[Moto G7 Plus Real Life Review] pseudonym58:
Moto G7+ after 2 weeks (long general post)

(moderator- please let me know if this is not the proper location for this kind of post)

The Moto G7+ takes advantage of major improvements that have been made over recent years in major flagship phones and is able to leverage a good chunk of that technology at a much lower price. At the same time it's not marketed to the people that would necessarily buy a flagship phone, so it still contains certain features that you would more likely find in a mid-range phone, such as a headphone jack.

I have using the Moto G7+ for about 2 weeks, and I am impressed with it. Previous to that I used a Sony compact phone since late 2017. Needless to say, the size of the G7+ took a bit of getting used to, and I find I occasionally miss the ability to do simple things easily with one hand.

A few things I’ve noticed:

The G7+ has very good speakers (i.e. loud and not tinny or distorted). One is front-facing, and the other, louder one is at the bottom, so in typical use they balance pretty well.

The screen is bright enough with good viewing angles.

I’ve only tried the camera a bit but it seems like it works pretty well and is very quick to focus. If it can actually take pictures of people in average interior light without making a total blurry or noisy mess of things, I'll be impressed! In particular, the zoom function is very smooth, and even at high zoom the results are nowhere near as *blocky* as what my previous phones have often produced. The camera interface is simple, with a ring you can move on the screen to specify subject for autofocus/exposure. I've gotten best results leaving HDR on *auto* or always on.

I have not had any problems with battery lasting the whole day, but then again I'm someone who most of the time is able to top it up at various different points during the day. As a result it probably never gets below 50% or so. If I find myself in a situation where I would not be able to charge the phone from an outlet, I would probably take along a small cell charger until I know how the phone would fare in such a situation. By the way, I have not yet even tried once the 27 watt charger that comes with the phone, as I have no reason to charge that quickly, and I'm suspicious that charging that rapidly is going to be bad for the battery itself.

The phone's ability to connect to the various different Bluetooth devices I have is very good. Occasionally, on re-connection, the Bluetooth receiver in my car gets its data scrambled so that the file data, such as time played and time remaining, is inaccurate or missing. But that happens on occasion with just about any phone I’ve tried.

Using Chromecast, I haven't encountered so much as a skip or a dropout. Yay!

As appears to be common to many phones, there is only a single volume slider for both ring and notification volume in the settings- you can't adjust them separately. But, seemingly only on this Moto phone (that I know of), there seems to be a limiter on *only* the notification volume.

I can set the volume of the notification/ring in the Settings, but, *in actual use*, the notification tone (but not the ring tone) is much quieter, about half of what it should be. Weird.

In general, I miss the ability to adjust all volumes without going into the Settings - that seems to be new to Android Pie, and not just the G7+.

I do wish that there was an LED notification lamp.

The remaining battery charge percentage is shown in an extremely tiny icon (I think it’s just the usual system modification previously made available under Developer Options), and it would be better if the number were shown by itself elsewhere on the status bar (which is largely empty to the left of the notch). I know that I could use the peek/glance screen, but I found that it activated at odd times, unexpectedly, which became a distraction. So I disabled it.

In general, the G7+ is the first Motorola phone that I have been motivated to try since using the Moto X Pure/Style of 2015, one of my old favorites. The G7+ is much faster, has a better camera, newer software (Android 9 with January 2019 security), and has comparable speakers.