Motorola Moto G7 Plus review

Squeaky clean Android 9.0 Pie

Some may call it boring, some may say it's all you need. You are getting stock Android experience across the entire Moto G lineup for better or for worse. After all, that's the key selling point of these devices ever since the first Moto G came around. However, that doesn't mean Motorola didn't add some cool stuff of its own in there.

The home screen isn't anything new, especially for stock Android fans. The only thing out of the ordinary is Motorola's circular clock in the middle, which also happens to indicate the remaining charge of the battery and also tells you if the TurboPower charging is active.

Tapping on it will take you to the Clock. Swiping to the right opens up the Google Feed tab with the latest news and a quick search box. Swiping from the bottom brings out the app drawer and if you swipe down from the home screen, the notification shade will drop down. This is a particularly useful gesture in an era of 19:9 aspect ratio smartphones. It does help a lot with the one-handed use. Oh, and the volume menu has been re-designed as well, but it was to be expected from Android 9.0 Pie in general.

Home screen, notification shade and Google Feed

The settings menu is quite minimalist with most of the settings tucked away within the sub-menus. Let's start with the most interesting ones - the so-called Moto Actions. There's a dedicated sub-menu in the Settings that lets you turn on and off various gestures. There's lift-to-unlock, media controls via the volume keys when the screen is off, three finger screenshot and a flip for Do Not Disturb mode. You can also shake the phone in a karate chop motion to turn on the flash or twist your wrist a few times to open up the camera app. The gestures work both ways - with the screen turned on or off.

Settings menu

The gesture-based navigation option is in there as well. It's called One Button Nav and works like Google Pixel's pill, but Motorola has its own take on this one. It's a small and rather long button in the middle. Swiping it to the left takes you back, swiping it up brings out the recent apps menu, swiping to the right quickly switches back to the previous app and a single tap will take you home. Holding it launches the voice assistant.

Moto Actions and the One Button Nav

If you've used other gesture-based navigations, it will take some time adjusting especially since the swipe from the bottom usually works as home whereas in this case, it opens up the recent apps menu. On the other hand, if you are coming from the standard software buttons, this one should feel familiar. The only downside we see in this is that the button is pretty small and it takes some time getting used to. And despite it being small, it still takes more space on the screen than the most currently available gesture navigations.

In the same Moto Actions menu, you will see the Moto Display sub-menu as well presenting two more display-related options. One that allows the screen to light up to notify you about new messages and the other one called Attentive Display. The latter keeps the screen on as long as you look at the display - we've seen similar implementations on Samsung, LG and other phones. It's pretty useful if you've set the screen timeout at 30 seconds or a minute and you are reading a long article.

Moto Voice and Moto Display

Next down the list is the Battery section where all the battery stats are buried. You can see which apps and hardware have drained most of the battery since the last full charge. There's an additional battery saver that limits the performance of the phone to preserve power. The new Adaptive Battery feature introduced with Android Pie is also at hand.

Battery menus

The Display menu offers the usual settings along with three color presets, which we've examined in the previous page. What's missing here is the notch toggle. Unfortunately, none of the new Motos offers the option to mask the notch. Also, we've noticed that turning the device's theme to "Dark" only changes the drop-down menu whereas the Settings menu remains white. It's probably a bug that needs fixing in future updates.

Display settings and sound settings

New to the Motorola's software is the face unlock. Don't expect anything fancy, though, as the software uses only the front-facing camera, so no additional hardware is used to identify your face. This means that the regular fingerprint reader and PIN/pattern unlocks are more secure.

Nevertheless, face recognition and the additional features make the unlocking experience way smoother. You can enable the Lift to unlock gesture - it bypasses the lock screen once you lift the device and the camera recognizes your face.

Fingerprint and face unlock menu

The rest is pretty standard and what you'd usually expect from a barebone Android OS. As we said earlier, Motorola still goes with the no clutter mantra so no third-party apps or bloatware can be found on the handset.

And as for updates, Motorola promised that all four G7 models would get the upcoming Android Q. The developers team, however, will keep the security updates for the next two years coming on a monthly basis.

Performance

The performance is one of the downsides of the Moto G7 Plus and not because it throttles or we felt the menu lagging. It's because most of the competitors in this price range sport a more powerful SoC like the Kirin 710 or the Snapdragon 660. Sure, the Snapdragon 636 is a perfectly capable SoC that can handle day-to-day tasks with ease and it's actually one of the most balanced mid-range chips efficiency-wise.

It's built on the 14nm node and has an octa-core processor featuring 8x Kryo 260 cores clocked at 1.8GHz and an Adreno 509 GPU for the graphically-intensive tasks. The ISP is also perfectly capable of handing slow-motion videos in 1080p as well as 2160p videos at 30fps.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  9003
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  5908
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  5894
• Nokia 7 plus
  5893
• Honor 8X
  5651
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  5574
• Realme 2 Pro
  5531
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  5411
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  4927
• Samsung Galaxy A8 (2018)
  4418

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  2438
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  1890
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  1650
• Nokia 7 plus
  1634
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  1628
• Honor 8X
  1618
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  1595
• Samsung Galaxy A8 (2018)
  1532
• Realme 2 Pro
  1462
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  1334

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  265314
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  170218
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  143257
• Nokia 7 plus
  140820
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  139075
• Honor 8X
  137276
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  136583
• Realme 2 Pro
  132958
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  117829

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  3713
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  2658
• Nokia 7 plus
  2376
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  2367
• Honor 8X
  2341
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  2338
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  2260
• Samsung Galaxy A8 (2018)
  2007
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  1999
• Realme 2 Pro
  1911

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  82
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  33
• Nokia 7 plus
  23
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  22
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  22
• Honor 8X
  21
• Realme 2 Pro
  21
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  20
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  16
• Samsung Galaxy A8 (2018)
  16

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  59
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  30
• Nokia 7 plus
  21
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  20
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  19
• Honor 8X
  19
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  19
• Realme 2 Pro
  18
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  15
• Samsung Galaxy A8 (2018)
  14

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  35
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  13
• Nokia 7 plus
  9.1
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  9
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  9
• Honor 8X
  7.6
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  7.6
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  6.3
• Samsung Galaxy A8 (2018)
  6

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  31
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  12
• Nokia 7 plus
  8.6
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  8
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  7.7
• Realme 2 Pro
  7.2
• Honor 8X
  6.7
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  6.7
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  5.9
• Samsung Galaxy A8 (2018)
  5.2

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Pocophone F1
  43652
• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE
  27560
• Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite
  21269
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 7
  21201
• Nokia 7 plus
  21063
• Huawei Mate 20 Lite
  20444
• Honor 8X
  20416
• Samsung Galaxy A8 (2018)
  15299
• Motorola Moto G7 Plus
  15004
• Realme 2 Pro
  14576