The Moto X isn’t the only Motorola phone getting a makeover. The company is also refreshing its affordable Moto G Android phone with a new 2nd generation model.

It has a bigger screen, a better camera, and improved speaker placement… but some features remain unchanged from last year’s model. That might not be a bad thing though, because one feature that’s unchanged is the price.

The new Moto G goes on sale at noon Eastern time today for $180 and up.

moto g 2_00

The 2nd-gen Moto G features a 5 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel IPS display, a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB to 32GB of storage.

The new display features 294 pixels per inch compared with last year’s model which had 329 pixels per inch thanks to its smaller 4.5 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel screen.

On the bright side bigger is bigger… and some folks seem to prefer phones with larger displays. Motorola has also replaced the single speaker on the original Moto G with stereo speakers on the new model… and they’re both on the front of the device which should make music and other audio sound better.

Motorola has replaced last year’s 5MP rear camera with a new 8MP camera and upgraded the front-facing camera from 1.3MP to 2MP.

Other new features include 802.11ac WiFi and a microSD card slot for removeable storage.

The phone has a 2070 mAh battery which Motorola says should offer all-day battery life and features Bluetooth 4.0. It ships with Android 4.4 KitKat at launch, and Motorola is guaranteeing an upgrade to the next version of Android.

While you can’t customize the full design of the Moto G with Moto Maker the way you can with the Moto X, Motorola does offer a range of “shells” including colorful rear panels for the phone or even shells with built-in flip covers.

One feature the 2nd-gen Moto G lacks (for now) is support for 4G LTE networks. This is a 3G-only phone. If you’re looking for a model with support for faster 4G networks you may want to wait a while… the original Moto G also launched as a 3G device, but earlier this year Motorola launched a new Moto G 4G LTE for $219.

Hopefully the new Moto G will also get the LTE treatment in the future.

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15 replies on “Meet the new Motorola Moto G (second generation)”

  1. Very happy they made a non-LTE version. After all this is a phone for developing markets.

  2. Typed on 1st gen moto g: original firmware buggy, cyanogenmod not any better w sporadically stable releases but poor memory management and apps crashing often esp various browsers. Not sure if its all hardware v. Software but that as well as making phones bigger ans bigger makes me want to get back to iphone4 size…

    1. If microsd support is as bad as in the Moto G 4G, that’s not a good news…

  3. sounded like a great deal until saw that no LTE,,soooooooooooo lame when they had it on the 1 st generation….sounds like they blew a great chance to corner the market ,,oh well another step backwards !!

    1. Totally agree. I was waiting for this phone to come out since I’m switching careers in next 2 months but no LTE means I have to look else where.

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