Last Updated on Dec 26, 2022

Moto G Plus (5th Generation)

My last phone, a ZTE Nubia Z11 Mini, was and forever will be a piece of crap.

“This phone teases you with its 64 bit octacore processor, 16mp camera, and 3gb of RAM, but it’s terrible. It randomly loses application data (apps occasionally start as if they’d just been installed). If you want notifications or accessibility services enabled for an app, you have to lock it so the phone doesn’t close it. You have to explicitly allow apps (such as add-ons to other apps and apps that run in the background like Tasker (as examples, Tasker won’t perform tasks and Greenify’s paid features won’t work without this)) to start automatically or they won’t work. There’s no Google calendar support. No way to directly access Google Settings out of the box. The power button is on the side near the middle–the perfect place for you to accidentally shut off your phone by holding the button for 10+ second. The camera sucks if the subject isn’t less than two feet away. The screen randomly shuts off. It’s dual SIM, but if you want to use two SIM cards, you can’t use an sdcard–it’s either two SIM cards or one SIM card and one sdcard. It doesn’t have NFC. Netflix works fine, but you can’t install it from the Play Store (though that may be a Netflix issue).”
–My official review

So I got a new one, a Motorola Moto G5 Plus. It seems promising, so far and it seems to use the unaltered AOSP (vanilla) version of Android. A few minor things I don’t like: no menu button, “back” is on the wrong side, I can’t take out the battery, and the alarm volume starts at 1 for about half a second before ramping up to the actual volume–nothing I can’t deal with.