Moto G

Motorola launched its new entry-level phone, the Moto G, in multiple countries around the world last week. And after using ours for the past few days we've noticed a strange quirk to do with the phone's notification LED — it doesn't seem to work at all, and there's no software switch for it anywhere in the Settings app. Emails, texts and missed calls all failed to trigger the flashing white LED, nor could we use third-party apps like LightFlow to activate it.

Moto G notification widgetThe glitch is a side effect of restoring from your Google account to the Moto G, which is part of the setup process for the phone. The feature downloads apps and settings from the cloud, which is usually a good thing. But in some instances it can tell the Moto G to restore the notification LED setting from another phone, leaving the light disabled with no way to re-enable it.

Fortunately there's a simple fix for this issue, and it's one that apparently applies to some other Motorola phones too ...

Motorola has released a widget that lets you toggle the notification light on and off, so if you're affected by this bug simply download it, place it on a home screen and toggle it on. After that you can remove the widget and your notification light will continue to work.

Here's Moto's explanation of the bug and solution, which reveals that the RAZR HD is another affected device:

"On some devices (such as Motorola Droid RAZR HD), a small number of users found that the notification light was disabled after logging into their google account if it was disabled previously on other devices with the same google account. This widget restores the ability to control the light on devices without an exposed setting."