Motorola's iconic smartphone design continues to live on in the G4 Plus. Although not as distinct as before, it's certainly identifiable as a Moto product. The rounded metal frame coupled with the rubber back cover offers good ergonomics and grip. The phone is a fair bit larger than its predecessors, thanks to the 5.5-inch full-HD TFT display. Sunlight legibility is very good and the display manages to produce punchy colours and good black levels. Gorilla Glass 3 is also present for added protection. The G4 Plus is fairly slim at 7.9mm and has good weight distribution so it doesn't feel heavy when you hold it.
The Moto G4 Plus ditches the trademark bottom grille of the Moto G series for a fingerprint sensor. It's not a physical button but it is slightly raised to help you find it by touch alone. The sensor can recognise your fingerprints from any angle and apart from a few intermittent misreads, it works very well all the time.
The buttons on the side are placed well within the reach of your fingertips and the power button has ridges on it to make easily identifiable. The headphones socket and Micro-USB port take their places on the top and bottom respectively.
The back is mostly flat as opposed to the earlier curved designs of Moto G models, apart from the slight bump that's present around the camera module. The 16-megapixel sensor is accompanied by a dual-tone LED flash and a laser autofocus system, which is a substantial upgrade.
Taking off the back cover, you'll see the non-removable 3000mAh battery and slots on the side for a microSD card( up to 128GB) and two Micro-SIMs. The Moto G4 Plus comes with Nano-to-Micro SIM card adapters, which is a thoughtful touch. One feature that's missing is the IP67 certification which earlier variants boasted of.
The retail box contains a TurboPower charger( 25W) and a headset. The wall charger is not modular so you will need a separate USB cable for data transfer. The headset looks and feels a bit cheap, in our opinion, and it didn't fit very well in our ears.
Specifications and features
In terms of power, the Moto G4 Plus uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 617 SoC, which is an octa-core chip running at 1.5GHz. This is the same SoC that was used in the HTC One A9( Review) . You also get 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage. The phone will also be available with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage at a lower price. Other specifications include 4G LTE( Category 4), Bluetooth 4.1 Low Energy, dual-band Wi-Fi b/g/n, GPS, GLONASS, USB-OTG, and FM radio. NFC is not present.
As is the case with all Moto smartphones, the G4 Plus runs on a near-stock version of Android, and in this case it is Marshmallow 6.0.1. You get the usual suite of Moto enhancements which include Moto Display and Moto Actions.
The former eliminates the need for a notification LED as it shows you the time and a preview of your notifications unlocking the phone, the moment you move it. There is an LED to the right of the fingerprint sensor but we only noticed it when it briefly lit up while charging the phone. Moto Actions lets you trigger various motion-based gestures, which all work as advertised. There aren't any preloaded apps other than a file manager and the standard suite of Google apps.
Performance
Without any bloatware slowing it down, the G4 Plus is one snappy performer. On average, there's about 1.2GB of RAM in use leaving you with plenty to spare. We noticed virtually no slow-downs or lags in animations and when switching between apps. The SoC does get warm quickly when gaming or even when using data or GPS, but it is nothing too alarming. You'll notice a bit of lag in the camera app if the phone is warm, which could be due to the system throttling the CPU speed in order to prevent it from overheating. We got a score of 42, 229 in the AnTuTu benchmark and 17fps in GFXbench, which are both respectable.
The gallery app has been replaced with Google's Photos app, which is not the best to be honest but it does its
