Motorola Moto G50
Mediocre camera aside, the Moto G50 offers everything you could reasonably ask for in a phone at this price
“For battery life, probably helped by the low-res screen, the Moto G50 managed a heroic 25hrs 45mins in our test”
Not content with having a Play, Plus and Power variant of the Moto G, Motorola has now gone into double and triple figures with its numbering system. The Moto G50 sits between the G10, G30 and G100 within the Moto G family, and that means you’re also getting middle-child performance.
£200 buys you an eight-core 2GHz/1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 480 chipset backed with 4GB of RAM. That’s a similar spec to the Nokia X20 ( see issue 322, p71) we reviewed last month but for £100 less, and it means the G50 competes well against sub-£200 opposition. Scores of 504 and 1,637 in Geekbench 5 are never going to make jaws drop, but this is a speedy phone – and it’s made to feel all the more smooth by a 90Hz screen.
A 41fps score in the offscreen GFXBench Manhattan test shows it has 3D power too, and note its 66fps onscreen score is high for a budget phone. Here, though, it’s helped by a relatively low 720 x 1,600 resolution across the 6.5in IPS screen, which gives it a pixel density of 269ppi.
Still, that’s sharp enough for most people’s needs.
In true Motorola fashion, it’s a solid screen that offers excellent value in such a low-cost handset.
You can choose between three colour modes of Natural, Boosted and Saturated, with Natural covering 92% of the sRGB gamut with a reasonable 1.69 average Delta E. There’s not much point in switching to the other modes with little more colour gamut coverage but worse accuracy.
Better news comes from a measured contrast of 1,764:1 and a peak brightness o of 431cd/m2. . I’v I’ve seen brighte brighter IPS panels, b but that’s suffici sufficient for comforta comfortable use on all bu but the brightest of f days. For bat battery life, probably helped by the low-res screen, the Moto G50 managed a heroic 25hrs 45mins in our looped video test.
Motorola handsets, from the cheapest to the most expensive (folding Razr aside) have followed a similar design trend in recent years, and the Moto G50 once again has looks that belie its cheap price. However, the first sign of cost-cutting arrives in the form of the bezels, which are thicker than you might expect on a 2021 phone. The second is that it’s plastic all the way.
There’s no fancy in-screen fingerprint reader, with Motorola instead using a circular sensor on the back that works well unless you want to unlock the phone when it’s flat on your desk. Next to the scanner is the camera array, tucked neatly in a rectangular l box b i in the h top left-hand l f hand
corner, whilst a 3.5mm jack sits at the hb bottom.
As there now w seems to be a law that h all ll phones, h nes, no matter what at price, must st have at least l three hree rear cameras, the Moto to G50 fully complies, plies, with three lenses of varying degrees of usefulness. The main 48MP (f/1.7) camera is joined by a 5MP (f/2.4) macro lens and a 2MP (f/2.4) depth sensor for those arty bokeh shots.
Those specs sound promising on paper, but the G50’s cameras won’t blow you away in terms of image quality. Photos look fine from a distance but zooming in revealed a worrying amount of noise around objects such as windows. I feared the worst in low-light conditions, but at sunset the Moto G50 coped reasonably well. For example, I took a shot of my garden as the sun began to recede and could still see each distinct leaf on the trees. Again, zooming in reveals plenty of noise with detail replaced by blur as the camera sensor struggles to cope.
To be clear, this is a problem with all budget phone cameras, which is why we recommend the £299 Google Pixel 4a ( see issue 313,
p60) to keen photographers, if they can afford it.
The G50 is no match for the Pixel 4a for video capture either, and note it can only be captured at 1080p at 30fps. Stabilisation is good, managing to stay pretty steady even when I was deliberately shaking the phone, but the footage is light on detail.
Camera disappointments aside, there’s a lot to recommend about the Moto G50. It looks great, has a decent screen, includes 5G support, has an incredible battery and is a strong performer for the price. Also note the nice, clean installation of Android. The Moto G50 is my pick of the sub-£200 Motos, offering a great all-round package that’s hard to beat for the price.