16GB Moto G4 starts at a similarly affordable £169.

Motorola — which is now owned by Lenovo, by the way — hasn’t said how much the phones will go for in Australia, but the Moto G4’s UK price converts to about AU$300.

So what’s the catch? Not much, really. Spending a bit more for the aforementioned Moto G4 Plus gets you a fingerprint sensor (for easy unlocking), a slightly better camera and — at the top end — double the RAM and even more built-in storage. But neither phone has NFC or contactless payment options, so the Plus upgrades don’t feel worth the extra money in our book.

Editors’ note, 4 p.m. PT: This review has been corrected to reflect that the G4 Plus does not offer NFC or Android Pay, and that we recommend the cheaper Moto G4 reviewed here as the better overall buy and Editors’ Choice.

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Moto G4 vs. G4 Plus: What’s the difference?

The G4 Plus gets its name from its 16-megapixel camera (up from 13 on the regular G4) and a fingerprint scanner on the front. It also offers more RAM (4GB vs. 2GB) on its top-end 64GB configuration. Otherwise the phones are the same, from processor to screen.

Obviously, the Plus costs a bit more — and configurations vary by region. Americans will pay $50 more for the 16GB Plus ($250), while those in the UK will pay an additional £30 (£199). An extra $100 or £95 gets you a 64GB G4 Plus, which — as noted above — also doubles the RAM. (The UK also gets a 32GB Plus that doesn’t appear to be available in the US.)

That said, none of those upgrades are particularly compelling in my book. I kept confusing the Plus’s fingerprint sensor for a home button (it’s not), and its lack of NFC means there’s no contactless payment option. The extra megapixels in the camera, meanwhile, didn’t offer a big difference in everyday shots, unless you were zooming in. For those reasons, the cheaper G4 is the better option for nearly everyone.

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Slender and water-resistant

The Moto G4 and the G4 Plus are almost identical. They both have 5.5-inch screens, which is half an inch larger than the previous model and a full inch larger than the original Moto G from 2013. Both displays have full HD (1,920×1,080-pixel) resolutions, which are bright, bold and well suited to your tweeting and snapchatting.

Even better, the handsets are water-resistant, so they won’t shut down the first time you spill your drink on them. The back panel is removable, providing access to the microSD slot to expand the storage. You can’t swap the battery out, but its 3,000 mAh capacity is sufficient for a full day of use, so you may not need to carry spares around.

On our looping video battery rundown test, it took 13 hours 20 minutes to drain the battery entirely, which is a respectable performance. By comparison, the LG G5 took 12 hours 30 minutes, while the OnePlus 3 took 14 hours 17 minutes.

As with the rest of the Moto family, you can select from a wide range of back panels and metallic accents using the online Moto Maker tool. This is also where you can choose the amount of storage (16 or 32GB for the G4; 16 (US), 32 (UK) or 64GB for the G4 Plus, with 4GB of RAM for that most capacious option).

Nippy software, free of junk

The G4s run a near stock version of Google’s Android 6.1 Marshmallow software, making them easy for even Android novices to use right out of the box. (Motorola will eventually offer a Moto G4 Play version too, which will have totally stock Android.) Many budget phone makers — I’m looking at you, Huawei — load their phones up with so much junk from the start that they’re tough to navigate and find the essential features. Not so here. The interface is uncluttered, and aside from a single Motorola personalisation app, there’s no messy bloatware.

That lack of bloatware helps the phone feel nippy and responsive. There’s no annoying lag when you swipe around the home screens, the camera opens quickly and loading apps is very swift.

HTC Desire 530 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

HTC first showed off its Desire 530 back in February at Mobile World Congress. Now, the 5-inch smartphone is coming to the US.

Like most of the company’s phones, the Desire 530 looks slick. It sports a trim 8.3mm profile and has a thin bezel on either side of its screen. On the back you’ll find what HTC calls a “multi splash” design — it looks like spots of paint on a blank canvas (which is much nicer than it sounds).

Available on T-Mobile and Verizon, the Desire is a phone for the budget conscious, with an unlocked version coming to HTC’s website “later this month” for $179.

For that price, you’ll get the following specs:

• 5-inch, 1,280×720-pixel resolution display
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 210
• 1.5GB of RAM
• 2,200 mAh battery
• 16GB of internal storage, up to 256GB of expandable storage

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On the back you’ll find an 8-megapixel camera, while the snapper on the front weighs in at 5 megapixels. That front camera comes with “Auto Selfie” and “Voice Selfie” features, which let you take selfies without pressing a button.

The Desire 530 will be available in three colors — Blue Lagoon, Sprinkle White and Stratus White.

Fujifilm X-T2 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Following the release of the X-Pro2 early this year, Fujifilm returns to revamp its X-T mirrorless series with its replacement for the X-T1, the X-T2. While it looks like a significant upgrade over the X-T1, it’s because that model is over two years old; the X-T2 incorporates a lot of the newer technologies that are in the X-Pro2.

Fujifilm plans to ship the camera in September — at least in the US — body-only for $1,600 or a kit with the XF18-55mm f2.8-4 lens for $1,900 (£1,400/£1,650 and AU$2,300 — I can’t find a kit price there).

Editors’ note, July 11, 2016: Updated with corrections based on a brief time with the camera as well as pricing for the UK and Australia.

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New highlights

• Sensor and autofocus. It uses the same 24.3-megapixel X-Trans III sensor and X-Processor Pro as the X-Pro2, but with an increased number of phase-detection autofocus points. Fujifilm claims much better speed and accuracy, plus adds more controls over continuous autofocus behavior. As a refresher, the X-Trans technology uses a 5G:2R:2B ratio (green, red, blue) color filter array rather than the 2G:1R:1B used by the standard Bayer array on a typical sensor. The extra green — the most sensitive sites on the sensor — provides sufficient data that there’s less false color produced by de-mosaicking (reconstructing colors from the array) and obviates the need for an optical low-pass filter to blur the edges between the pixels.
• 4K video support. One one hand, it’s great that Fujifilm has upped its video game to 4K. But in my experience the company has never done a great job with video; I hope we don’t just see the same artifacts writ high resolution. It can output clean HDMI at 4:2:2 (8-bit) depth.
• Design and features. The biggest change is the LCD; now it not only tilts up and down, but can flip out to the right, as well as tilt up or down while flipped out to the right. Really nice. It also increases to two SD card slots, which is essential for serious continuous shooting or 4K video recording. The viewfinder has similar specs to that of the X-T1, but with a higher maximum refresh rate of 100 frames per second. It does seem pretty responsive. Fujifilm adds the ability to use focal-plane sync to shoot with flash at any shutter speed. There are a couple of tweaks to the control layout, most notably the removal of the recording button from the top and the replacement of the focus assist button on the back with a joystick similar to the X-Pro2’s. While the X-T series has always had a more pronounced grip than the X-Pro models, there’s a new optional Vertical Power Booster Grip (VPB-XT2; $330, £300) that’s intended to deliver improved frame rates during continuous shooting and increase the maximum 4K recording time to 30 minutes, in addition to extra battery life.

Other updates and announcements

There’s also a new flash, the EF-X500 (GN 164 in feet and GN 50 in meters), which has a tilt and swivel head, and a video LED. It will ship in September as well for $450 (directly converted, £350, AU$600).

Additionally, the company announced it plans to release a firmware update for the X-Pro2 in October, updating the autofocus algorithm with many of the same performance enhancements as the X-T2, the focal-plane flash sync capability and improvements to the parallax correction in the viewfinder.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen an X-series lens roadmap; there are no real dates on the new one. Fujifilm plans an XF23mmF2 R WR for 2016, followed by the XF50mmF2 R WR and XF80mmF2.8 R LM OIS WR Macro in 2017. The latter has replaced the 120mm f2.8 macro lens that was promised on the last roadmap.

My take

I’m kind of baffled as to the differentiation. The X-T2, which is close to identically priced to the X-Pro2, incorporates the same sensor and a newer autofocus system than the X-Pro2, plus a tilting LCD and support for 4K video. It has similar performance specs as well. The two cameras basically have different designs and viewfinders — the X-T2 looks more streamlined with a bigger grip — but the X-T2 seems a significantly more advanced camera for the same money. Unless you really want the X-Pro2’s hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder.

Comparative specifications