Motorola has yet to get started on its own phone announcements just yet, but the time is getting close. Usually, the Moto X, Motorola’s flagship, launches around August, and, since this is mid-April, there’s a good chance that leaks will start popping up later this Spring/early summer.
If you’re a Motorola fan who’s been waiting for your chance to upgrade your Motorola device, you’ll be pleased to get these first few glimpses at what Motorola intends to do this year. The new device in question is the Motorola Moto G4, which has leaked in three new photos uploaded to Chinese social media site Weibo.
The Moto G4 photos that leak don’t show us the display, nor do they show us settings, cameras, Android OS update number, build number, or anything of the sort; rather, we get a look at the Moto G4 hardware. The first thing to notice about the new Moto G4 is the home button, which is nothing short of “squircle-shaped”: it looks like a square with rounded corners. This is an interesting take on the home button, since Apple and Samsung tend to go with rounded home buttons for their devices, but HTC’s new home button in the HTC 10 follows the same selection as Motorola with the G4, in a sense — so perhaps the Moto G4 is starting a whole new trend for the Lenovo-owned company.The home button seems to be the place where Motorola will place a fingerprint scanner for the Moto G4, and, since fingerprint authentication is on the rise, G4 customers will become part of the expected trend.
The next photo shows the matte plastic finish we’ve come to expect from Motorola devices, but it doesn’t seem to be cheap at all. This material looks similar to that which Google and Asus offered users in the first Nexus 7 (2012). The second-generation Nexus 7 (2013) had a similar finish and design. The Moto G4 has the tried-and-true “M” branded at the back where it has always been. There are two small dots at the back of the Moto G4, above the camera, but we have no clue what those are for. Could it be that Motorola will provide something in the way of small cameras at the back of the device? These could be sensors, too, though we don’t know for what.
The last Moto G4 photo zooms out of the phone and lets us see the entire back for ourselves. In the light, the Moto G4 setup looks metal, though it seems to be more of an issue of the light reflection than anything else. The camera has a rounded shape, with a bit of simplicity and elegance, and the speaker placement at the bottom seems somewhat original for Motorola. There is one noticeable thing about the Moto G4 (if that’s what this is): three buttons are placed on the side of the device: the power/standby, and volume buttons seem to be the ones in question here. This positioning isn’t too wise in Motorola’s design, matching what LG has done in the LG G5. LG decided to move its buttons to the side this year and ditch the “back of the phone” placement they’ve had since the G2. At that time, LG said it did this because users always had their fingers there (and it would seem intuitive and natural). Apparently, LG’s customers have decided that the side, where Samsung places its buttons, are more intuitive, so LG had to change its tune with the G5.
We don’t know much else about the device, but we can say that the Moto G4 will sport the usual expected specs for 2016: of these, we’ll be sure to see a quad-core, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and a Quad HD display. We don’t know about the Moto G4 front and back cameras, but you can expect Motorola to keep its software as much “stock vanilla Android a la Google) as possible.
We’ll be back to provide more details on the Moto G4 as it surfaces. For now, take a look at device photos below.
