Motorola Moto G10
By no means the fastest phone, but the temptingly priced Moto G10 still has much going for it
SCORE
PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com
The Moto G10 is, even by the Moto G range’s budget standards, worryingly cheap. Has Motorola really managed to produce a decent handset for £30 less than the price of the entry-level Moto G9 Play ( see issue 314, p76)?
At a glance, the G10 shares a lot of DNA with the G9 series – and its more expensive sibling opposite. It’s a fine-looking phone, with the only giveaways that you’re not holding a flagship being the bezel on the “chin” and the plastic back.
Motorola has tried something a little different with the shell here, introducing 29 textured waves to give it a distinctive look and make it marginally more grippy. The fingerprint reader is embedded into the circular Motorola logo on the back, and the four cameras are contained within a rectangular hump in the top left-hand corner. On the front, the selfie camera hides in a small notch at the top of the screen.
We were sent the “Aurora Grey” variant for review, but the G10 also comes in “Sakura Pearl”. Both are surprisingly stylish for a handset that retails for a ridiculous £130. And, as this is a Moto G phone, it comes with two consumer-friendly options that flagships so often omit: a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD slot. The G10 supports cards up to 512GB in size, expanding the 64GB of built-in memory. It’s a hybrid slot too, meaning you can whack in an additional SIM instead.
The G10’s screen may not sound like much on paper – an IPS 720 x 1,600 panel stretched over 6.5in for a total of 269ppi – but it’s very good for the price. Our colorimeter found that the display covered 87% of the sRGB gamut with a volume of 99%. Contrast was impressive, recording 1,927:1, and a maximum screen brightness of 377cd/m2 should be fine on all but the brightest days. Just bear in mind that it’s 60Hz, not 90Hz like the Moto G30 opposite.
So far, so good. But if you were predicting that things would take a turn when it comes to day-to-day performance then congratulations: you’re spot on. The G10 uses an eight-core 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 paired with 4GB of RAM and it feels sluggish from the moment you switch it on.
For example, the keyboard takes a fraction too long to pop up after you tap on a text field, apps sit on the logo for a half-second more than you’d expect and camera previews are choppy as you move around the frame. It’s a clear step down from the G9 Play and the G30, both of which use the faster Snapdragon 662 chip.
Benchmarks back up that anecdotal evidence. Spend another £30 for the G30 and Geekbench 5 rewards you with 20% higher scores in its single-core test and 15% more for multitasking. It’s the same story in games, with the G10 returning 24fps in the Manhattan 3 test compared to 34fps for the G30 .
There was little to separate the phones for battery life, with the G10 returning a commendable 21hrs 14mins in our video-rundown test. If every minute matters, note that the G30 managed to squeeze an extra
“Not only does it look good, but it also packs a decent screen and camera for its low price, as well as having formidable battery life”
hour from the same 5,000mAh battery.
The G10 has four cameras, at least two of which could be dismissed as being gimmicky. You’re getting a 48MP f/1.7 main sensor, an 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide angle lens, a 2MP f/2.4 macro unit and another 2MP f/2.4 depth sensor.
I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images captured by the G10, especially given the sluggishness of the camera app itself. In well-lit conditions, it’s more than capable of taking decent, detailed shots.
In fact, compared directly to the G30, I prefer the G10’s pictures. The colours are a fraction colder, but if you zoom in you’re rewarded with more detail and less blur. Its 8MP, f/2.2 front-facing camera performs well too and, thankfully, Motorola has left the beautification settings turned off by default.
There’s no option to change any of the video settings on the G10, but the footage captured is 1080p at 30fps with electronic stabilisation applied. Video is steady enough, but it’s a little soft and the stabilisation struggles with sharp movements.
The G10 has a lot going for it: not only does it looks good, but it also packs a decent screen and camera, despite its low price. The cherry on top is its formidable battery life. Downsides? It feels unresponsive even on its first day out of the box, and that problem is only going to get worse over time. If you can afford the extra £30, then the G30 certainly justifies the expense. But, if you can’t, the Moto G10 is a worthy budget handset. It may not be the speediest, but it remains superb value.