I'm going to pose a crazy hypothetical: someday soon you may need a new smartphone, but you won't have a spare $600 lying around.
For a long time, phone makers offered only two solutions: bury the cost of a premium device in your monthly bill at a massive effective markup—a trick you may know as "upgrading"—or buy a piece of off-brand junk. Motorola's Moto G3 offers a third path: a well made, middle-tier smartphone. None of its competitors even come close.
If the iPhone 6s+ is the slick, shiny Porsche of smartphones, the G3 is a Volvo sedan with good gas mileage and excellent impact ratings. I've had mine since September, and dollar-for-dollar it's the best value I've ever gotten in a tech purchase.
The G3 comes in two models. For $179.99 you get 8 gigabytes of storage and 1GB of RAM. For $219.99 you get 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM. I opted for the slightly more expensive version, stuck an extra 32GB in its micro-SD port and haven't had any speed or storage issues since.
It doesn't have quite the zip of a premium device, but running stock Android it also skips a lot of the lag of luxury Samsung and HTC phones loaded with bloatware.
The G3's five inch screen compromises on resolution, but you'd never know it unless you held it up next to a quad-HD phone like Samsung's Galaxy G6. Once you've shrunk a 720x1280 display down below the size of an index card, its pixel density compares to top-of-the-line 4K laptops.
Plus, without the demands of an ultra-dense display on its processor, the phone draws a lot less power. I've gone whole weekends without charging mine.
Even the camera on this phone doesn't lag. It's nothing fancy, but it will ably capture images during the day and match any cell phone's quality in low light.
Finally, and most importantly for budget-conscious buyers, the G3 is a phone built for the real world. Many luxury phones are built to look beautiful in the store, but fall apart in your pocket. Not so with this machine.
I've kept this water-resistent phone in my pocket without a case since September, dropped it in puddles, and even brought it into the shower to listen to podcasts and it shows absolutely no wear on its interchangeable color back plate or screen. Seriously, this phone is so durable no other model should get a pass anymore.
If you need a great smartphone and want to spend less than $250, there isn't even a choice. Get a Moto G3.
