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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9525/the-moto-g-2015-review
The Moto G (2015) Review
by Brandon Chester on August 19, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Motorola's original Moto G was one of the first Android devices to offer what one could honestly call a good user experience at a price of around $200. It had a 4.5" 720p display, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 400 SoC, a 5MP rear camera, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of memory. Since that time, Motorola has adopted a structure where their Moto E fills in the sub $150 range, the Moto G hovers around $200, and the Moto X acts as a several hundred dollar flagship device, although the dual Moto X launch for 2015 changes this slightly. In early 2014 we saw Motorola refresh the Moto G with support for LTE, and later in the year they did a more major refresh which bumped the display size to 5", the camera resolution to 8MP, and added the microSD slot from the LTE model of the original version.
While Motorola's 2014 refresh of the Moto G was technically a major update as far as their yearly cadence was concerned, many aspects of the phone remained the same. There was no change to the SoC or the amount of RAM, no change to the display resolution or connectivity, and no change to battery capacity. The early 2015 launch of the Moto E made things even stranger, as it shipped with some specifications that actually outclassed the Moto G, such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410 SoC. This put Motorola in a strange situation, which has finally been resolved with the new 2015 model of the Moto G. In my view, this is the first truly major update that the phone has seen since the original version, and you can see what improvements Motorola has made in the chart below.
Moto G (2014) | Moto G (2015) | |
SoC | Snapdragon 400 1.2 GHZ A7 | Snapdragon 410 1.4 GHz A53 |
RAM | 1GB | 1/2GB |
NAND | 8GB NAND + microSD | 8/16GB NAND + microSD |
Display | 5” 720p IPS |
5” 720p IPS |
Network | 2G / 3G / 4G LTE | 2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Category 4 LTE) |
Dimensions | 141.5 x 70.7 x 11mm, 149g | 142.1 x 72.4 x 6.1-11.6mm, 155g |
Camera | 8MP Rear Facing (Sony IMX179) f/2.4, 1.4 micron 1/3.2" sensor | 13MP Rear Facing (Sony IMX214) f/2.0, 1.1 micron 1/3.06" sensor |
2MP Front Facing | 5MP Front Facing | |
Battery | 2070 mAh (7.87 Whr) | 2470 mAh (9.39 Whr) |
OS | Android 4.4 (At Launch) | Android 5.1 (At Launch) |
Connectivity | 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS |
2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS |
SIM | MicroSIM | MicroSIM |
Launch Price | $179 (1GB/8GB) | $179 (1GB/8GB) $219 (2GB/16GB) |
As you can see above, this year's iteration of the Moto G brings along some significant improvements. For the first time ever, we're seeing an update to the Moto G's SoC. While both the first and second generation models used Qualcomm's Snapdragon 400 SoC with four 1.2GHz Cortex A7 cores, this year's model adopts a 1.4GHz version of Snapdragon 410 with four Cortex A53 cores. The battery also receives a hefty bump in capacity, although this does come along with an increase in height, width, and thickness, as well as a slight increase in mass. Memory remains the same for the base model at 8GB of NAND and 1GB of RAM, but an extra $40 bumps that to 16GB of NAND and 2GB of RAM.
The rear-facing camera moves from Sony's IMX179 sensor to IMX214 which interestingly enough is the same improvement that was made going from the Nexus 5 to the Nexus 6. The sensor size increases from 1/3.2" to 1/3.06", and the resolution is bumped to 13MP from 8MP. This means that pixel size drops from 1.3 micron to 1.12, and low light scenarios may see a reduction in image quality as a result, but the wider F/2.0 aperture can help to offset this. The front-facing camera also jumps from a 2MP to a 5MP sensor.
Connectivity and the display don't see any improvements with this upgrade. We're still looking at a 5" 1280x720 IPS display, and with WiFi and Bluetooth you get 2.4GHz 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0 LE.
Design
At this point, Motorola's industrial design is fairly well known and understood. All of their devices, from the Moto E all the way up to the Nexus 6, have essentially the same chassis shape with differing dimensions. The big difference between Motorola's devices is the materials that are used. While Moto Maker allows users to customize their devices to some extent, more expensive devices may have special options like wood back covers, and may have metal frames around the chassis rather than plastic ones. Being a mid-range smartphone, the Moto G is made primarily of plastic.
When it comes to the front face and sides the 2015 Moto G continues to share a design with Motorola's other devices. It has speakers sitting above and below the display, and a front facing camera sitting to the right of the upper speaker. The sides are flat on the edge that meets the display, and curved on the edge that meets the back cover. Both the power button and volume rocker are located on the right side of the phone, and the power button has the same texture to it as the Nexus 6 and Moto E, which makes it easy to tell apart from the volume rocker. Something that does concern me a bit about the sides of the device is the large gap between the back cover and the rest of the device. There are points where the gap is wide enough that you can feel it decreasing in size when you grip the phone in that area, which concerned me both because it negatively impacts the feel of the device, and because the Moto G is supposed to be waterproof.
The back of the 2015 Moto G is where things depart slightly from how Motorola devices usually look. On older Motorola devices, the rear-facing camera sat above a small indent which had the Motorola logo inside it. The camera flash either sat between the logo and the camera, or was integrated into the ring around the camera itself. All of these features were separate and sat flush with the back cover. The new Moto G and Motorola's recently launched Moto X devices now have a strip which connects the camera, flash, and Motorola logo and puts them slightly below the level of the back cover.
Since the Moto G can be customized with Moto Maker, there will potentially be differences between a consumer's device and the review unit I have. In my case, the Moto G's back cover is made of black plastic, with a series of raised diagonal lines which gives it a different feeling from a device with a smooth back like the Moto E. I personally prefer the in hand feel of this back cover to the smooth slippery plastic on the Moto E, and I think the black color goes very well with it.
As I mentioned earlier, the Moto G is waterproof. Its IPX7 rating specifies that it can be submerged up to 1 meter deep for up to thirty minutes. While I didn't push the device to that limit just due to worries about possibly damaging a review unit, I did put it under thirty centimeters of water for around twenty minutes and it did not sustain any damage. All back covers for the third generation Moto G have plastic sections that fit into and protect the open ports on the back of the phone from any water getting in. While there was absolutely no damage, you can see above that water was able to get between the back of the chassis and the back cover even though I made sure to secure the back cover tightly and properly. I don't believe this to be any cause for concern, but I felt it was worth sharing. With a removable back cover this issue can't really be avoided, and the inserts that block important ports have kept water out of the areas that need to be protected.
In the end I think the 2015 Moto G has a good feel in the hand, and I think the build quality is more than acceptable for a phone that starts at $179. I definitely prefer the textured back cover to the smooth and slippery ones on some other Motorola phones, and if you're given that option I would definitely opt for it. My only complaint is that the back cover doesn't attach as tightly to the phone as I would like, and you can notice the gap when you touch it at the edges. The gap also seems to be big enough to let water through, but the protective covers on the back cover ensure that the phone won't get damaged.
System Performance
Like the 2015 Moto E, the Moto G uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410 MSM8916 SoC. This is the first time Motorola has updated the SoC in the Moto G, with both the first and second generation models using the same 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 SoC. Because the Moto G shares an SoC with the Moto E one might think this means they are equal in speed. However, the SKU in the Moto G has a peak frequency of 1.4GHz rather than the 1.2GHz in the Moto E. This is somewhat confusing because both are named MSM8916, but it's not dissimilar to how Snapdragon 615 devices run at either 1.5GHz or 1.7GHz on the big cluster.
As far as clock speed goes, the Moto G is 17% faster than the Moto E. It's difficult to estimate how much improvement will be seen compared to the older Moto G models, as the core architecture moves from Cortex A7 to Cortex A53 which comes with its own improvements in IPC in addition to the higher clock speed. It's also important to note that we are testing the model of the Moto G with 2GB of RAM, and this is another factor that can increase performance when comparing to Motorola's 1GB devices. Ultimately, it's important not to assume how much faster the Moto G will be based purely on the CPU frequency, even though it can give some idea about performance relative to other devices with the same CPU but a lower frequency. In order to properly characterize the Moto G's performance relative to many other devices, we turn to our standard workflow of web based benchmarks, followed by PCMark and BaseMark OS II.
The overall picture painted by our web browser tests is that the 2015 Moto G has a healthy lead over the Moto E's performance, and an even greater one over the older Snapdragon 400 based models of the Moto G. The level of performance is certainly good for a $219 device, but I do find myself wishing that Snapdragon 410 and 615 were produced on 28nm HPC or 28nm HPm in order to achieve even greater performance without an increase to power consumption.
In PCMark, which focuses heavily on replicating real world tasks like watching video and editing photos, the 2015 Moto G again has a strong showing. Overall performance actually sits about the HTC One M9, carried by high scores in the writing and video playback tests. Web browsing performance also improves significantly from the 2015 Moto E and the 2014 Moto G, which could either be the result of additional memory or further optimizations to the Android WebView.
The Moto G doesn't perform as well in BaseMark OS II as it does in PCMark. While there's still good performance in the web and NAND memory sub-tests, performance lags in the system sub-test which stresses CPU and memory, and the graphics test score is very low due to how slow the Adreno 306 GPU is.
The Moto G's general performance is pretty good for a device of this price. There's a good level of improvement over the Moto E's performance, with the gap between the new Moto G and the 2014 model being even larger. The ASUS Zenfone 2 still has the best performance of a $200 smartphone, but it's something of an anomaly, and barring it the Moto G provides the best general performance that you'll see at this price point.
GPU Performance
While CPU performance has improved significantly in low-end and mid-range smartphones, the same can't be said of GPU performance. Adreno 306 is really just a variant of Adreno 305, which we have covered time and time again in reviews of Snapdragon 400 devices. I already discussed in my Moto E review that I'm not happy with the graphics performance in Snapdragon 410 and with the GPU configuration in the Moto G being exactly the same there won't be any significant changes to graphics performance.
Due to the way 3DMark calculates its overall score, it's not possible for a device to pull ahead based on the score of one test being substantially higher than the other. Because of this, the Moto G's improvement in the physics test doesn't lead to it coming on top overall due to its slightly lower graphics score. I would just attribute the lower graphics test score to testing variance, and so in reality the Moto G will be slightly faster than the Moto E or older Moto G in any physics heavy games.
Driver bugs had previously prevented me from running BaseMark X on Snapdragon 410 devices. This appears to have been resolved, as the test runs and completes on the Moto G. There's not much to be said about the scores, which are at the bottom of the charts in every single test.
As expected, performance in GFXBench on the new Moto G is essentially identical to that of other Adreno 305/306 devices. Unfortunately they all share a space at the very bottom of each chart, and end up being between 1/3 and 1/2 the speed of the Adreno 405 GPU in Snapdragon 615.
When I reviewed the Moto E I gave the GPU performance a pass because the phone sold for $100-130. With the Moto G priced as high as $219 for the high end model, I have to say that $30 more gets you the Huawei P8 Lite which uses Snapdragon 615 and Adreno 405 which is substantially faster. There's not much Motorola could do about this apart from using a completely different SoC, but obviously that wasn't a possibility when building a device that does start at $179 even if it scales up to $219. I just hope that we see some improvement in GPU performance on devices at this price point in the near future.
NAND Performance
Flash memory performance can often be an invisible performance bottleneck when applications are running in the background, writing files, or performing updates. Low-end and mid-range devices often suffer from very poor NAND performance which can cause stuttering or slowness whenever there's heavy I/O activity occurring.
Random read speeds on the Moto G are much faster than the Moto E or the Huawei P8 Lite. They're certainly not the fastest on record, but they're at the point where I wouldn't worry about them causing performance problems in most circumstances. The random write speed is a very curious case, with it being faster than every other device on record. There doesn't appear to be any problem with the testing, and it seems that the Moto G's NAND simply has relatively fast random write speeds.
Sequential read speeds on the Moto G are faster than other mid range phones, but not as fast as the Zenfone 2 or flagship Android devices. Sequential writes sit right in the middle of the chart and are around the same speed as the NAND in LG's flagship devices. Whether it's random or sequential access I don't expect users will encounter any performance issues on the Moto G caused by poor NAND performance.
Display
Since a smartphone is primarily a large display that you interact with, it's important that manufacturers prioritize including a high quality display. As smartphones advanced we first saw increases to display resolution to improve sharpness, as well as a shift from TN displays to VA or IPS panels in order to improve viewing angle. With specs like resolution reaching a point where there isn't much more improvement to be made, manufacturers have moved on to improving display accuracy. While some have begun to focus on the color accuracy of their mid-range devices, others have not. To evaluate the various aspects of a display we use X-Rite's i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer along with their i1Display Pro colorimeter, and SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software.
The Moto G has a good peak brightness, although the black level is higher than most recent devices, including the 2015 Moto E. What makes the Moto G somewhat difficult to use outdoors despite its brightness is the fact that the display seems fairly reflective, and the capacitive touch sensors show up very easily in the light which creates a pattern that obscures the content on the LCD.
The Moto G's gamma is very accurate, but the overall greyscale accuracy is let down by the panel's blue shift. The white point average is 7627K, which is noticeably more blue than the desired average of 6504K. From 20% grey onward one can notice the blue tint in grey shades, and in the end the average error is a somewhat disappointing 4.5532, with the error in the lightest shades being even higher at around six. In all of these aspects, the 2015 Moto G's display actually regresses significantly from the 2014 model. It's not clear if this is just model variance, or if this is applicable to all versions, but in any case it is disappointing.
In our saturation sweep test we see that blue has a degree of over-saturation at all points, with saturations past 60% overshooting significantly. Red demonstrates some saturation compression, and there's general inaccuracy in yellow, cyan, and most of all, magenta. This is another situation where the 2015 Moto G's display regresses compared to the 2014 edition, and it's to a much more significant degree than the greyscale test, with the older 2014 Moto G having achieved a result that rivals high end smartphones.
Due to the inaccuracy in the greyscale and in rendering primary and secondary colors there's not much hope for accurate reproduction of color mixtures on the 2015 Moto G's display. Shades of green tend to have a decent level of accuracy, but most other colors and shades of grey suffer from over-saturation or under-saturation depending on what primary/secondary color they most relate to, and are just generally inaccurate. When using the Moto G this was fairly evident to me throughout the UI, particularly on icons that I see very often such as those for Google's own apps.
While I don't know how consistent the calibration across Motorola's devices is, based on the results measured for our samples of the 2014 and 2015 Moto G it's clear that the display of the 2015 model regresses in most respects. Peak brightness increases substantially which is appreciated, and maintaining black level has boosted contrast. Unfortunately, the display is far too blue, and this causes significant greyscale errors despite the display's relatively straight and accurate gamma. The inaccuracies in rendering primary and secondary colors combined with the greyscale errors means that there aren't many shades the display actually does render accurately outside of some that primarily consist of a green component. Ultimately I'm let down by the Moto G's display, because this year's model saw no upgrade to resolution, and I had hoped that there would be some improvement, or at the very least no reduction in the display accuracy.
Camera
One of the most notable improvements to the 2015 Moto G is its new rear-facing camera. The 2014 Moto G used Sony's IMX179, while the 2015 model adopts IMX214. The sensor size increases from 1/3.2" to 1/3.06" and the resolution increases from 8MP to 13MP. The aperture is also much wider, moving from F/2.4 to F/2.0, which can help offset the lower sensitivity of the smaller pixels. An overview of the Moto G's cameras can be found in the chart below.
Camera Specifications | |||
Moto G (2015) | |||
Front Camera | 5MP (2560x1920) |
||
Front Camera - Sensor | S5K5E2 (1.12 µm, 1/5") |
||
Front Camera - Max Aperture | F/2.2 | ||
Rear Camera | 13.0MP (4224x3400) |
||
Rear Camera - Sensor | Sony IMX214 (1.12 µm, 1/3.06") |
||
Rear Camera - Focal Length | 3.6mm (26mm eff) | ||
Rear Camera - Max Aperture | F/2.0 |
While the Moto G lacks the voice coil motor from the Nexus 6 which is needed to enable OIS, the rest of the camera stack is effectively identical. The one difference on paper is the Moto G's shorter focal length which will give images a wider field of view.
Coincidentally, the move from IMX179 to IMX214 is the exact same change made between the Nexus 5 and Nexus 6. Whatever differences there are between the image quality of the 2015 Moto G and the Nexus 6 in good lighting rests primarily in the hands of their image signal processors. The Nexus 6 will obviously have a low light advantage due to its inclusion of OIS to lengthen shutter times, and we'll get to the low light differences after covering image quality with generous lighting.
In this daylight scene the Moto G performs very well. The exposure is very good, although I feel that it underexposed slightly while the Nexus 6 overexposed slightly. The Nexus 6 definitely has an edge when it comes to the sharpness of grass and foliage, as well as the preservation of textures such as the walls of the building and the pavement of the road. It's also worth noting that there's some lens distortion occurring on the Moto G which is causing color fringing along the white edges of the building windows, although at a normal viewing size it's barely noticeable. I think the Nexus 6 took an overall better photo, but only slightly better, with the Moto G doing a better job than any other mid-range device I've tested during the day.
Low light image quality is where things start to fall apart on the Moto G. While it's difficult to see in the small preview above, looking at the full size image reveals a great deal of color noise throughout the entire image, which doesn't exist on the Nexus 6. The Moto G took a 1/15s exposure, while the Nexus 6 was longer at 1/12s. 1/12s actually isn't very long for a device with OIS, and the difference in ISO value was not very large between the two devices either which means that Motorola's lacking quality has more to do with a simple lack of chroma noise reduction more than anything else. Chroma noise is by far the most distracting type of artifact in photos, and unfortunately it makes the Moto G unsuitable for photography in low light.
Video Quality
Video recording is a great test of a device's ISP as there's only a very short timespan to do processing on each frame that is captured. Since the 2015 Moto G and the Nexus 6 use the same image sensor this allows us to take a look at the differences in video quality between the ISPs in Snapdragon 410 and Snapdragon 805.
The Moto G records 1080p video at 30fps. Video is encoded with an average bitrate of 17Mbps using the H.264 high profile. For this comparison I limited the Nexus 6 to 1080p rather than UHD recording to make it an apples to apples comparison.
The most obvious advantage the Nexus 6 has is the stability of the video. While one might think this is due to the inclusion of OIS, the Nexus 6 isn't using the OIS for stabilization, and this is really just a case of superior EIS enabled by the superior ISP. As for the video quality itself, it's clear that the Nexus 6 is sharper across the frame and has greater detail on the various types of foliage in the area. The Nexus 6 also manages a better exposure, with the Moto G's video being too dark, with muted and just generally inaccurate colors. It appears that like the low light photo scene, the Moto G's video recording abilities are hampered by its ISP.
WiFi Performance
Like almost all of the low end and mid range devices I've tested recently, the Moto G ships with support for 802.11n on the 2.4GHz band. This single spatial stream implementation has a max link speed of 72Mbps.
The Moto G's WiFi speed is roughly the same as all other mid range devices. The Zenfone 2 is once again an exception to the rule, but I don't think anyone buying a device like the Moto G will have adopted an 802.11ac router at this point anyway due to cost reasons. I really hope we start seeing 5GHz support in mid range 802.11n phones though, rather than the ever increasingly crowded 2.4GHz band.
Battery Life
Battery life is obviously one of the most important aspects of any mobile device, whether it be a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, or a wearable device. To examine battery life on mobile devices we run them through a number of tests. The first is a web browsing test run both on WiFi and on LTE, which is primarily a display bound test. The next test is BaseMark OS II, which stresses the CPU. After that is PCMark which attempts to simulate various real world workloads, and is a good indicator of real world battery life. Finally, we test using GFXBench 3.0 to see how long a device lasts and how well it performs with a constant GPU load.
In both of our web browsing battery tests the Moto G performs very well. Through a combination of reduced platform power and a larger battery we see the 2015 Moto G last nearly 2.5 hours longer than its predecessor in the WiFi test. Unfortunately I don't have data for the 2014 model on LTE, but at 9.27 hours the Moto G's lifetime when browsing on cellular is also very respectable.
BaseMark OS II's battery test stresses the CPU a great deal, and in it we see the 2015 Moto G lasts roughly as long as its predecessor. Since the 2015 model has a significantly larger battery this implies a greater amount of battery drain in a given unit of time, which is what leads to the lower battery score for the 2015 model. If Snapdragon 410 were produced on a lower leakage process like 28nm HPm or HPC rather than 28nm LP we would see a significant improvement to power consumption in CPU heavy workloads.
In PCMark's battery test the Moto G is in a league of its own. Due to its relatively large battery it pulls ahead of other mid range devices by a large margin. The downside of course is that if you were a user going through the workloads PCMark performs you would have substantially worse performance than a device like the Zenfone 2. I think the Moto G's runtime in PCMark demonstrates an important consideration for consumers, with a device like the Zenfone 2 being much faster than the Moto G at roughly the same price, but offering only a little more than half the battery life in a mixed workload. If battery life is your priority in a mid range device the 2015 Moto G appears to be the best option by far.
Low and and mid range devices with big batteries and relatively low GPU performance tend to do well in GFXBench's battery test. While they do last long, the performance during the T-Rex HD test that continually loops is well below what would be considered a playable frame rate, and so it's not really worth discussing in much detail.
Overall, I'm very happy with the new Moto G's battery life. Both the web browsing results and the PCMark result confirm my experience in the real world which is that the Moto G lasts for a really long time. I often found myself only charging it every other day unless I had been using it very heavily, and it's really one of the only devices I own where I didn't even bother to take a look at the battery percentage from time to time. The only disappointment is the knowledge that if Snapdragon 410 were produced on a lower leakage process we could see even higher performance with the same great battery life that the Moto G achieves.
Charge Time
While the Moto G has a fairly substantial battery life, it will eventually die and need to be recharged. We've seen a large improvement in the charge time of mobile devices with the adoption of fast chargers that supply as much as 18W of power to a device. Unfortunately, this hasn't trickled down to low end and mid range devices yet, and as a result they often suffer from very long charge times using their included chargers.
The combination of a 9.39Wh battery and a 2.75W charger leads to the longest charge time on record for a mobile device. While it's only a couple minutes longer than the Huawei P8 Lite, it's substantially longer than most other phones. Since the Moto G has very good battery life users can just charge their phone at night, which puts it in a better situation than the P8 Lite. Despite that, I wish Motorola had considered the additional charge time their larger battery would require and included a 5W charging block to compensate. If a user has a spare 5W or higher charging block or lives in a region where the Moto G comes with one they will see the charge time drop to as low as 2 hours and 50 minutes, which is much more reasonable.
Final Words
When Motorola launched the 2014 Moto G I felt that it was something of a sidegrade rather than a straight upgrade. The larger display size wasn't accompanied by an increase in resolution, but it did come with improvements to color accuracy. The cameras also received an upgrade, and you got a microSD slot, but every other aspect of the device was unchanged. The 2015 Moto G really feels like the first major upgrade to the phone since the original version launched in 2013.
As far as design and build quality goes, if you're a fan of Motorola's industrial design you'll like the 2015 Moto G, and if you don't like it your mind isn't likely to be changed by it. I think the Moto G has a good feel in the hand and it's not as slippery as the Moto E because of the textured back. The flex around the edges is difficult for me to ignore though, especially when the less expensive Moto E with its non removable back feels much more solid as a result. The waterproofing is definitely a neat addition, but I think in most cases it's just a nice thing to have rather than a selling point. Once waterproofing is accompanied by the ability to use the display when it's really wet I'll be a lot more interested in it.
Speaking of the display, that's one of the areas of the Moto G that disappointed me. The improvement to brightness over the 2014 model is greatly appreciated, but it's still quite reflective and the capacitive touch sensors show up very easily in light which makes it difficult to use outdoors. The calibration also takes a hit in every respect, and unfortunately I would have to describe the 2015 Moto G's display as an overall downgrade from the 2014 model.
When it comes to performance, the 1.4GHz Snapdragon 410 paired with 2GB of RAM is a definite improvement over the 1.2GHz implementation with 1GB of RAM in the Moto E. In fact, CPU performance is almost as fast as devices that use the 1.5GHz version of Snapdragon 615 such as the Huawei P8 Lite. Unfortunately, the Adreno 306 GPU is not very fast to say the least, and that leaves a graphics performance gap between the Moto G and Snapdragon 615 devices. The Zenfone 2 is also a device to consider, with approximately the same price as the 16GB/2GB model of the Moto G, a better display, and significantly higher performance.
While the Zenfone 2 is definitely a faster device than the Moto G, it falls short when it comes to the quality of photos and videos. In fact, I think that the new rear camera in the Moto G is one of its most substantial improvements. IMX214 was a good camera sensor in the Nexus 6, and it's even more impressive to see in a device that starts at $179. Comparisons between the two devices definitely highlights a gap in ISP performance, particularly when examining video quality, but I think the Moto G has the best camera when compared to other mid range devices that I've used.
The last important aspect of the new Moto G to consider is its battery life. While it's certainly not as fast as a device like the Zenfone 2, it has outstanding battery life in a variety of scenarios. It's unfortunate that battery life in heavy CPU workloads is hampered by the high leakage of the 28nm LP process, but in the sort of tasks Moto G users will be performing the battery life is longer than any other mid range phone, and is often twice as long as the Zenfone 2.
This ends up presenting buyers with a choice. One can opt for the larger, faster Zenfone 2 with its better display, but they lose out on camera quality and battery life. If one chooses the Moto G, they sacrifice performance and display resolution for a smaller device with much longer battery life and a camera that is on a completely different level. While users all have different preferences for the features that are important to them, I think whether they choose the Moto G or a device like the Zenfone 2 depends on how much battery life they need.
In the end, I think as far as conventional mid range devices goes there's no competition for the Moto G. The construction and the camera are good, the performance is the best of an ARM device at this price point, and the battery life is amazing. If you feel that the Moto G's performance isn't fast enough for you then the Zenfone 2 is definitely a device to consider, but I think the Moto G strikes a good balance of performance, features, and battery life, and ends up being the best choice for the average buyer looking to buy a mid range smartphone.