Moto G - Verizon Prepaid Phone (Verizon Prepaid Only)

The only flaw I can find with this phone is that, like all other cell phones, they cannot stand up to the abusive lifestyle I tend to demand of my personal communications gear. This is my third. The two before it both broke because of my own carelessness. I have broken many phones over the years, including a Gzone and a particularly rugged Kyocera, which is why I've gone back to owning cheap phones. But the price keeps going down!With Verizon you can get this phone activated for about $30 a month with 1G of data and unlimited voice. Why sign a contract to pay three times as much? Well, for one, you will be shunned from visiting the Verizon store like a plague carrier; stores only cater to contract holders. They will not answer questions about your account, take payments, or even sell you a case (but the Moto G is old enough that they wouldn't have one to sell you anyway.) You will also get somewhat degraded service in some markets. Where I live, there is no performance difference between this phone and the iphone I used to have on contract.There is no card slot on this phone, and the battery is not removeable. But if you aren't planning on watching HD movies on a transoceanic flight, you will not have much trouble from those aspects. I have run out of app space once or twice, but I just deleted a bunch of apps I wasn't using and things were back to normal. I keep a couple gigs of mp3s in there for car trips and mowing the lawn.Like any carrier-based phone, this one comes with a bunch of apps you won't want and can't delete, like the NFL app or the "my verizon" app that just loads and loads, but you can disable these apps in Android and at least not see them on the menu. If you unlock/jailbreak the phone you can then install a file manager that will allow you to remove them completely and open up a little more space in flash, but I'm not the kind of person who needs gigabytes in a phone.The GPS in this phone is pretty responsive and nearly good enough for turn-by-turn directions in all but the most crowded environments. In Manhattan, my dedicated Garmin Nuvi outperforms the Moto G, but nearly anywhere else I go they are equivalent. The voice prompts are nice and loud and clear. Unfortunately navigation kind of sucks in a car, because ALL audio goes through bluetooth. You cannot hear the voice prompts unless you're also listening to your phone on the BT audio system. If you want to do something so preposterous as listen to a CD or a USB stick that you use instead of loading down your phone with mp3s, you have to disable BT and listen to prompts through the speaker. But see my notes below about Android as an OS.My only complaints about this phone are Android-specific. For example, since I got the phone, Google removed the ability to lock screen rotation from the settings menu, and they added this ridiculous feature whereby if you scroll up from the bottom (or just try to click an icon or link near the bottom), a new app loads up which searches the web for something you don't want and didn't ask for, and then you have to click "back' three times to get back to where you were. The calendar defaults to viewing a single day, rather than a month or week or whatever you want. The alarm clock and camera keep reverting back to "first use mode," so if you want to take a photo of something quickly like a laughing child, there is always a chance that you'll have to click through ten or fifteen seconds of tutorials before you can actually take a photo (likewise for muting the alarm clock if you're crashing at a friend's place and in a hurry so as not to wake your hosts).I downloaded some apps to compensate for some of these issues, but using up more CPU and disk space to fix Google's ignorance doesn't seem like the optimal solution. In many cases, I just assume that somebody smarter than me knows better how I'd like to use the phone.There is not really a deal close to this from any other manufacturer, in terms of equipment cost or service cost. Except maybe not smashing them all the time.

I bought this about a month ago myself for my first phone and it's great! I'll break down the basic aspects of this phone.Prepaid:It's prepaid which is what I wanted so I wouldn't have to agree to contracts. With using up the money (on data) to make it last longer all I have to do is turn the data off when I finish replying to a message or not checking anything then when I know I should be getting a reply or some kind of other notification I turn the data back on and repeat the process. By doing it this way I spend only about $.01 each time I turn it on then back off again (I have all background data off for my apps which I highly recommend you do). Here is a tip: if you use only prepaid cards texts using the system's default costs $.20 per text sent and received (not worth it); install a free texting app (I use TextNow) and use data on that to get around the $.20 per text sent and received and pay about $.01 "per text" when you turn data on and off. Also as a note about redeeming the Verizon Prepaid cards: cards priced $15 (the cheapest card available) to $29.99 expire after 30 days of being applied to your account, cards $30-$74.99 expire after 90 days of being applied to the account, $75-$99.99 expire after 180 days of being applied, and $100 or more expires after one year of being applied to the account. This means any money you have left on your account will just disappear (I suggest you keep track of when you redeem them). But as a note I redeemed a $15 card then before it expired I added another $20 (both good for only 30 days) and it extended the time for the new total balance including my old balance to when the $20 card expires! With Verizon reception it's so-so. At home (in the suburbs) I get usually about 2-3 bars and 3G takes longer than it should. At my little vacation place that's surrounded by farm land and pretty much in the middle of nowhere I usually get about 2-3 bars and when I'm driving around sometimes I get up to 4 or 5 and even with 2-3 bars it connects to 3G much faster than at home (also as a note I have roaming turned off).Camera:I wouldn't even bother mentioning this normally but this is the reason I gave this phone only 4 stars. The quality is beyond words terrible. You have to be in bright natural light to take a front facing picture or the picture will appear blue tinted. If it's not natural light you will appear orange no matter how far you are away from the light (or if you're far enough it'll be a dark shadow). For rear camera photos they're okay in artificial light but they appear so sharply focused and makes pictures look very unattractive (to me anyway). The flash is also very long and blinding but helps the quality a little.Display/Software:The display is amazing on this phone! I didn't think it'd be so great looking that I could compare it with my iPod touch since I only paid $70 for this phone but I believe this display is even better (ignoring the poor camera quality). This phone's brightness is brighter than I'm used to and doesn't really get dark enough for me but it's not bad at all. Listening to music on this phone using the speaker on the back is amazing! It's clear and loud even on a low setting. One thing though, I have heard people complain about the calling quality on this phone and say it's really bad and they have to constantly repeat themselves. Not sure if it really is that bad since I haven't tried calling on it yet but I'll update this review with that information when I do. Now for the software: this phone uses KitKat and as I'm typing up this review the latest update I've gotten (about 1 week ago) was version 4.4.4 (which is the latest). The software is great to use and I like it better than Apple's (I just tried out Android with this phone and I see how it's better). Games are good on this phone since the screen is on the bigger side. This version of the Moto G when you first purchase it (before you download anything) has about 5.5 GB of storage. It doesn't sound like a lot but it's working out alright for me. Love the display and software on this phone!Look & Feel:This phone looks kind of like an iPhone to me (on the front) but longer and thicker. It's kind of clunky since it's so thick but I've gotten used to it. Even though it's a longer and wider phone it fits in the compartments on my backpack and in my back pockets alright. I've come to like the structure of this phone physically.I didn't expect the review to be this long so I'll just summarize it just in case you didn't want to read all of that. Prepaid on this phone is great and there are ways around the expensive charges for texting and calling when you do not have a contract plan and reception with Verizon is so-so, just depends. The camera quality is terrible and is why I gave this phone only 4 stars. The display on this is better than on my iPod touch (which costs more than double of this phone). The latest software on here (KitKat 4.4.4) is great to use and the storage on here is about 5.5 GB of your personal downloads which doesn't sound like a lot but works alright for me. It's a bit of a big, clunky phone but I've come to like how it's built and the structure isn't really a problem. I would recommend this phone to anyone it's just amazing.