Motorola Moto G5 and G5+ now officially available in Australia from Motorola online, Harvey Norman, Officeworks and JB HiFi

After a false start last week, Motorola Australia has officially announced the Moto G5 and G5 Plus here in Australia today at an event in Sydney.

Motorola, yes they’re Motorola again, have said that future launches will be under the Motorola branding not Lenovo but that’s just a side=note the real news is the launch of the hotly anticipated Moto G5 and G5 Plus.

The big question around the launch was which model of the Moto G5 Plus we’ll be seeing here in Australia, and the good news is that we’ll be seeing both the 16GB/3GB RAM option for $399 and the 32GB/4GB RAM option for $449 – for the extra $50 you’d be mad to settle. The Moto G5 will be available in a 16GB/2GB RAM option for just $299. Motorola Australia have also said they won’t be bringing a 64GB version to Australia as there’s no demand for it here that they’ve seen.

The phones are now showing on the Moto Australia online store with the Moto G5 and Moto G5 Plus being offered in both Lunar Grey and Fine Gold colour options in all storage/RAM configurations. If you don’t want to buy them online, you can of course head into a Harvey Norman store to pick one up – though we suspect The Good Guys will have them shortly, and apparently Office Works and JB Hi-fi will be carrying them too.

There are a few differences between the US and Australian versions, we get NFC, whereas the US gets a compass due to E911 (Enhanced 911 emergency) requirement.

The phones are both Dual SIM capable. The Moto G5+ has support for 4G/3G out of the box, while the G5 is 4G/2G out of the box. The Moto G5 is however inline to get an update to support 4G/3G though this is pending on Qualcomm – but they say it’s close. Motorola is also testing Voice over Wifi with Australian carriers and will deploy it when ready to models that support it at Chipset and OS level.

Both phones include an octa-core Snapdragon processor for both models – SD430 for Moto G5, while the G5 Plus gets an SD625 processor. Camera setups for the phones offer a lot as well, with a 12MP/13MP on the Moto G5/G5 Plus. Storage wise, you’ll get 16GB for the Moto G5, while the Plus model has 32GB with both getting microSD card slots as a backup for storage.

Full spec list:

Moto will be launching the phones with Android 7.0 (Nougat), it’s their usual lightly touched stock Android experience which we’ve come to know and love. Motorola has said that they will support security updates with quarterly update, though this like OS updates sometimes require carrier approval. On OS updates – Motorola don’t consider the 7.1 maintenance release an ‘os update’, more a maintenance release but they will be supplying Android O to both phones when they launch. Motorola offered 2 years of full resolution backups with the Moto G4 and that offer is back with the Moto G5/G5+, so you can backup all your memories for next to nought.

If you want to check out our thoughts on the Moto G5, you can check out Duncan’s hands-on video from Barcelona right here:

We’ll have full reviews of both the Moto G5+ and Moto G5 on the site as soon as possible, look out for those in the near future.