Motorola makes good phones. Their Android phones are not pure Android, but they are close enough. When I need a new mid-level phone dedicated for Android Auto, I decided to get the smallest possible with the specs and reviews I am happy about. Small-sized phone is important so I can easily carry it around on top of my main phone (iPhone 7), plus I won’t need to use the screen a lot anyway because most of its functioning time will be spent on powering Android Auto screen.

Other than size limit (I started by setting maximum 5″ screen), I was also looking at a phone that still uses microSD instead of the newer USB-C, mostly because I need to share the connectivity cable with my iPhone. Dual cables of lightning + micro-USB are easy to get (I already have some), but dual cable of lightning + USB-C is still quite rare. Yes I know there are some cables that provides trio connectors (lightning, USB-C and micro-USB) but they usually come in somewhat bulkier or longer end.

Boy, it’s surely difficult to get a decent Android phone that’s not supersized nowadays. After few days of research, I gave up the 5″ screen size limit. I started considering 5.1″ and 5.2″ as compromise, and end up with 2 strong candidates: Motorola Moto G5S and Nokia 5. The choice went to Motorola Moto G5S mainly because Nokia 5 model in Australia only has 2 GB RAM. Moto G5S has 3 GB RAM.

Motorola Moto G5S is a sleek mid-range Android phone with all metal body, Corning Gorilla Glass 3, Bluetooth 4.2, 16 MP camera and 5.2″ IPS display with 424 ppi density (1080 x 1920 pixels resolution). It uses Qualcomm MSM8937 Snapdragon 430 chipset with Octa-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A53 CPU and Adreno 505 GPU. This phone ships with Android 7.1 (Nougat) with promise of Oreo upgrade. Some models are single SIM with micro-SD support up to 256 GB, some others offer dual SIM but the second SIM slot is shared with micro-SD card. It means if we decide to put micro-SD card for additional storage, only 1 SIM card can be used. Luckily, it already comes with 32 GB internal storage, more than sufficient for my purpose as a phone dedicated for Android Auto.

There are a few different variants available in the market, each with slightly different specs. You might want to make sure you would get the exact variant that you want before making a purchase. Mine is XT1797 with dual SIM and 3 GB RAM. Some other variants only take single SIM card or have only 2 GB RAM.

From few simple tests, 16 MB f/2.0 rear camera and 5 MP f/2.0 front camera in Moto G5S are nowhere near flagship quality, but they take decent pictures for casual usage. Not that I will use the camera a lot when using this phone exclusively for Android Auto.

GPS connectivity equipped with A-GPS and GLONASS works as expected for my navigation apps. Of course I would enable high accuracy GPS in the setting (use GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth and mobile networks to determine location). In-car, it always performs fast and snappy. However, I notice that there were a few times when I opened Google Maps (or other apps that needs to get my location) after disconnecting from Android Auto and it would took almost 60 seconds for the apps to get my location. This does not always happen, but it can be quite annoying when we rely on app to mark our parking spot.

Physical home button at the front with fingerprint sensor turns out to be a very nice bonus. It is worth to note that even though this home button does have physical appearance (not just on-screen display), the button does not actually perform mechanical move. It is somewhat similar to home button iPhone 7, a button that emulates pressing movement by vibration. That fingerprint sensor does not automatically serves as home button out of the box (default setting is on screen home button). We need to open Moto app and turn on One-button nav setting, and the fingerprint sensor will become home button and more. Light touch on fingerprint sensor triggers home button, swiping left and right on that sensor triggers recent apps and go back buttons (we can choose between swipe left and right for each action).

Have I mentioned how much I HATE power button at the back? I’m so glad this phone allows me to turn on the phone AND also to turn it off using the home button at the front. While light touch on the fingerprint sensor registers as home button touch, hard press on that button will turn off the screen. To enable this behaviour, go to Settings > Security > Screen Lock and enable the option for “Power button instantly locks”.

Smart lock feature allows us to choose to keep the phone unlocked while it’s on our body, when the phone is in trusted location or when the phone is connected to trusted devices. We can also set trusted face and trusted voice, which I find not really ready for prime time. They are a bit of hit and miss.

Battery life is good thanks to its 3,000 mAh capacity. Since this is not a main phone, one full charge usually would last 2-3 days because most of the time it only remains on standby.

I am very happy with this purchase. Even though Moto G5S has significantly lower specs compared to my LG V20, I enjoy using Moto G5S more, thanks to its front home button and fingerprint sensor. It works very well with Android Auto and had guided me to various destinations.