Moto G 5G Plus
An outrageously good phone for the money, and support for 5G only adds to its attractions
PRICE 64GB, £250 (£300 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk
Until now, even if you were lucky enough to live in one of the few 5G-enabled areas dotted around the UK, the entry fee into this brave, new world was off-putting. Only a handful of phones could access these faster data speeds and they tended to be flagship devices that cost the best part of £1,000.
It’s true that a few phones have tried to bring down the 5G network’s high barrier for entry since the tech was switched on last May. Samsung’s Galaxy A90 5G cost a more considerate £669 on release earlier this year, for instance. But it’s taken Motorola’s popular Moto G series to provide the real breakthrough: a 5G phone for £300. What’s the catch?
No 5G catch
As it turns out, there ther isn’t one – at least on paper. The Moto G 5G uses the new Snapdragon 765 chipset, which is second only to the beefy Snapdragon 865 in terms of power. The integrated 5G modem supports all sub-6GHz frequencies, so you should be able to connect to any 5G network in the UK without hassle.
The 5G Plus is also the first budget Motorola phone to include a 90Hz, 21:9 screen with support for HDR 10 video. Nor has the company stinted on cameras, with four on the back. Even the entry-level model comes with 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM, while an extra £50 buys you 128GB of storage with 6GB of RAM.
The Moto G 5G Plus can be picked up in two colours: “Surfing Blue” (the model you see here) and “Mystic Lilac”. Note that only the blue version is available direct from Motorola, but the 64GB GB version will also be sold by Argos, John Lewis and EE. If you want the 128GB GB version on contract, you’ll have to buy from Vodafone.
Design-wise, gn-wise, the Moto G 5G Plus is a departure ture from the rest of Moto’s budget offering. It looks rather swish, in fact, with a neat iPhone 11-like square camera housing at the back, and an oblong fingerprint reader – which doubles as the power button – on the e phone’s right edge.
Motorola orola includes a 3.5mm headphone hone socket, which sits next to the speaker aker grille on the bottom, alongside de a USB-C port that supports 20W charging. arging. That means you can shove the he phone on charge for 15 minutes and be sure of hours of f usage, but note that this phone doesn’t t support wireless charging.
Nor do you get an IP rating. Motorola instead describes it as “water repellant”, which is one of the few signs of this phone’s budget nature. Another is that it’s made of plastic, with relatively thick bezels around its gigantic screen. Despite this, the 5G Plus feels like a considerable step up from the rest of Moto’s budget line.
Swish screen
“It supports all sub-6GHz frequencies, so you should be able to connect to any 5G network in the UK without hassle”
It helps that the screen is so impressive too. For one, it’s huge, measuring 6.7in across the diagonal, and that’s a great size for its 1,080 x 2,520 resolution. There’s no notch, with Motorola instead boring two tiny holes out of the top-left corner for the selfie ca meras.
As usual with Moto phones, there are three display modes to choose from, and the “Natural” screen setting was the most colour accurate in tests. With a measured sRGB colour gamut coverage of 93%, a total volume of 94% and an average Delta E of 1.02, the screen barely puts a foot wrong, with only slight inconsistencies in the red tones.
It uses an IPS panel rather than AMOLED, so can’t match the impact of the Samsung Galaxy M31 ( see p70), and I hoped for a higher contrast ratio than 1,265:1, but it makes up for this with a peak brightness of 575cd/m2 . HDR-supported content looks punchy and vibrant, too.
Dragon speed
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765 chipset includes an octa-core CPU that’s built using a 7nm fabrication process and clocked at 2.3GHz. It’s slower than the Snapdragon 865 that powers many flagship phones, which has a clock speed of 2.84GHz, but it’s still miles faster than a budget phone has any right to be, and it proved to be a rapid performer in our tests.
Not only is this the fastest budget Moto by a margin but the Moto G 5G Plus’ barnstorming performance beats the similarly priced Galaxy A51 ( see issue 310, p75) in the Geekbench 5 CPU benchmark and the GFXBench gaming test. It isn’t far off mid-range handsets that cost almost double the price.
The phone is also expandable by up to 1TB via microSD and comes with a huge 5,000mAh battery, which lasted 22hrs 15mins in our video-rundown test. If you ignore the stunning result from the Galaxy M31, that’s very good indeed, and means that you should eke out two days of use.
Four snappers
The Moto G 5G Plus has four cameras on the rear, including a 48-megapixel main camera (which captures 12-megapixel images by default; to quote the company, it “combines four pixels into one large quad pixel”), a 8-megapixel 118° wide-angle camera, 5-megapixel macro lens with a 2cm focus distance, and a 2-megapixel depth-sensing unit.
The cameras picked up plenty of detail, with neutral colours and an auto-exposure that’s well balanced. The images are still more processed than they need to be, but not distractingly so. Rest assured, what you’re getting here is still of exceptional quality for the price and the portrait mode is especially good. The macro sensor – while probably only of interest as a novelty – does the job well, as you can see from the up close and personal shot of my lavender plant.
Motorola supplies a handful of extra shooting modes to choose from. The Night vision setting boosts shadows and increases dynamic range, while the new long exposure mode allows you to open the shutter for up to 90 seconds for fancy-looking motion blur effects and light trails. Auto smile ca pture also returns, as does shot optimisation, which helpfully suggests shooting modes or camera settings based on the scene.
This is a capable video camera too, with support for 4K at 30fps, which bumps up to 60fps if you drop the resolution down to Full HD. Finally, the Moto G 5G Plus includes two front selfie cameras, with a 16-megapixel main unit accompanied by an 8-megapixel wide-angle camera. The idea is that if you want to take a photo of a group of you together, you don’t need to crowd in so close – probably a good idea with current social-distancing rules.
Plus points
The Moto G 5G Plus is a phenomenal addition to the Moto G lineup, and marks one of the big milestones when it comes to 5G accessibility in the UK. If you happen to live or work in an area with reliable 5G coverage, and you’d like to benefit from these faster speeds while picking up the cheapest handset possible, the Moto G 5G Plus is the phone to choose.
What’s more remarkable is that if even you don’t give a hoot about 5G, the 5G Plus is a superb choice. It’s fast for the price, has a large, accurate screen, a long-lasting battery and a strong suite of cameras. It’s simply the best smartphone you can buy for £300.
Octa-core 2.4GHz/2.2GHz/1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 4GB RAM Adreno 620 graphics 6.7in IPS screen, 1,080 x 2,520 resolution 64GB storage microSD slot quad 48/8/5/2-megapixel rear camera dual 16/8-megapixel front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 5.1 NFC USB-C connector 5,000mAh battery Android 10 74 x 9 x 168mm (WDH) 207g 1yr warranty