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It’s not all bad. The Moto G4, especially the G4 Plus configuration, was still a solid midrange phone that offered good-enough performance, a nice big 1080p screen, and a fingerprint reader for $250. Unlike the Moto Z, it at least understood and respected the intent behind the original 2013 Moto G: an affordable phone with clean, unskinned Android and no-to-low-frills hardware that got the job done. Its lack of updates over the last nine months has been disappointing, but that’s the norm in the Android world rather than the exception.

The Moto G5 Plus mostly continues in that vein, though its new aluminum backplate and slightly higher price ($229 for a model with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, $299 for one with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage) signal a desire to move upmarket a little. Like the G4 before it, the G5 Plus shows that Motorola under Lenovo isn’t a lost cause even if this isn’t the company it was two or three years ago.

Look and feel

Specs at a glance: Lenovo Moto G5 Plus Screen 1920×1080 5.2-inch IPS (424 PPI) OS Android 7.0 CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 (8x 2.0GHz Cortex A53) RAM 2GB or 4GB GPU Qualcomm Adreno 506 Storage 32GB, or 64GB NAND flash, expandable via microSD Networking Dual-band 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.2. CDMA (850, 850+,1900 MHz)

GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)

UMTS/HSPA+ (850, 900, 1700, 1900, 2100 MHz)

4G LTE (B1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 25, 26, 38, 41, 66) Ports Micro-USB, headphones Camera 12MP rear camera, 5MP front camera Size 5.91" x 2.91" x 0.30-0.38" (150.2 x 74.0 x 7.7-9.7mm) Weight 5.47oz (155g) Battery 3,000 mAh Starting price $229 for 2GB/32GB, $299 for 4GB/64GB

The G5 is the most dramatic break yet from the no-frills utilitarian design of the first Moto G. Its relatively large display bezels and its plastic edges still identify it as a lower-end phone, but previous generations’ rubberized and/or textured backs have been swapped out for an aluminum backplate with a smooth matte finish and a slightly raised Motorola logo. It’s still lighter in your hand and a little chunkier than comparable high-end phones, but at first glance you might have trouble distinguishing it from a metal or glass-and-metal phone like Google’s or Samsung’s.

Unlike Ars Android guru Ron Amadeo, I don’t think metal is necessarily better than other materials. The rubberized backs of the older Moto phones made them easier to grip, especially if you were using them one-handed. You lose that on the Moto G5, which also uses glossy plastic edges that don’t help matters. It’s not as though the phone is always slipping and sliding around in your hands, but it does sacrifice something I personally liked about older Moto designs in favor of a more “premium” look and feel.

The designs and materials of $300 and $400 phones have gotten a lot better in the last couple years, so changing the G5’s materials to help it compete makes sense as a business strategy. I just liked it the other way, is all.

The 5.2-inch G5 is just a little smaller than the 5.5-inch G4, a change that’s minor enough that I really have no opinion about it. The screen is large enough to keep fans of big phones happy, so I wouldn't worry much about it. The only thing I wonder about is how Motorola made the screen smaller while barely reducing the size and weight of the phone at all (it weighs the same as the G4 Plus and is almost imperceptibly smaller). It’s not clear why screen size would go down when the trend is upward, ever upward (except maybe to keep it from stepping on the also-5.5-inch Moto Z’s toes), but in any case it doesn’t make a huge difference.

The screen itself is unremarkable, a nice 1080p IPS panel that isn’t fancy but looks nice and colorful and sharp and has none of the uneven backlighting that some of the earlier 720p Moto G screens had. 1080p is a great resolution for a screen this size—more would be overkill, less would make things just a bit pixelated and blurry. No complaints here.

The front of the smartphone doesn’t deviate far from the standard smartphone template. There’s a small “moto” logo under the earpiece above the screen that I could honestly do without, but it doesn’t make the phone bigger like HTC’s logos used to back in the day. The fingerprint reader under the screen is a bit odd, too. It’s less obtrusive and tacked-on looking than the one on the Moto G4, but it’s still easy to forget that it isn’t a button. Navigation is handled by Android’s standard onscreen buttons.

One change Motorola has made is that if you put your finger on the sensor when the phone is already awake, it will lock. Whether you like or use it will depend on how you use your phone; I often found myself turning my screen off by accident, but if you’re using the phone one-handed it can also be more convenient than reaching up for the power button. If you don’t like this behavior, you can disable it in the settings.

Like the G5, the G5 Plus has two buttons on its right side: a power button and a volume rocker. The power button is lightly textured so you can tell the difference just by feeling around. Lenovo switched the position of the buttons, too. The power button is now below the volume rocker, placed about halfway down the side of the device.

The one thing that clearly pegs the G5 as a lower-end phone is Lenovo’s continued use of micro USB instead of USB-C, which all flagship Android phones (including the Moto Z) have been using for a year or two at this point. Maybe the company figures that people in the market for a low-end phone don’t also want to have to change all their cables and chargers and accessories—in any case, the benefits of the newer port are numerous enough that I’d still like to see this change.

The metal backplate doesn’t come off, the battery isn’t replaceable, and I’m still sad to see the colorful swappable shells and the Moto Maker customization features of previous Moto Gs go by the wayside. They gave the older phones a character that these newer models lack. The Moto G4 had removable batteries but none of the previous models did, so this is a step back from last year; I also wish the G5 was completely waterproof like the G3 was a couple of years ago. The G5 is merely “water-repellant,” which means “you can get a little water on it sometimes.”

Since the back doesn’t come off, if you want to swap out a SIM or put in an SD card, you’ll need to pop out the tray on the top of the phone with a bent paper clip or some other slim poking implement. This tray does its job, though I don’t love that it doesn’t sit flush with the top of the phone.

Software

Ugh, this section gets more depressing to write every year.

Let's start with the good stuff. The Moto G5 Plus ships with Android 7.0 and January 2017’s security patches (storage encryption is enabled by default out of the box, a first for the Moto G lineup even if they do still ship with 32-bit Android kernels for some reason). Even under Lenovo, the Moto lineup has continued to use a version of Android that sticks pretty closely to the Google-designed user interface. This includes the notification shade and settings screen, two places that Android OEMs tend to redesign and mess up themselves.

The default app launcher isn’t the Pixel Launcher (still exclusive to Pixel phones) or the old Google Now Launcher (on its way out), but a sort of in-between launcher that keeps the same swipe-up-to-open app drawer design and places the Google Now feed to the left of the main home screen. It’s close enough to Google’s and inoffensive enough that I didn’t feel the need to change it.

The default app loadout is also pleasingly free of cruft, at least on the unlocked version that I’m reviewing. Lenovo leans on Google apps like Chrome, Gmail, and Gboard to handle core functionality without adding the duplicative apps typical on, say, Samsung phones. There’s still a Moto app, and Motorola still ships its own default camera app, too. But by and large, this is Nougat as Google ships it.

As for what sucks, the short version is that Motorola under Google was really great about Android updates, head and shoulders above the rest of the other Android OEMs. Now, Motorola under Lenovo is pretty bad about updates. I wouldn’t say it’s “the worst,” just because the competition is so fierce, but the speed and frequency of updates, the amount of time Moto devices are supported, and the company’s communication about these issues have all gotten noticeably, obviously worse under Lenovo.

Case in point: I reviewed the Moto G4 back in July of 2016. The phones ran Android 6.0.1—Android 7.0 would be released the following month—with May 2016’s security patches installed. Fire up the same phone today, at least in the US, and you’ll still be running Android 6.0.1 with May 2016’s security updates. A long-promised update to Android 7.0 is apparently available in India and is pending carrier approval in the US, but it’s not widely available yet.

Update: A week or two after this review was published, our Moto G4 did finally receive the 7.0 update, which also bumped the security patch level to December of 2016. Better, but still far from current.

Adding insult to injury, Android 7.0 has been replaced by both Android 7.1 and 7.1.1 already, and 7.1.2 is right around the corner. Moto’s reviewers' guides and press releases used to mention guaranteed updates up top, and now they don’t mention updates at all. Google’s apps continue to do a decent job of keeping phones feeling fresh via individual app updates, but it’s awfully hard to give a phone a full-throated recommendation when there’s so much evidence that it will get new OS and security patches sporadically if at all.

Motorola tells us it’s committed to delivering an Android O update and quarterly security updates for the G5. We’ll see.