This Phone is $169 - What's the Catch?

(Intro Sounds): This new 2023 smart

phone

has a 6 1/2-inch 90-hertz display with a punch-hole cutout, a 5,000 milliamp-hour battery, triple cameras, a micro SD card slot for expandable storage, a head

phone

jack and 169 water resistance. Okay, but

what

's the problem? There has to be a

catch

, right? So look, I've said it before and I'll say it again. Good phones are getting cheap, no, and cheap phones are getting good. And

this

video is going to focus on the second part, which is the cheap phones that are getting so good, because

this

phone arrived in my inbox recently. It's called the Moto G Play for 2023 and if you've been paying attention to

what

Motorola's been doing recently, they've been making a lot of really good budget phones in the background over the last couple of years.

I just wanted to know, personally, from using it myself, how can I end up with a phone that costs a tenth of the price of ones I've actually enjoyed? So on the outside, well, it's a pretty big phone, which I like, and it actually has a 6.5-inch flat 90-hertz LCD screen. Now, it's not the most attractive display you've ever seen. It's only 720P so sometimes I can literally see pixels and it doesn't get very bright. You know, the viewing angles are pretty bad if you go off axis. And of course, the bezels you can see are slightly thicker, especially on the chin.

And there's a bit of light falling around the hole-punch camera on top. But the question is: can you really check out the Pixels at this price? So there's plenty of screen for texting, web browsing, browsing, flipping through apps, scrolling through social media, the classic things you want to do on a phone. Mission accomplished, you know, it's a big screen, so that's not the problem. But what about construction? You've probably noticed that it's a pretty big phone but it's also made of plastic. But honestly, the design is perfectly fine. It has the port and speakers on the bottom, there's a headphone jack on top, and it has additional expandable storage next to the SIM card tray right where it belongs.

And on the back, yes, there's a pretty fast fingerprint reader right in that classic Motorola dimple. So it's well laid out, no bending or dragging or anything weird like that. Also, you may have heard that plastic is by no means the end of the world when it comes to smartphone construction. Obviously premium ones will really like to feel more premium and heavier, so glass will do that. But this is usually more durable than glass if it falls. And some people like a lighter phone when it's that big. Plus, it's still waterproof. I can't say it's waterproof, it's IP52, but it is waterproof.

So the construction, that's not the trick. So, okay, what about the battery? You might be wondering: Cheap phone, it's excellent, perfectly ironic and without exaggeration, it's excellent, which really shouldn't be a surprise given the specifications. It's a 5,000 milliamp hour battery that powers a phone with a 720p screen. So you're good for a quiet day and a half, two days of daylight is no problem with seven hours of screen time. Now it only charges up to 10 watts which is pretty slow and there's no wireless charging but I'm not going to consider that to be a problem at this price.

Again, it's like you can charge it overnight every night like a normal person and the battery life will be fine. And even the software is really good. It's pretty much the same experience as its $1000 Edge flagship phone, meaning almost stock Android with some extra Moto features on top. So at its most basic, it'll feel like a Pixel when you're browsing through the quick settings, notifications, and launcher, but then you'll get some Motorola widgets, you know, you'll get a couple of extra settings in the settings. app, but then you get this Moto app that lets you go deeper into their gestures and additional features that they've perfected over the years.

The double flashlight cutout, the three-finger screenshot, you know, the view feature that lets you take a look at your new notifications and even swipe down the notification panel from the fingerprint reader on the back. later. Basically everything except the double twist to quickly open the camera, probably because the camera is not one of those things you really expect on these super cheap phones. Oh wow, look at the light going out, you can see it on the camera, but either way, I'm happy to report that this camera is functional, which is what you'd expect at this price, which is, Yes, it's functional.

I'm just not a big fan of the triple camera design here. As I know, they are trying to look premium and the triple cameras look premium, but the top one is a two megapixel macro camera and the bottom one is a two megapixel depth camera for portrait mode. So I'm mainly looking for this 16 megapixel main camera to be able to capture scenes, documents, you know, take photos and videos without problems. And it does, especially if you give it enough light. It won't win any comparison tests, that's for sure. But hey, we ask a lot of things from our phones, like the fact that this $169 device can already make phone calls and send text messages and navigate the world and also play games and surf the Internet and can also take decent pictures and videos. 1080p and that's solid.

I initially had my suspicions about whether I was actually going to use this depth camera when taking a photo in portrait mode, but it screamed at me when I covered it and tried to take a photo in portrait mode, so it pays to at least pay attention to it. But when I took the photo and increased the background blur, this is the cutout shape which, if you zoom in a little, is really strange. It's really bad. I've never seen anything so bad in my life. (laughs) They really just said, "Yeah, we'll save a little bit of processing power here and use the zigzag cutting method from those scissors from preschool to make this work." But see, that's the thing.

That's the trap. It's not the build quality, okay, and it's definitely not the battery life, that's great. It's not the cameras and it's certainly not the software. This phone is slow, very slow. So, this phone has a MediaTek Helio G37 chip inside and three gigabytes of RAM. Other phones with this chipset include the Techno Spark 9, Infinix Hot 12, and HONOR X7a, all of which sell for less than US$150. It's clearly a cheap chip, right, and that's how it ended up in this phone. For some context, the iPhone 14's Geekbench score is this and the Moto G Play's Geekbench score is this.

So when I say it's trying to save processing power by not doing detailed portrait crops, I actually mean it, like it completely lacks meaningful processing power. And I'm not being picky about the fact that maybe it's slow in some high-end games or something. No, this phone is slow all the time. It is slow to scroll and move around the user interface. Now remember I mentioned at the beginning that this phone has a variable 90 hertz display, but I'll be honest, it would have taken me a while to say that because it almost never gets close to 60 hertz.

It hangs up constantly and stutters all over the place. It's slow to unlock, it's slow to open apps, not just huge apps, just normal apps. Even settings apps take an embarrassingly long time to open and even longer to search for things. To be fair, some of this is also due to storage speed. So I don't want to put it all on the chip, but the point here is that it absolutely does the trick. This phone is slower than average at taking pictures. It's slow to type things, browsing and doing anything like high-end gaming or photo editing is out of the question.

It may be the slowest phone I've ever used and I'm constantly reminded of it, which can make it quite unpleasant to use. So the more I use this phone, the more it made me think about a big question: is it better to buy a new, cheap phone like this or an older, more expensive one? Like this phone, this is 169 new, right? This phone here, this is the OnePlus 7 Pro, you might remember. It's one of my favorite phones. This was the phone of the year in 2019. So when it came out it was $669, but right now you can easily get it for under $200 secondhand.

This is just an example of a phone like this. This phone, if you compare dollar for dollar to the Moto, is a much better experience across the board, obviously it will have a much better chipset. So the Snapdragon 855 is a few years old, but it's much more capable and part of an overall better, smoother performance profile with faster storage and more RAM. It has a much, much better OLED display, which is sharper, brighter, and actually hits the 90 hertz refresh rate all the time. It has a lot more built-in storage, although it's not expandable, and it has a much better camera array.

It's a prime plus an ultra-wide and a zoom, and it's built with glass instead of plastic, which feels rock solid, and it has a 4,000 milliamp-hour battery, which is probably the only hardware line on the line. which can be called attractive or maybe even a win for the Moto phone, but we can't forget that warp charging that OnePlus was famous for. So this old flagship will have 30 watts of wired charging. So it seems pretty unanimous here. But a distinct advantage of the budget phone is that since it is new, it will receive future software updates later than the old phone.

In theory, this is of course like Motorola doesn't have the best track record here, so it depends on which phone we're talking about, but the Samsung A14 5G, for example, has a pretty similar spec sheet and a similar price. period, and it will probably receive more software updates than the Moto. But the idea here is that even if a flagship phone is promised three to four years of software updates, and the budget phone only gets two, as soon as that flagship phone is more than three years old, it won't have that advantage. not anymore. So the OnePlus 7 Pro probably doesn't have any software updates anymore, while we probably have some in the tank for the Moto.

However, it's also sometimes funny how I hear people talk about software updates, like some people don't think about software updates at all, they avoid them. By the way, don't do that; Security patches are quite important. But yeah, it's just one of those points that, by default, should go to the newer phone. But the last straw in favor of the older phone is actually the environment. Simply because buying an older phone that is designed to last and potentially getting an extra 2, 3, or 4 years out of it is better for the environment overall. You buy fewer new things and generate less electronic waste.

So that's something that's an advantage in the old phone over the new one. So my general thought looking at this landscape and all these options with older flagship phones versus newer budget phones is that the lower the price of the phone, the more I would want to buy the older phone. So at 169, for example, based on the experience I've had with this phone, I would definitely prefer to have, actually, the older flagship phone. There are a lot of flagships you can get for like $200, you can get this one, you can get a Pixel 5. Secondhand phones are really good.

Now if you go up to around $400 then it's a little more debatable. There are still some things that would still steer me toward the previous flagship phone, but then you get to $600 and it's like, oh, there are really good new $600 phones that I would buy today and still have the benefits of software upgrades. . It doesn't get much better than the Pixel 7, right now. So that's the theory. (brass fanfare blaring) So there you have it. At this price, I would prefer a prehistoric premium at a nice price today. Thanks for watching. Talk to you next time, peace. (Metal music continues) Pleasantly right now, that's a lot.

Pleasant, current and at a pleasant price?