The Moto G5S and Moto G5S Plus go on sale tonight. Before you book your device, check out our first impressions of the smartphones.
At an event in New Delhi, Motorola debuted, what it calls the “special edition” phones in India today. Successors to this year’s Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus, the company launched the Moto G5S and Moto G5S Plus, priced at Rs 13,999, and Rs 15,999, respectively. Both the smartphones will go on sale starting tonight, and will be available via Amazon India; also offline at any Moto Hub store. At the event, I got to spend some time with the Moto G5S Plus and the Moto G5S, and here’s what I drew from my brief experience.
To begin with, despite essentially carrying the same name as its immediate predecessors, the Moto G5S and Moto G5S Plus are improvements. In fact, they’re much sleeker, and look more premium than the G5 duo. The Moto G5S and Moto G5S Plus are encased in a metal unibody, with a little curve in the back, making it easier to hold. The devices come in two color variants – a Lunar Gray and Blush Gold. While the gray variant features a black front, the gold variant comes with a white front.
Since we’re talking about the design, I must point out the return of the logo dimple. Though that sounds like a sequel of an epic, it’s essentially that little crater found in older Motorola phones, which encircled the company logo. Since a while we had been seeing that little trademark missing, but with the Moto G5S duo, it has returned.
Further on the design, while the bigger Moto G5S Plus features a 5.5-inch display, the Moto G5S comes with a smaller 5.2-inch display. Another visible difference between the two is the dual-camera setup at the back, which only comes on the larger variant. Apart from that, the two smartphones look exactly the same, both the Moto G5S and the Moto G5S Plus feature a camera, a supporting flash and a proximity sensor on the front, with the earpiece sandwiched between them, and a home button with fingerprint sensor placed downwards. The volume rocker and power button are placed on the right, with the SIM tray placed on the left. On the bottom is the Type-C port, and an audio grille. The Moto G5S and Moto G5S Plus retain the 3.5mm audio jack, which is placed on the phone’s head.
Moto G5S Plus
Moving to the highlight of the phones, the camera, let’s talk about the two individually. Talking about the Moto G5S Plus first, it sports a pair of 13-megapixel camera at the back, in which one captures in RGB and the other captures in monochrome. During the brief interaction with the smartphone’s camera, the pictures captured were quite sharp, with good color. The camera app has 3D depth sensors, for those bokeh effect-like pictures. It allows you to choose and adjust the blurriness in an image. The device also has a professional mode on the primary camera app, which offers a bunch of features that you’d find on a professional camera, such as adjusting ISO levels, brightness, sharpness, etc.
I also switched the primary camera to the video made, which showed support for 4K recording and slow mo videos. I didn’t have a lot of time with the phone to actually judge the quality of the videos, but from what I felt in the brief encounter, the slo-mo was quite good, there was no lag in the video.
Up front, it has an 8-megapixel camera, which also comes with a bunch of beauty modes, a professional mode and a panoramic mode. As the name suggests, the beauty mode has features that clear out your skin, and make it look brighter (personally not a fan of the mode). The professional mode is simply a counterpart of the similar mode for the primary camera. But what I really likes was the panoramic mode, which allows you to take wider selfies, but without a wide-angle lens. What this mode does is that it asks you to pan the camera to certain distance. While you pan, it takes three separate images, and then stitches them together to create a wide image. That I thought was a useful feature for group selfies, or what people call the groupfie.
Moto G5S
Though the smaller Moto G5S comes sans a dual-camera assembly, I would still call the camera its highlight. It features a 16-megapixel camera at the back and a 5-megapixel at the front. I wouldn’t call the front camera particularly impressive, especially when I used it along with the Moto G5S Plus’, but the primary camera of the Moto G5S was certainly good. It maintained the sharpness and color quality of its larger variant.
Besides the camera, another bit I noticed about the Moto G5S and Moto G5S Plus that I think is worth pointing out is the pure stock Android on the two smartphones. There is no bloatware flooding the devices. Further, though my time with the smartphones was too brief to really judge the performance of the phone, but when I used the phone, swapping between apps was easy, I experienced no lags.
Gathering my thoughts, for the features and specification that they offer, the Moto G5S Plus would compete with the likes of Lenovo K8 Note, Micromax Dual 5 and Honor 6X. The smaller Moto G5S, on the other hand, will be head-on with smartphones like, Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Lenovo K6 Power. While that’s what my brief encounter with Moto G5S duo suggests, we would be able to give you a more detailed opinion in our review of the smartphone, which you can expect soon. Keep watching this space!