Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Lenovo

Today Lenovo made the rumors official: the company’s mid-range Moto G lineup has been refreshed with not one but three different phones. The Moto G (hereafter the Moto G4) and the Moto G Plus bring spec bumps inside and out, while the lower-end Moto G Play is more like a redesign of last year’s Moto G. The phones will be available in Brazil and India to start, but all three should come to the US, Europe, and elsewhere later this summer.

The Moto G4 is the mainstream option, and for £169 (about $244, though US pricing hasn’t been announced) you get a decent amount for your money. Its larger 5.5-inch display jumps from 720p to 1080p, and it picks up an octa-core Snapdragon 617 SoC. The phone has dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, a nice upgrade over the 2.4GHz-only wireless in previous models, Bluetooth 4.1, 2GB of RAM, and 16 or 32GB of storage that can be expanded by up to 128GB with a microSD card. All three of the Motos G continue to use micro-USB rather than USB Type-C.

The phone also includes a 3,000mAh battery, a “water repellent nano-coating,” LTE that should work “on all major carriers,” a 13MP rear camera and 5MP front camera, and a skin-free build of Android 6.0.1. Visually, Lenovo has tweaked the Moto G design to look a bit flatter, and the camera now bulges out slightly from the back. Given the amount of time it takes to develop a smartphone, this is probably the first Moto G designed mostly by Lenovo rather than being a leftover from the Google days, but it doesn’t drastically shake up the formula.

The £199 ($288, though again, US pricing hasn’t been confirmed) Moto G Plus looks almost identical to the G4 and the two phones share many of the same core specs, but it offers up to 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The camera gets a further bump from 13MP to 16MP. And most crucially, the phone has a fingerprint reader on the front, a feature which until now has been reserved mostly for high-end Android phones.

The US pricing for the G Plus will be important—it has impressive specs for a Moto G, but if it comes out at anywhere near $300, it’s going to be playing in the Nexus 5X’s territory. That phone is a few months old, but its Snapdragon 808 is still going to be much faster than a Snapdragon 617, and you get guaranteed Android updates and monthly security patches on top of that.

That 5.5-inch screen may also give some buyers pause, especially if they’re coming from the original 2013 Moto G. The size is in line with many recent Android flagships, and there are obviously users who prefer larger screens to smaller ones, but these phones will be significantly less pocketable than even last year’s 5.0-inch Moto G.

Finally, there’s the Moto G Play—we don’t have pricing information for this phone, international or otherwise, but it’s safe to say that it will be the cheapest of the three. It’s also much more similar on the inside to last year’s Moto G, despite a new exterior design. You still get a quad-core Snapdragon 410, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage expandable via microSD, a 5.0-inch 720p display, LTE, 2.4GHz 802.11n, and Bluetooth 4.1. The 8MP rear camera is actually a resolution downgrade, though the 5MP front camera should be roughly the same.

All three phones come in either black or white, and you’ll be able to pick the color of the rear shell and the accent colors on the G4 and G Plus with Moto Maker. It’s not immediately clear whether the Play will be similarly customizable or if Lenovo will provide colorful rear shells as it has for past Moto G and E models—all of the press photos show it in either all-black or all-white, so going with the cheapest phone might cost you a little customizability as well.

The Moto brand has lost some of its luster since moving from Google’s care to that of Lenovo: quick Android updates are no longer the norm, and the Marshmallow update skipped an unfortunate number of phones, including a handful of recent ones. And the decision to ship multiple Moto Gs and Xs in the last couple of years muddies a lineup that was kept intentionally simple in 2013 and 2014. Still, there’s some value here—Lenovo seems committed to “a pure, clutter-free version of Android,” and being bad at updates is the rule in the Android ecosystem rather than the exception.

The G4 and G Plus are available today in Brazil, and the G Plus is available today in India. Both phones will be released “soon” in North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific region. The lower-end Moto G Play “will be available globally starting later this summer.”

Listing image by Lenovo