Of all the smartphone segments, the most cut-throat has to be the budget to midrange market. Each brand has its own specialties but with little room for error (unless they want to hear a mouthful from consumers).

While Xiaomi continues to cram as much power as it can into its smartphones and ASUS confidently creates budget-friendly battery kings, Moto is pushing something a little different: premium design with an affordable price.

That’s what the Moto G6 is all about. Although the specifications sheet doesn’t scream high-end (or barely even midrange), gripping it feels like you have something more.

As soon as the G6 lands in your hands, you know it’s a rock-solid device. The all-glass construction curves smoothly from back to front, delivering a fluid feel like it’s meant for human hands and not tables. The 5.7-inch 1080p display is also fun to view thanks to the slimmer 18:9 ratio.

And yet, it’s admittedly on the almost-too-thick side. I first thought that there’d be a massive battery inside, but the capacity is only 3000mAh. For comparison, phones this thick have batteries as large as 4000mAh, offering 33 percent more without the added bulk.

Strangely enough, there’s even a significant camera bulge on the back, meaning the phone can’t lie flat on a surface. It’s a head-scratching design, although I appreciate the fingerprint scanner’s front-facing placement — where it should belong.

Unfortunately, the fingerprint reading isn’t that fast; there’s a slight pause between the vibration feedback and screen turning on. On the flip side, the scanner serves an additional purpose of being an all-in-one navigation key.

By entering the Moto Actions menu and turning on “One button nav,” you can tap the capacitive button to go home, swipe right to bring up recent apps, swipe left to go back, or hold to turn the screen off. Enabling this frees up some screen space since the on-display navigation bar isn’t needed anymore.

Another useful feature is Moto Display, which works a lot like the Always On tricks of Samsung and Huawei’s own implementation on the P20 Pro. It gives you a glimpse at the time, date, and battery percentage while the phone is on standby; it’ll also light up when a notification arrives or you wave a hand over the phone.

Aside from those, this is simply a solidly built, pure Android smartphone. It comes with Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box with no bloatware whatsoever. Sadly, it isn’t part of the Android One platform, meaning the G6 isn’t guaranteed to get timely updates from Google, and Moto isn’t known to push newer versions of the OS on time.

Running the show is a Snapdragon 450 processor, which slots into the lower-midrange speed realm, but is certainly efficient. Despite the smallish battery, the G6 can last through a day of moderate usage on a single charge with mobile data or Wi-Fi constantly on.

I tried playing a few games, but wasn’t too impressed by the performance. A couple of rounds of Dragon Ball Legends and Asphalt Xtreme didn’t show off the smoothest gameplay or fastest loading times. While the chipset isn’t too bad, the 3GB of memory is lacking, and there’s not much room for all my games and videos on the 32GB of internal storage — though you can expand that using the hybrid SIM and microSD tray.

Our creative director Chay also experienced some hiccups while using the G6’s cameras. Although they look good on paper — a 12- and 5-megapixel rear setup (one with a better f/1.8 lens) — the quality isn’t great and moving from one mode to another can get slow at times.

Here are some of the best photos she took:

The 8-megapixel front camera isn’t too impressive, either. You’d think it’s good when taking selfies in broad daylight, but it gets grainy even with indoor lighting. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend buying the G6 for its cameras or speed. Neither stand out as much as the build quality.

And that sort of sums up my experience with the Moto G6. As pretty as it looks, there’s not much going on inside. For this phone’s price of US$ 250 (INR 13,999 in India), you can find more powerful devices in the market.

We have two great lists for that, but one advantage the G6 has is its design. I can confidently say it’s the most well-built in its price range.