{"id":4201,"date":"2020-12-28T10:22:08","date_gmt":"2020-12-28T15:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/?p=4201"},"modified":"2020-12-28T10:22:08","modified_gmt":"2020-12-28T15:22:08","slug":"moto-g7-plus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2020\/12\/moto-g7-plus\/","title":{"rendered":"Moto G7 Plus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just over a year ago I replaced my Moto G4<\/a> with a Moto Z3 Play<\/a>. Motorola (really Lenovo) makes pretty good budget phones and one of the nice things about them is you can afford to replace them more often and not worry about throwing away a lot of money. Or if you break them, or don’t like the phone, or it breaks on its own, it’s not like you’ve invested a ton of money. I wasn’t crazy about the Z3. It did away with a headphone jack, and I had to use an adapter to connect headphones to the USB-C port. I don’t really use the headphones now that I’m not taking the train into work, but I didn’t like that. It had a protruding camera on the back and because when it is lying down it is bearing on the camera, the glass cover over the camera broke pretty early on. Then it got a line on the screen and I had to return it under warranty. And now lately it won’t charge, or won’t charge easily because the USB-C connector won’t stay in the port. I tried cleaning the port out, but it is still pretty loose. I can get it to charge, but it isn’t reliable, so I looked for new phones and found the Moto G7 Plus for only $120. It is cheap because it was released in 2019 and has been replaced by the G8. I usually shop at bhphoto.com for cheap unlocked phones, but was surprised that Best Buy had the same price on the phone, which let me use $20 in rewards credits and earn $5 in new credits for the purchase. It should arrive today.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Unlike the Z3, it has a headphone jack. The fingerprint reader is on the back instead of the side which may help get a reading faster (lately that was getting worse). It uses the same processor as the Z3 which was a little higher end when I got it. It comes with 64 GB of storage instead of 32 for the Z3, though I will still use my 128 GB SD card for extra storage. In order to maximize the screen space, there is a teardrop indentation in the top of the screen for the front facing camera, but otherwise the screen continues to the top. Since you usually have status things on the upper left and upper right, that works out okay. To the left of the camera is the time and notifications. To the right of the camera are signal and battery strength indicators. It is thin, but not crazy thin and only has two buttons on the right edge, one for volume up and down and the other for power. On the back, below the rear camera, is the fingerprint reader so when you are holding the phone it is easy to put your left or right index finger over the reader and start the phone. I am still getting used to it. Sometimes I put my finger over the camera and the first picture I took was all blurry because the camera was covered with fingerprints. That camera still protrudes a little, but a case might help it be almost flush. Except it seems hard to find cases for this phone because it sort of wasn’t released in the US. Most of the Moto 7 family has circular camera protrusions, but on the Plus it is an oval. T-Mobile had a rebranded version of this phone called the T-Mobile Revvlry+ and cases for that phone fit this one.<\/p>\n

Setting it up was pretty easy. I did a backup of my phone to Google Drive, which gets most things, but not all of the documents that go with an app and not all of the text message history. So I used SMS Backup & Restore to create a text message archive on Google Drive and restored it to the new phone. I had to manually move all of my notes and databases. Because the USB port doesn’t stay in place, I had to move those to the SD card first and move the SD card to the new phone. Then you have to reenter passwords in a few apps, but otherwise, the layout of the apps was the same as the old phone, Chrome brings over the bookmarks, etc. I also had to install Mint Mobile’s data transmission settings. I had heard that the phone supported wifi calling, but wifi calling didn’t work with Mint. The old phone did wifi calling, which I didn’t think was good, but cell service can be kind of weak, so if all quality is better, why wouldn’t I enable that. Wifi calling seems to be working fine on the new phone. It took a long time to download and install of the apps. I could probably pare down my apps, but the phone has plenty of storage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just over a year ago I replaced my Moto G4 with a Moto Z3 Play. Motorola (really Lenovo) makes pretty good budget phones and one of the nice things about them is you can afford to replace them more often and not worry about throwing away a lot of money. Or if you break them, … Continue reading “Moto G7 Plus”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4201"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4203,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201\/revisions\/4203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}