My research on Moto G reviews (with an emphasis on battery life)

As soon as Motorola announced the Moto G and I went through the specs, I told myself: "If the battery life is what they claim, I'm definitely picking up one of these". Since then I'd been monitoring the online review rags to verify if the claims are true.

I'm keeping this page as a live diary to store links to the reviews that I find have relevant information about battery life that I'm looking for.

Why do I seem to be only concerned about battery life? In short, I'm already sold on the rest of the phone. The screen is the right size for me (I'm one of those who draw the line at anything above 5"). I would love to have LTE, but reality is that it's not going to really take off here in Thailand for at least another year (would love to be proven wrong though). The CPU looks like it's going to serve me just fine. I'm a bit worried about just 1GB of RAM, but let's see how Google's Project Svelte pans out. Which leaves just the battery, which it the one thing that I'm asking out of a new phone more than anything else.

1. Motorola Moto G review – the best budget smartphone is just £135 - by +Samuel Gibbs



Battery life is something Motorola has historically been known for, and the Moto G makes no exception to that rule. Motorola rates the Moto G as having around 24 hours of usable battery life, juggling web browsing, emailing and listening to music.

In my testing I found the Moto G to more or less live up to Motorola’s claims, far exceeding the battery life of smartphones more than three times its price, lasting just about two days of general usage. Bearing in mind the flood of emails that pass through my devices, and the constant connection to servers across 3G, the Moto G is likely to last much longer than that in most consumers’ hands.

2. Motorola Moto G review: The best budget smartphone you can get - by +Chris Martin

Just a passing mention about battery life, I don't know how he test it. Wouldn't put much stock in it:


Motorola touts 'all day' battery life for the Moto G and this is certainly the case in our testing. The Moto G will last a day and if you are a light user then you'll probably even get a couple of days from the handset.

3. Motorola Moto G review - by +Andrew Hoyle (CNET)



I found I was easily able to achieve over a day of use from the phone, even with quite intense use. I unplugged the phone at 8am on day one, and throughout the day played various sessions of Asphalt 8, Riptide GP 2 and Dead Trigger, ran benchmark tests, browsed the Web, watched some Netflix and browsed images and videos, all with the screen brightness set to max. The battery still had a couple of per cent remaining at 12:30pm the following day.

4. Motorola Moto G review - by Alastair Stevenson (V3)



Motorola has loaded the Moto G with a 2,070mAh battery that it claims will offer users 24 hours of mixed usage off one charge. This was quite a pessimistic representation of the phone's life, and with average use it was actually capable of lasting between a day and a half and two days.

During our opening day with the Moto G we used it fairly heavily and found it still had 50 percent of its charge left the morning after. Heavy use entailed watching a selection of YouTube videos, listening to music, regularly checking our social media and email accounts, surfing the internet, making and taking a few phone calls and sporadically checking Google Maps after getting lost on the way to a briefing.

After battery burning the Moto G we were similarly impressed. When constantly looping a video file stored on the phone with the screen set to auto brightness the Moto G lasted nearly eight hours before dying. By comparison most other smartphones generally last between six to seven hours when tasked with the same test.



5. Moto G Review: the unbeatable people's smartphone - by Johannes Wallat



The battery performance provided another angle within Motorola’s marketing. Motorola promises 24 hours of battery life and the battery is actually quite powerful with a capacity of 2,070 mAh. I noticed that the battery life was indeed good during my test and after about 7 hours it was still at about 30%. During this time, I used Wi-Fi and mobile networks and the display was on full brightness most of the time. I took pictures and recorded videos, synced my Google account, downloaded many apps from the Google Play Store and played Real Racing 3. When taking this into consideration and also the fact that I didn’t completely charge the device in the first place, Motorola’s statement is actually realistic.



6. Moto G review - by Alex Dobie (Android Central)



With a 2070 mAh battery and an energy-efficient Cortex A7-based CPU inside, is not surprising to find that the Moto G delivers excellent battery life. We had real difficulty depleting the battery in under 24 hours with our day-to-day usage patterns — and when we did it was with a healthy six hours of screen-on time behind us. When idle, the the device uses almost no power at all, even with accounts syncing in the background. And even relatively strenuous tasks didn’t seem to impact available charge too drastically. Music playback and web browsing over HSPA, for instance, didn’t produce the rapid increase in battery usage we’re accustomed to seeing on other Android phones.

The Moto G was also unfazed by hostile radio environments during our testing. For example, busy stations in central London which quickly sap the batteries of many other devices had no such effect on the Moto G — or at the very least, this characteristic battery drain was significantly reduced.

Of course it's still wise to plan on a nightly charge, but if you do you shouldn't have to worry about battery life at all. And it’s refreshing to say that about any Android phone, let alone one at this price point.



7. Motorola Moto G review - by Britta O'Boyle (Pocket Lint)



Motorola promises up to 24 hours from the 2070mAh battery inside the Moto G, but we have yet to get close to that. On a typical day, we make calls, have emails coming through on a regular basis, Twitter open, WhatsApp running constantly, the camera will get some usage and we will browse the internet regularly, possibly even play a few games. We managed to get around 14 hours from it before it started red-lining, which we were still impressed with.

That will take you through your working day with battery saver on and you can get a rundown on what services you are using that are drinking a lot of juice, which is handy. It's good going for a smartphone so we don't want to be too hard on it, but to manage 24 hours of mixed use, we suspect you can't do much at all.

As with many phones, if you have the display set to be as bright as possible, you will get even less, so it is worth making sure it is set to auto before you start your stop clock on the battery life.

8. Motorola Moto G review - by Dave Oliver (Wired)



...and the battery stood up pretty well too, giving us almost two solid days of steady use.

Yong Taufu / Yentafo : That moment when you realize you may have been wrong all along

For most of us in Malaysia, "yong tau fu / 釀豆腐" is typically defined by an assortment of chunky ingredients (typically beancurd, chili, brinjals etc) stuffed with meat filling. We assume that the traditional version of the dish started out with just beancurd stuffed with meat and as time passed, we started stuffing other ingredients as well to add variety.

The Malaysian interpretation of Yong Taufu. Note that it's not even about the beancurd anymore nowadays (image credit AhTeeKitchen)

Over here in Thailand, there's a dish that's very popular called "Yentafo". Most fahrangs would refer to it as "pink noodles", and yes, it's served in a pink broth that makes it look pretty funky alright.

Typical yentafo dish, from a local chain called "Maliga"

By chance, I once walked into a yentafo shop owned by a Thai Chinese, and he had proudly displayed the words "釀豆腐" in his shop. That's how I knew that "yentafo" is actually a Thai-localized name of "yong taufu".

Initially though, I refused to acknowledged that this was yong taufu. Note that there's an absolute absence of beancurd in the dish pictured. Yong taufu in Thailand is served with absolutely no big chunks of beancurd. Heresy, I know right? For the longest time, I just accepted this as an example of a Chinese dish lost in translation into Thai culture.

Recently though, I was explaining to my fiancee and her mother our version of yongtaufu. I showed them a picture of the dish and their immediate reaction was "where're the noodles???". I explained that in Malaysia, yong taufu is defined by the chunks of ingredients and it doesn't matter whether we eat it with rice or noodles. Predictably, they rejected this outright and said that we got it wrong. Heh. The mother further explained that yentafo in Thailand points to the noodles and the pink broth it's served in and not so much the ingredients.

Now, I've been thinking about this for about a week and something just clicked: the word "yong / 釀" in yong taufu. 

Now, if you open up a Chinese dictionary and look up the definition of the word "釀", you will find that it literally means "wine" or "fermented". Has it occurred to any of the Chinese-reading foodies in Malaysia that this definition seems rather incongruous with our definition of the dish, which is "stuffed beancurd"?

Now, looking back at the Thailand version of the dish, would anyone want to take a stab at guessing what the pink broth is made of? It's actually using a primary ingredient called in Chinese "腐乳", which is red fermented beancurd. So, the word "yentafo" is actually defined by a dish of noodles served with red fermented beancurd. And it sure as heck makes a lot more sense than our Malaysian version of it.

Red fermented beancurd (Image credit Christine's Recipes)

Kinda mind-blowing if it's true, ain't it? Turns out it may have been us Malaysians who had gotten things lost in translation. How could a couple of generations of Malaysian foodies have gotten it wrong for so long?