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With its 5.5-inch display the Moto G4 Plus is a good phone for watching movies or gaming, but it's definitely let down by its speaker. It's loud enough, but distortion soon rears its ugly head when you turn the volume up, and it sounds obnoxiously harsh and tinny.
As mentioned, the G4 Plus is being offered in the UK with either 32GB or 64GB of internal storage. Pop the back off and you can add a microSD card up to 128GB in size.
If you use Google's Photos app you can back up as many photos as you want to the cloud for free, and you get an extra 15GB of cloud storage with the included Google Drive.
Music
The only music app installed here is Google's Play Music, which is geared towards subscribers, but you can load your own MP3s onto the G4 Plus and play them with Play Music.
This has a good widget in the notification shade for basic controls and skipping tracks, so you can start your music and then get on with other things. Music controls also appear on the lock screen.
As I've said, there are no problems with volume on the speaker, but if you do turn it up the sound quality really suffers. Headphones are the way to go when listening to music, then, but you'll have to provide your own, as none are included in the box – that's par for the course at the budget end of the market.
There's an FM radio app on the G4 Plus as well – you'll need headphones connected to act as an antenna.
Movies and TV
The 5.5-inch 1080p screen is a decent size for watching movies, but you'll want to be in a dark room to avoid reflection problems. I settled down to enjoy Watchmen after installing Netflix, and it played without a hitch in full HD. Colours look good, and there's even a colour mode in the settings that enables you to turn the vibrancy up.
The only real problems were the reflective screen and the brightness; even with the brightness turned way up in a poorly lit room it was sometimes difficult to see the action during dark scenes.
The Moto 4G Plus is fairly light for a phone of this size at 155g, but it's awkward to hold, so it's not going to be comfortable to hold it while you watch an entire movie. You'll want to prop it up somewhere – although that could be tricky because the frame is rather slippery.
Google's Play Movies is preinstalled, and offers access to a decent library of rentals or digital purchases. If you load movie files onto the G4 Plus yourself you can then play them through the Google Photos app, where they'll be listed in the Movies folder.
Gaming
I played a lot of Fallout Shelter on the G4 Plus, and it was noticeably slower to load than it is on the Note 5. It also dropped an occasional frame, or stuttered when I panned around quickly, but nothing that really impacted my enjoyment.
It was a similar story playing Asphalt 8 with the visuals at maximum quality. There was definitely an occasional dropped frame, but it ran pretty smoothly and there were no major incidents. The G4 Plus did get quite warm though, and 10 minutes of play was enough to drain 7% of the battery.
If you're a serious gamer and want to play a lot of first-person shooters or graphically-intense racing games the G4 Plus might not be the best choice, but for a budget phone it performs just fine. Casual gamers will have no issues.
