The smartphone experience on the Motorola Moto G5S Plus

The first impression that you get when handling the phone for the first time is that of a bulky, yet sturdy phone. As opposed to the Motorola Moto Z2 Play, which is roughly 6mm thick and needs the reduced thickness to accommodate the Moto Mods, the Motorola Moto G5S Plus has no such requirements, and with an 8mm thickness, we would have loved to see a bigger battery in the specs sheet.

Telephony is very good: the noise suppression system works well in noisy environments, and the earpiece is sufficiently loud. We had no reception issues.The sound quality when using headphones or externally amplified sound sets is good, with balanced frequency output and decent volume. When switching to the integrated speaker, the phone struggles with the mid and low-frequency sound reproduction. Even compared to phones below its price range, the speaker is mediocre.

The IPS LCD screen is, at least in theory, not cutting-edge technology, but in practice, it performs close to more high-end devices. The pixel density is sufficient (401 ppi), the brightness is no issue under direct sunlight and, apart from a slight loss of brightness on extreme viewing angles, the screen of the Motorola Moto G5S Plus is beyond reproach. The phone has a "night mode" for the screen, which changes the color temperature to reduce eye strain, and it also has an optional, more vivid color profile, for those of you who fancy the more vibrant colors.

The combination of the Snapdragon 625 processor, the Adreno 506 GPU and 4GB of memory is sufficient for any application to run fluently on the full HD screen. We didn't experience any slowdowns, although we did encounter some application crashes which will hopefully be solved soon. The phone gets slightly warm during intense gaming sessions or when using the TurboPower charger, but nothing to worry about, since the metal case has a better heat conductivity than plastic, so the components inside benefit from the heat dissipation.

The fingerprint reader does its job well, with little to no delay when unlocking the phone and a very good fingerprint recognition rate. A cool feature is that the fingerprint reader can also be used to navigate in the menus, with swipe left acting as a "back" command, swipe right acting as a "recent apps" command and quick press being the equivalent of the "Home" button. If the fingerprint sensor navigation is turned on, the classic soft buttons on the bottom of the screen disappear, making more room for the image on the screen.

Charging from under 5% to 100% takes just under 90 minutes, and the battery lasts over a day easily, even under more intense usage of the phone. Under moderate, office usage conditions, we got almost two days of battery life out of the Motorola Moto G5S Plus, which is a very good result.

We found the Motorola Moto G5S Plus to be a balanced phone, with few negative aspects in daily usage. One-handed operation is difficult for people with small to medium hands and the lack of a status LED is disappointing, especially since the phone has a LED flash on the front camera.

The camera experience on the Motorola Moto G5S Plus

The Motorola Moto G5S Plus has a dual-camera system, with the second camera used for capturing additional depth information. The system enhances pictures by adding blur to the background (the equivalent of having a larger aperture), similar to the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. The camera system also has a dual-LED flash, which is sufficiently robust for night portraits. Sadly, there is no optical image stabilization available.

The interface is simple, with some easily-accessible settings like the flash, the HDR enhancement, the timer and the night mode. You can access more advanced options in the Pro mode, although we don't expect many users to use the advanced settings. Both horizontal and vertical panoramas are easily made with the Panorama mode.

Pictures taken in good lighting conditions are detailed, and the color reproduction is good, although slightly oversaturated. The HDR mode does a good job at increasing the dynamic range of the pictures, with clear improvements over the standard photos. Below you can see the dramatic effect HDR mode has on a picture shot in rather poor lighting (left - HDR off, right - HDR on).

Pictures in less than ideal lighting have high amounts of noise and are poor by today's standards, even when comparing to other phones in the same price range. The Night mode bumps up the ISO setting, increasing the amount of light visible, but drastically reducing the picture quality when the scene is dark, as in the example below (left - night mode off, right - night mode on).

Close-ups are handled pretty well, and the camera can get close to the subject without losing focus.

The front camera is nothing to write home about, but it does its job pretty well and, because it has a dedicated LED flash, you can even make selfies in poorly lit areas. It also has a Panorama mode and the now common "beautification" option, for those days when your face is not cooperating (in my case, every day).

The camera system is capable of shooting videos in 4K resolution at 30fps. The standard setting is Full HD (1920 by 1080 pixels) at 30 fps (it can also record at 60 fps). There is a camera stabilization setting for shooting videos, but it's done in the software (basically the image that you record is a cropped image of the actual scene captured by the sensor). Below you can watch a video with the default settings and if you turn the sound on you will also be able to evaluate the sound recording capabilities of the Motorola Moto G5S Plus.

As usual, you can take a look at the full-size pictures we made with the Motorola Moto G5S Plus. Expand the album below to view them.

Overall, the camera experience was not great. Although under good lighting conditions the pictures are well lit and have good detail, the quality drops significantly indoors, under artificial light or in poor lighting conditions. There is also a significant delay in taking and processing photos, a fact which can potentially make you miss the opportunity for a well-timed shot. The depth enhancement feature has a somewhat underwhelming effect and may fail to recognize the subject of the photo.

Android 7 Nougat and default apps

The Motorola Moto G5S Plus comes with the Android 7.1.1 (Nougat) operating system, with a very clean user interface. The operating system and default Android user interface have not been tampered with, except for a few minor tweaks, and that is an excellent thing in our opinion. If you want a clean operating system on your smartphone, Motorola is among the few smartphone brands that come with stock Android.

Out of the box, 50 applications are installed, and the available storage space is roughly 23 GB, a good value if you cannot install a MicroSD card. The value drops to about 21,9 GB once all the applications have updated.

The average memory use without any additional apps running is 1.2 GB, and the list of bundled applications is very short. You have Microsoft Outlook and a LinkedIn application, as well as Moto, a simple app that controls two features: Moto Actions and Moto Display.

Moto Actions enables several gestures that you can use to perform certain tasks even with the phone locked. When enabled, making a chopping motion will turn the flashlight on/off. Quickly twisting the wrist twice, will open the camera app. Moto Display can show you a sneak peek of your notifications, even when your display is off.

As usual, the user has access to advanced notification options, from the way the shortcuts are arranged in the notification tray to the individual notification permissions for each app.

The user can register up to five fingerprints which can be used to unlock the smartphone.

We did find a few issues with the operating system interface, the first one being that there is no way of showing the battery percentage in or near the battery indicator. The second issue is that, because only certain models of the Motorola Moto G5S Plus have NFC, there is no shortcut in the drop-down menu for toggling it on and off. To turn it on or off, you need to go to Settings, an unnecessary complication. But, since we are talking about Android and not iOS, both these issues can easily be fixed with third-party applications, of course.

We also noticed a few application crashes and bugs, but there were few and far between, and we expect them to be fixed with system updates in the future.

Motorola Moto G5S Plus comes with Android 7.1.1 Nougat. The stock Android user interface is not altered, and there are no useless apps bundled on it. Many users will love this. There are few issues, and they can be easily fixed with third-party applications.

Performance in benchmarks

Looking at the specifications sheet, we expected solid mid-range results in our tests, and with few exceptions, the phone delivered. We started off with the Vellamo suite and its Metal and Multicore tests. Metal tests the single-core performance, while Multicore puts all cores to work.

The results were as expected, with a score of 1710 (Metal) and 1844 (Multicore). The Multicore results were below those of the Huawei P10 Lite, but still good for the price range.

Next, we tested the graphics subsystem using the GFX Bench GL Benchmark suite. The Motorola Moto G5S Plus obtained average results in all the tests, thanks to the Adreno 506 graphics processor. The results for 1080p Car Chase Offscreen (224 frames) 1080p Manhattan Offscreen (608.8 frames) and 1080p T-Rex Offscreen (1267 frames) test results are similar to phones with the same specs and above the Huawei P10 Lite.

We return to the Vellamo suite for the Browser test, which we ran for the Google Chrome browser to evaluate the browsing experience. However, the test refused to run, either due to a problem with the Chrome browser or the application compatibility with the phone. We also ran AnTuTu and Basemark OSII, and the results of the latter confirmed that there was a problem with browser compatibility.

Next, we ran the Work battery life test from PCMark to see how much juice the battery can provide. Unfortunately, although the Work 2.0 performance test ran and the phone managed a score of 4938, the Work battery life did not run correctly. Since we needed a benchmark score for comparison, we again turned to AnTuTu for its battery test.

With a score of 8564, the Motorola Moto G5S Plus is far from being at the top, but real-life testing proved that the phone easily lasts more than 24 hours on a charge.

The benchmarks show a decent performance level for the Motorola Moto G5S Plus. It is an excellent smartphone when it comes to regular daily activities. It is also capable of running games at good quality settings and framerates.

What is your opinion about the Motorola Moto G5S Plus?

Now that you've gone through the test results and seen our conclusions, what do you think about the Motorola Moto G5S Plus? Is it a good contender in the mid-range category? Does it have enough features to convince you to buy it? Share your opinion in the comments section.