Moto G Power packs wireless charging, 8GB RAM in a $300 phone | Hacker News Reader

Moto G Power packs wireless charging, 8GB RAM in a $300 phone

arstechnica.com

18 pointsPaulHoule18 comments

>"It seems criminal that these budget Qualcomm chips prioritize barely there 5G bands yet only support 802.11ac, AKA "Wi-Fi 5," which first hit smartphones in 2013."

I'm often surprised when phone reviewers _can't believe_ that a phone designed to be cheap doesn't hit the same target specs as a modern flagship.

Of course it doesn't, that's why it's cheap.

I'm not even sure why they need wifi 6. According to the specs page, the chipset supports wifi 5 2x2 80 mhz, which translates to a theoretical speed of 866.7 Mb/s. Even if we halve or third the speed for "real life" speeds, that's plenty enough for whatever can be done on a lowend phone. Even if you're downloading netflix videos (to watch later), you'll probably be bottlenecked by the slow eMMC storage.

Meanwhile 5G is significantly faster than LTE, probably due to better spectral efficiency as well as being less congested (less 5G devices around). In congested areas I'd only get 10-20Mb/s on LTE but 200+ Mb/s on 5G. That's far more useful than getting 866.7Mb/s vs 1021 Mb/s over wifi.

> 5G is significantly faster than LTE, probably due to better spectral efficiency as well as being less congested

I think they just converted 4G to 5G. So they give the illusion that 5G is faster. It will pass in a couple of months. /s

Because these tech journalists have no actual credentials and are borderline tech illiterate.

Also 802.11ac gets me 400mbps or so down/up on my phone, I can't imagine why I would need faster than that. Even offloading 4k videos is perfectly fast enough.

I have used Moto for my last 3 phones and they are great. Almost no bloatware, fast, good battery life. Only thing I would like is longer support for the phone OS.

I concur. I had a moto g before my Pixel 4 and it was an extremely solid budget phone.

Cheaper phones with a better Ubuntu/Android ROMs could actually make for better SBCs when considering all sensors that come with them.

All sensors, incredible form factor, battery and touch screen included. It's an sbc dream come true.

All you need to make things perfect, is a usb c with displayport alt mode and you are good to go.

Doesn't seem to live up to the legendary original moto G phones that were released when they were still under Google.

Where does it fall short?

The CPU? it's the slowest you can get

It's the cheapest Snapdragon you can get, but the actual specs / benchmarks don't look that bad.

2 A78 cores, 6 A55, single core performance roughly on the level of Snapdragon 855 (5 year old flagship). I have a weaker SoC on my phone and it works pretty well even for light gaming.

The cameras on the previous generation were rubbish, both extremely slow and low quality. GUI and web page rendering were also slow, perhaps because the cores were homogeneous, or just too slow. The battery life was excellent, but perhaps too good because everything was running slowly all the time.

The lack of updates isn't so bad if you are already accepting that it will likely get dropped and broken.

I'm completely out of the loop here.

What do you use 8gb of ram for on your phone? Just browsing the web?

Switching apps could also cause things to get unloaded if there is too little ram to hold both active.

Apps are bloated like crazy now so Android needs that much just to keep a couple open.

1 Android update

3 years of security updates (every other month)

That's Motorola's new and improved software policy

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