Motorola Moto G30
A solid budget handset, but you may be tempted to save £30 and buy the Moto G10 instead
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PRICE £133 (£160 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/320g30
Despite its name, the Moto G30 isn’t three times as good as the Moto G10 opposite, but it also isn’t three times the price. At a mere £30 more, though, is the Moto G30 worth the extra?
Despite the numerical jump, the G30 is still very much a budget device. Powered by Qualcomm’s eight-core Snapdragon 662 processor and backed by 4GB of RAM, it’s actually a side-step from the Moto G9 Power
( see issue 318, p72) and G9 Play ( see issue 314, p76) handsets, which have identical internals.
Like its G10 doppelganger, the G30 is a chunky handset, with a 6.5in screen bordered by bezels a couple of millimetres thick. As usual, this bezel doubles in thickness around the “chin” of the device, and the front camera is tucked away in a tiny notch at the top.
Flip the G30 over and it’s plastic all the way. The smooth finish does a good job of imitating matte metal from a distance, but isn’t fooling anybody to the touch. The Motorola logo is in a small indented circle that doubles up as the fingerprint reader on the back, while the camera array is embedded in a rectangular hump in the top-left corner.
Still, it’s a decent-looking handset and I’m pleased to report that there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top. It also supports microSD cards up to 512GB in size – or you can use the slot for a second SIM card.
The 6.5in IPS display has a resolution of 720 x 1,600 and pixel density of 269ppi, which is quite low in a world where 1080p and 2K phone displays are common. Yet Motorola provides very good performance on a budget: colour accuracy is solid with 86% of the sRGB spectrum covered from a gamut volume of 99%, and contrast is good with a ratio of 1,775:1. Brightness is a weak spot, with the screen maxing out at 335cd/m2 , but it’s still fine for most environments.
However, the G30 has an ace up its sleeve: the panel boasts a 90Hz refresh rate over the G10’s 60Hz. This makes for a smoother effect when navigating Android and, theoretically, opens up the potential to 90fps performance in compatible games. By default, the mode is set to Auto, where the operating system decides whether to use 60Hz or 90Hz via an AI algorithm, but you can overrule it and pick whichever you like. You might not want to go all out on 90Hz, however, as this will reduce battery life.
The good news is that the G30 excels for stamina, lasting 22hrs 30mins in our video-rundown test. That’s narrowly behind the Samsung Galaxy A21s ( see issue 312, p72), but beats almost everything else – the most notable exception being the G9 Power and its 6,000mAh battery, which kept going for 26hrs 51mins.
The Snapdragon 662, 4GB of RAM and generous 128GB of storage mean performance feels snappy out of the box, in contrast to the cheaper G10. The benchmarks put the phone exactly where you’d expect it to be: in line with the Moto G9 Play and Power. For example, it scored 306 in the Geekbench 5 single-core test and
1,281 in the multicore section
“The G30’s Snapdragon 662, 4GB of RAM and generous 128GB storage mean performance feels snappy out of the box”
The G30 gets four cameras: a 64MP f/1.7 main unit, supported by an 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide lens and two 2MP sensors (depth and macro). In bright conditions, it performs admirably – shots are colourful and capture plenty of detail. This holds true even when zoomed in, although the cheaper Moto G10 visibly suffers from less blur at this level of magnification. It’s also slightly odd that, while the G10 lets you get a full 48MP shot, the G30 only lets you have the pixel-binned 16MP version from its 64MP lens.
The G30 isn’t quite as strong in conditions where light is at a premium, but while it loses detail its performance here was better than I expected. And, when zoomed in, the Moto G30 shows its class by having less blur and visible noise in low light than the G10. The 13MP front-facing selfie camera is equally solid and its aggressive beautification effects are disabled by default.
As with the G10, there aren’t any options when it comes to video capture. Footage is shot at 1080p at 30fps with digital stabilisation in place; while the G30’s video quality is a touch sharper than the G10’s, it still struggles with sudden movements.
The Moto G30 is yet another solid budget phone from Motorola, and is well priced at £160. The question is whether the addition of a 90Hz screen, an ultrawide camera lens and double the storage of the G9 Play – and the G10 – are worth the added investment. It’s £20 more than the Play, £30 more than the G10.
I’d argue not: that the majority of budget buyers would be better served looking for discounts on the previous Motorola generation instead. For a handset with a name that implies a 21-generation leap, the Moto G30 feels more like a gentle shuffle along.