Motorola Moto G9 Plus
If you have big hands, the Moto G9 Plus is simply the best phone you can buy for under £200
SCORE
PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com
Motorola’s Moto G line has a well-earned reputation for being among the best phones you can buy on a budget. However, to stand out from Chinese handsets such as the £249 5G-toting Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T ( see issue 318, p71) is growing ever more difficult.
In the case of the Moto G9 Plus, its first standout feature is the size of its screen. A 6.81in diagonal and 1,080 x 2,400 resolution equates to a sharp 386ppi, and it’s bright at 466cd/m2 with excellent colour reproduction: it covers 94% of the sRGB spectrum from a colour gamut volume of 95%, and accuracy is top-notch too. Speaking of which, Motorola avoids notches by putting the front camera in a pinhole in the top-left corner.
This phone’s second major differentiator is an eight-core, 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G, which is the same chipset that’s inside the £349 Google Pixel 4a ( see issue 313, p60). This is backed by 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with expansion courtesy of an SD card slot that supports cards up to 512GB. Or you can put in a second SIM.
In day to day use, that means you’re getting a phone that feels snappy, as reflected by Geekbench 5 scores of 542 and 1,737 for singlecore and multicore respectively. It’s the same story for graphical performance, with the G9 Plus going toe to toe with similarly priced rivals: 38fps in the onscreen GFXBench Manhattan 3 test, 42fps off-screen.
Battery life is similarly strong at 19hrs 11mins, even if it can’t match the 26hrs 51mins of the G9 Power we reviewed last month ( see issue 318, p72). That said, Motorola bundles a “Turbo Charger” with the promise that it will give you an extra 12 hours of battery life in less than ten minutes of charging.
The downside to a capacious battery and huge screen is size, and with a depth of 9.7mm and 223g weight there’s no denying the G9 Plus’s chunky nature. Flip it over, and it’s plastic all the way, although Motorola has opted for an extremely reflective metal look. In our case, this was a royal blue, but it’s also available in “Blush Gold”. We won’t judge. The glistening surface means that the Motorola “M” logo is barely visible, while a bump in the top left-hand corner houses four lenses and a flash.
That’s a 64MP (f/1.8) main camera, supported by an 8MP (f/2.2) ultrawide lens and two 2MP (f/2.2) sensors: one for depth and another for macro photography. While I’m unconvinced that many people will get much use out of these, I can report that the
64MP main camera is very good for the price. Expect detailed shots accurately reproduced with a nice colour balance.
The G9 Plus’ default camera settings capture 16MP images via pixel
“Motorola bundles a ‘Turbo Charger’ with the promise that it will give you an extra 12 hours of battery life in under ten minutes”
binning. You can turn things up to a full 64MP shot, but I wouldn’t bother. The difference is marginal, other than the fact that the shots take up around three times as much valuable storage space at the higher setting.
Low-light photography is more testing because dark conditions often lead to an abundance of visual noise and irritating artefacts. The G9 Plus isn’t immune to this phenomenon, but overall it does a good job – you lose some detail but you have to zoom in to notice.
In terms of video, the G9 Plus can shoot 1080p footage at up to 60fps, or 4K at a more modest 30fps. Results are extremely good: often you find that raising the frame rate or resolution kills stablisation, resulting in unusable shaky footage, but here things stay stable even if you upgrade the image to 4K.
The front-facing camera is a 16MP f/2.0 affair, and – somewhat unusually – beautification effects are turned off by default. I quickly realised why this was when I enabled them and saw my face replaced by a shiny thumb with eyes and a blurry beard.
There are a couple of extra design points worth highlighting. First off, the 3.5mm headphone jack is maintained, which will please those who want to hang onto a trusty pair of headphones. Secondly, Motorola combines the fingerprint reader with the side power button.
One omission to note is a magnetometer, which means you can’t see which direction you’re facing on Google Maps and also makes night sky apps tricky to use. Other than this, I have nothing bad to say about the Motorola Moto G9 Plus. At £200, it’s a stone-cold bargain.
SPECIFICATIONS
Eight-core 2.2GHz/1.6GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G 4GB RAM Adreno 617 graphics 6.81in 60Hz IPS screen, 1,080 x 2,400 resolution 128GB storage microSD card slot quad 64MP/8MP/2MP/2MP rear camera amera 16MP front camera Wi-Fi 5 Bluetooth uetooth 5 NFC USB-C connector 5,000mAh 000mAh battery Android 10 78 x 9.7 x 170mm 0mm (WDH) 223g 1yr warranty