Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an awesome budget phone, I purchased this for my wife as her smartphone needs are relatively basic, after receiving the unit, I am seriously considering replacing my existing Note 4 with one of these units. You may think this sounds crazy, but this is not, here are my reasons: 1. This is a great sized phone at a very reasonable price. Aside from a few products from a couple cut rate far east vendors, this is one of the best phone at the price range and it offers a 5 inch screen. Moto has an good reputation as an RF design company. Although the screen resolution is only at 720x1280 (HD), you're really fooling yourself if you think in reality this makes any real difference in day to day use. OK, if you're doing photoshop retouching, a 1080P FHD screen or higher may be required, but even compared to my 1440x2560 screen at 5.7 inches on my Samsung Note 4, there is no real visual differences if you read the screen at any reasonable distance (10-12 inches?). This is after all a 5 inch screen, which comes to the key point of choosing a Moto G4 play: it's relatively small with a 5 inch HD screen. This means even with a rugged case around it (which I bought along with the phone), it fits into a pocket or a purse very nicely without giving you the nightmarish cramped touch screen keyboard issue. Web pages, photos and videos shows up nice without any issue of pixelation, touch screen is responsive and touch typing is good as well. All that without having to deal with the size of a pocket busting phablet, which incidentally is the most urgent reason I'd want to replace the Note 4 with this, it's really not so crazy. I am so tired of taking the Note 4 out of my pant pockets when I drive because it's often just too uncomfortable to leave it in the pocket. 2. Great battery life, Moto matched a Qualcomm 410 perfectly with a HD screen at 5 inches, which gives over 13 hours of video playback time, and real life battery life has been excellent, my wife has seen 3 days of average use with phone calls, emails, text messaging and GPS navigation peppered throughout the days. That is excellent, especially compared to the short life she was getting on her nexus 5 under the same use pattern (less than a day of actual normal use). 3. Reasonable processor performance from a 64 bit Qualcomm 410 chip, it's not going to win any speed contests, but all the real life applications have been handled without issue. Sure it only has 2 GB of RAM compared to 4GB on some of the flagship phones, and this may not be a gamer's best choice, but for anyone who uses their smartphone as a smartphone not a replacement for arcade gaming device, the low power chip gives plenty performance and the HUGE bonus of the battery life (see point 2!! :0) ) 4. Replaceable battery AND SD card support, this unit has a REPLACEABLE battery, which in my mind clearly indicates this is a more consumer friendly unit aim to offer value and bang for the buck. I don't really need to reiterate the virtues of a replaceable battery design (espeically given the Note 7 fiasco these days). Throw in up to 128 GB of SD card, you're set to shoot photos, video and store your audio book and music to your heart's content. Picture taking and video shooting onto a fast 64GB SD card has seen no-delay or issue, my wife is a lot happier she is no longer limited by Nexus's internal memory size. 5. Great RF performance and GPS lock speed. But this is designed by Moto, so this pretty much goes without saying, although it's always good to know the phone work as a phone and a GPS unit really well. LTE data speed is great, and it support band 12 and VOLTE, which gives us great range and data speed on Tmobile even when you're on the phone over voice (imagine that a smartphone that's still good at voice phone calls). The play has a single front end speaker, it is quite loud, but nothing impressive, the voice quality has nothing to complain about. It actually, GASP, has a 3.5 head phone jack if you care about audio quality! Bonus! :-) Some may say the phone is rather bland in style, to me, it's not an issue, I am a bit tired with crazy attempts on style differentiation, some times, the Toyota Camry is the right choice. There are plenty case choices for color and adding some style edge to the phone if you choose to do so, honestly, everyone puts their phone in a case anyway, I think the case drives the look more than the phone itself these days. Some little cons just to be fair: this phone has no magnetometer or high precision gyro-sensor, and no finger print sensor. Also, more importantly it has no NFC which prevents the use of Android Pay. For me and my wife, that's a plus, we consistently turn off the NFC on our phones, have no intention to use touch to pay of any kind any time soon, why pay for a part that is never to be used? Lack of mag and gyro means Google map will not rotate based on the orientation of the phone (navigation works fine because it's GPS based), but you will not miss it and it prevents those weird cases where your mag tells the map you're facing a completely different direction than you're actually heading when you are stopped at a traffic light during driving because it's time for a mag sensor re-calibration (which happens in all phones with mag sensors). It probably annoys our son a bit, since his Pokemon Go's AR feature does not work properly w/o magnetometer, but hey that's his problem. Besides, even Pokemon Go works fine with AR turned off, so no real losses there (much to my wife's dismay probably). Also since the phone has no magnetometer, it does not need to be recalibrated, so leaving this right next to a magnetic source (which happens more often than you'd think, such as leaving it on top of your tablet's magnetic cover) would not require you to go through the 3-axis recalibration process required to make the the digital compass work properly again. But keep these issues in mind if you're a heavy user of finger print sensor, digital compass or NFC. Also the wifi chip is single band at 2.4Ghz support only 802.11N speed with single stream, but that's not really an issue for us since we have dual band wifi at home and almost any wifi site would have at least the 2.4GHz band. This phone can only connect at up to 150 mbps on wifi as a result. So if you have google fiber at home, and want the fastest possible download speed, you will be "limited" to the 150mbps with this phone. For my wife's and my use, the Moto G(4th gen) Play is an excellent choice, it looks nice (in my opinion), works well in all the no-non-sense ways, and comes in a perfect balance between screen real estate and pocketability with a great price to boot. The only real improvement could be a 1080p screen, but if that means less battery life, then this phone is actually better off as is. Oh yeah, ditch the charger, the one I got gives 5 volts at 550mA only, I gave my wife a 5 volt 2 amp charger, should help in charging time tremendously. The first charge was the OEM charger, took a few hours...