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Android Cellphones Displays The Almighty Buck Hardware Technology

The Moto G7 Lineup Offers Bigger Screens and Smaller Bezels On a Budget (theverge.com) 66

Posted by BeauHD from the new-and-shiny dept.
Motorola is releasing three versions of the Moto G7 this year: the G7, the G7 Power, and the G7 Play (a fourth, more powerful G7 Plus model will also be released internationally). These new devices offer slimmer bezels, bigger displays, and larger batteries than their predecessors. The Verge reports: [T]he $299 G7 (not to be confused with LG's G7 ThinQ) is the top-of-the-line model, with a 6.2-inch Gorilla Glass display that features a 2270 x 1080 resolution and a more subtle teardrop notch. The G7 also has more RAM (4GB), and more internal storage (64GB) than its siblings, along with a dual-camera setup on the back that offers a 12-megapixel main lens along with a 5-megapixel depth sensor for a better portrait mode experience (the other G7 phones will have a software-based portrait mode instead). The G7 also supports Motorola's 15W TurboPower charging spec, which promises nine hours of battery life from a 15-minute charge.

The next phone in the lineup, the $249 G7 Power, may not offer the same level of premium upgrades as the G7, but it does offer an intriguing feature that its pricier counterpart doesn't: a massive 5,000mAh battery that Motorola promises should last for up to three days, besting the 3,000mAh battery in the G7 by a considerable amount (it also supports Motorola's TurboPower charging). The G7 Power also features a 6.2-inch display, but at a lower 1520 x 720 resolution and with a larger notch, and only a single 12-megapixel camera on the back. It also drops down to 3GB of RAM and a base storage of 32GB, and is a bit bulkier than the main G7 -- but if sheer battery life is your goal, it seems like the G7 Power will be tough to beat. Lastly, there's the $199 G7 Play, the smallest and cheapest model in the 2019 Moto G lineup. There are more cuts here: a smaller 5.7-inch 1512 x 720 display with an even larger notch than the G7 Power, a cheaper plastic case, and just 2GB of RAM. All three devices will feature Qualcomm's mid-tier Snapdragon 632 processor, Android 9.0 Pie, 8-megapixel front-facing cameras, charge via USB-C, and offer rear-mounted fingerprint sensors. Lastly, the 3.5mm headphone jack is still included on all three models. Motorola is promising a release date sometime in the spring for both the U.S. and Canada.
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The Moto G7 Lineup Offers Bigger Screens and Smaller Bezels On a Budget More

The Moto G7 Lineup Offers Bigger Screens and Smaller Bezels On a Budget

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  • Sorry, Motorola, I'm still rocking your basic Moto G. When will you manufacturers comprehend that not everyone wants to lug around an overpriced tablet? Would it really kill you to at least try making a smaller phone - less than 5" - these days?

  • I own a Moto G4 play and it still is a solid device. Good to see the line refreshed; and if it is like previous generations, the Android setup would be mostly bloat-free. I don't care about the notches, though. They look just like an useless gimmick.

  • One of the older models of the Moto G had a IPX7 rating.

    It's been harder to find in the more recent Moto Gs.

    Will the G7 have IPX7? If not, can anyone recommend a good budget Android phone without much bloatware that is waterproof?

  • Motorola used to design and manufacture kick ass microprocessors. The 68040 was my favorite, but the line went until the 68060 (or 68080 if your a Vampire fan with an FPGA, but that's different). They were CISC processors and I always felt they were similar in a lot of ways to the VAX (which was in some ways the ultimate CISC processor). You heard lots of hype about RISC, yes? Let me kick some street knowledge to those who don't do ASM: RISC sucks donkey balls for ASM coders on the metal. RISC's play was ba

    • Re:Motorola, I miss what you once were. 68k foreve (Score:4, Informative)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday February 07, 2019 @11:39PM (#58087642)
      The cell phones are made by Motorola Mobility, which was bought by Google (for its telecommunications patent portfolio) and sold to Lenovo (after stripping out most of the patents).

      Motorola's semiconductor business was spun off as Freescale Semiconductor [wikipedia.org] in 2004, and operated independently for a decade. Freescale was bought by NXP Semiconductors (a Dutch company) in 2015.
    • The shipping industry standardized on container sizes and shapes because it is much easy to automate and long term efficiency shoots up. Why would you waste a human brain/attention on writing machine code when compiler does that. You want to move up the food chain. Just because Joe spent 4k hours mastering CISC doesn't mean that's the right way to go. human cost in software development is the most significant. So you develop hw that is compiler friendly not human friendly. RISC won as it's simpler and stan

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        For some things such as maximum performance and/or minimal size, compilers still suck. Try compiling FFmpeg with assembly disabled and compare to assembly enabled. It's almost useless with assembly disabled.
        There's also things that compilers still can't really do, such as optimizing for different CPU's.
        Just like those containers don't really work for certain application such as shipping heavy equipment, compilers have their limitations.

        • I believe such narrow applications where u need the last bit of juice for each watt, it's better to put it in silicon - build custom hw/asics/fpga. The point is human capital/attention is way too valuable to be mucking with bits n wasting time in debugging (a small error where u meant to store 0xcafe but did 0xcaef - like typo). I'm sure any great compiler like gcc is built for various CPU.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dryeo ( 100693 )

            I meant supporting various CPU's dynamically in the same binary, and who wants to update hardware every time a new video codec comes out or your browser update includes an update to the JavaScript JIT.
            I'm running 10 year old hardware with even older OS and am happy that libavcodec can render 1080 video with about 1/3rd CPU use.

            • another advantage of HLL/v-HLL ( high level language like C; very hll like python) is feature-velocity. If your team is using 10 year old system (hw/ sw), it's hard to compete with a nimble competitor who uses the latest tech and reaps the benefit of 10 year tech growth.
              When you want to be ahead of the rest, you need to use human capital/attention/time with utmost care and delegate as much work to machines/sw/hw.
              one of the reasons a system is run 10 years on same hw or sw is because its hard to evolve i
        • You are so right. I'd also throw in libjpegturbo too, as it or something like it is used in most browsers. Even most IT people have little idea how much optimized, hand-rolled, asm there is in play in their daily computing experience. Then they get on threads like this and talk noise about it like compilers have it all figured out. All that tells me is that they are **not** asm coders and know exactly bupkis about the topic. It's too funny seeing them all commenting on it like they are some kind of authori

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dryeo ( 100693 )

            Yes, it surprises me the lack of understanding. I'm not a programmer but have still done and watched enough stuff to understand that compilers sometimes put out crap code and that even things like jpegturbo benefits from the hand-rolled simd support as I patched it at one point to support a platform. You don't have to be a programmer to compare compiled C code vs good assembler.
            There's also lots of older computers out there and even new ones with crap processors and I hate developers who assume everyone has

            • That's right, you don't have to be a programmer to know better, the performance speaks for itself. Plus, a simple cogent explanation of why SIMD instructions aren't easy to optimize helps, but too many folks just want to dismiss anything that's not in their experience as "OLD" and useless. They have no idea about the giant's shoulders they stand on.

    • The trouble is that RISC is great if you happen to be a compiler, but it's no fun for a human.

      The trouble is Motorola wasn't competent to develop a high speed CPU, so they had to get involved with IBM and make PowerPC. Plenty of cellphones were made with low-power PPC cores. But who cares how friendly RISC cores are to assembly programmers? Assembler is less important than ever before, for anyone who isn't writing a compiler, because compilers keep doing more optimization. Unless you're writing code for the baseband processor in a cellphone, you're probably not going to bother with assembler. The ot

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Motorola's implementations were considered superior to IBM's until the G5 came along,

          What? By whom? They offered superior price-performance, but they had inferior performance, notably because only the PPC601 implemented the full POWER instruction set. They also had inferior performance (and price-performance) to x86 processors. The G4 was about the same as a good Intel chip (but for more money) and the G5 was faster than an Intel chip for about a month, then it was slower again.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • They also had inferior performance (and price-performance) to x86 processors

              IBM didn't make x86 processors, except for that brief time when they partnered with Cyrix.

              That's orthogonal to the argument. Apple should have either gone multicore ARM (they were an ARM licensor from way back, the Newton was ARM) with a GPU coprocessor, or they should have just jumped to x86 instead of PPC. The ARM decision only necessarily makes sense in hindsight, so x86 is the one that would have made sense. PPC cost too much more than x86, though, so it never made any sense.

      • But who cares how friendly RISC cores are to assembly programmers?

        Me. I am one. I find it useful for my job and I use it hobby projects, too. I still do assembler on about.... 4 platforms on a regular basis. People pay good money for it.I also care because I like to code on my old SGI's and I find it frustrating at times to deal with MIPS versus 68k.

        Assembler is less important than ever before, for anyone who isn't writing a compiler, because compilers keep doing more optimization.

        My experience disagrees. Have you ever looked at SIMD instructions ? Compilers barely scratch the surface of their power and are notoriously terrible at optimizing for them. They *try* but they fall very short of the mark. Whe

  • For all the folks dissing on the Power model - you are forgetting not everyone is like us.
    There are quite some folks who:
    - don't need that much cpu power/memory
    - don't have a 10/10 eyesight, do want a bigger display, don't have problems keeping the bigger phone in the pants (think at home, think shoulder bags, pouch and so on)
    - don't need high resolution (think calls, whatsapp, facebook and maybe basic instagram usage); remember the previous point, maybe even on the bigger screen they can't see the differen

    • There's really no utility to having more than 720p on a cellphone, unless you're using it for VR. But I also want a true 720p display, with no notch, because I want to be able to view 720p video without scaling, and because notches are stupid.

      • At 720p, 16:9 (1.78:1) video is only 1280 wide; @ 1512/1520, even with the notch, I'm sure the screen's plenty big for that -- surely the notch doesn't occupy > 15% of the screen. I'm sure 1.85:1 would be fine, too. Never having used a phone w/ a notch, though, I have no idea how video players behave, whether they center (which would be a shame if the notch took a chunk out but you still had room at the other end of the display) or what. For comparison, the aspect ration of the full width of the Powe

  • I cannot believe there is no NFC on new cellphones...everywhere in the world we use NFC to pay with our phone, or do others things ; except in USA so US cellphones do not have NFC, great! This is why I bought a Nokia, I have the 6.1 but the X6 or 7.1 are wonderful for the same price as the G7. The 6.1 is cheaper than the G7 Power and has better specs.

  • Woefully inadequate summary, for Slashdot. (Score:3)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Friday February 08, 2019 @07:48AM (#58088604) Journal

    We are Sparta! I mean, Slashdot - we want to know, first and foremost, if the battery is user-replaceable, because we like to use our phones for several years.

    Troublingly, I could not find (as of now) any articles/reviews that would communicate this crucial piece of information to the reader. I can but assume the battery is glued in.

  • Sony with 21:9 aspect ratio.
  • Frankly, unless you are built like your typical NBA player, holding one of those big phones to your ear makes you look like a jerk. And, yes, as unbelievable as it may sound, many of us still use smartphones to make and receive phone calls, among other things.

    • Frankly, unless you are built like your typical NBA player, holding one of those big phones to your ear makes you look like a jerk.

      A bigger phone can have a bigger antenna, so you might look like a bigger jerk, but you can also have a bigger signal meter reading. Also, if you spend so much time on your phone that this is a consideration, get a headset already.

      With that said, a smaller phone is harder to break, and not everyone wants to do anything but make calls and maybe look up the occasional bit of data someplace, so not everyone needs a phablet. But really, if you're concerned that holding up a big phone will make you look like a j

  • To the hell with Motorola after Lenovo acquired it. The support got pure crap and you only receive shop news through the Motorola news channel, nothing about new functionalities or fast updates like they were in the past. After my third Motorola phone (after Lenovo unfortunately acquired it) I don't give a damn for this brand anymore and will change to another brand I already tested and liked it a lot and won't praise or mention here so people don't start "XPTO FANBOY". New cell phones today have NO NEW T

  • I'm disappointed that to get good specifications you have to buy a phone with an enormous screen. Even the base model is 5.7", which is larger than the flagship screens from two years ago. The G7 bezel is smaller than the G5 bezel, which means the phone size isn't that much more than the G5 (13mm taller), but every generation gets a little bigger.

    The 5" G5 was a great size, especially for smaller women with small hands. My wife had a G1 and has a G5, but she refused the G6 and wouldn't want a G7 because of

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