Motorola Moto G6 Play

Motorola lowers the price but extends the life of its latest phone

You’ll recall that the £220 Moto G6 (see Issue 530, page 25) revived our faith in Motorola’s budget G family. If you want to pay even less, the G6 Play is a similar size and shape but with a slower processor, plastic back, single rear camera and lower-resolution screen. It also lacks the G6’s water-repellent coating, but if you drop it in a pond you’ve lost 70 quid less, so it’s swings and roundabouts really.

Our G6 Play came in an upmarket dark, glossy finish called Deep Indigo; it’s also available in gold ( www.snipca.com/28665). It’s not the slimmest phone, and has a bit of a camera bump on top of that, with the fingerprint reader below it on this model. But we like the curvy edges, and the 5.7mm screen, in the tall 18:9 format, is a good balance between size and grippability. It’s not super-sharp, but with similar colour quality, better contrast and higher brightness than the G6, this isn’t a bad screen.

The rear camera is average, resembling the G5’s, but has a great HDR mode; the front camera is better than some, and has flash. Helped by the paucity of pixels, Android 8 chugs along quite nicely on the Snapdragon 430 processor, the same as last year’s pricier G5, and most games run fine. The surprise is a 43 per cent bigger battery, which paid off in proportion in our video playback test: the G6 Play lasted 15 hours 39 minutes, versus 10 hours 45 minutes for the G6.