Motorola Moto G31
The lack of 5G – and speed – holds it back, but the Moto G31 is comfy to hold and offers long battery life
SCORE
PRICE 64GB, £142 (£170 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk
The cheaper end of the smartphone market is increasingly cluttered, but Motorola hopes to cut through the sludge with its Moto G31. By ignoring 5G, its tactic is to concentrate on more visible aspects of the device – think design and screen – while stuffing in a whopping great battery to keep it going for two days.
It’s the build of the phone that will likely delight you most. Offering curved edges and a textured rear, it felt good to hold and secure in my hands (which are smaller than most people’s, so normally aren’t fond of big phones). Motorola sent us the “mineral grey” model to review – it’s also available in “baby blue” – and it looks classy despite its plastic body.
Along with the usual buttons for volume and power, you’ll find a fingerprint reader on the right-hand side. The reader would have felt more comfortable on the back, but it means that the rear of the phone has a minimalist air, other than the camera lenses in the top left-hand corner. The textured plastic body means no risk of fingerprints either, so it looks good no matter how long you’ve been using it for.
The bottom holds the USB-C charging port and a speaker, but you’ll search in vain for a headphone jack. And while there is some water resistance, it’s the minimal IPX2 rating (drops of water at a 15° angle) so this is a phone to keep well away from the beach.
Then we come to the second prize inclusion of this phone: its AMOLED display. Thanks to this, the Moto G31 offers vibrant colours and deep blacks. It’s ideal for watching streaming video, capturing all the colours how you’d like them to be. A sharp resolution of 1,080 x 2,400 helps, too, although I was a little surprised to see it stuck at 60Hz refresh rates when other budget phones offer 90Hz. Not that this is a deal-breaker: I didn’t notice any obvious visual lag when playing games or watching videos. The only thing I wished for was more brightness, as it struggled in bright sunlight.
A punch-hole at the top of the screen offers up the selfie camera lens, but it takes up the bare minimum of space – it’s literally just the lens. This is one of four cameras on the G31, but only the main 50MP unit is anything to shout about. Photos taken in daylight offer natural colours and reasonable dynamic ranges, and while the HDR setting can make images over-vibrant, it’s certainly eye-catching.
Things start to falter when you switch to the other cameras. The ultra-wide sensor helps with group shots, but it often produced blurry photos in my tests. Blurriness is also the theme for low-light photos. Switch night mode on and things certainly look brighter than you might expect, but the results aren’t always realistic. The macro camera is simply pointless, but that’s often the case with cheaper phones.
On the plus side, selfies come out well and the Moto G31 offers plenty of great software options that are easy to find and select when you want to
“With the 64GB variant costing £170 and 128GB at £190, it’s tempting if your priority is ease of use and sheer longevity”
use them. In fact, software is a plus point overall: Moto offers a clean Android 11 experience that’s genuinely enhanced by the familiar Moto gestures.
The Moto G31 uses the MediaTek Helio G85 chipset, which was only enough for 345 in Geekbench 5’s single-core test and 1,311 in the multicore section. That’s fine – just about – but it’s disappointing that the G31 is outperformed by older phones such as the Moto G50 ( see issue 323, p75). This scored 504 and 1,637, helping the G50 to feel significantly smoother in use; it helps that the G50 includes a 90Hz screen, even if it’s a less vibrant IPS panel.
With 4GB of RAM for support, the G31 isn’t a phone designed for multitasking, but it can do it in a bind. Similarly, it can cope with gaming but gets hot when doing so.
Assuming you aren’t gaming, though, you can expect amazing stamina. In fact, the 5,000mAh battery kept it going for a couple of days without any trouble during my testing. The only downside is that recharging is slow going at 10W, and there’s no wireless charging support.
So, should you buy the G31?
With the 64GB variant costing £170 and 128GB at £190, it’s tempting if your priority is ease of use, comfort in the hand and sheer longevity.
And I would expect the G31 to be discounted in the coming months (it only became available to buy in December 2021, so is still in its honeymoon period).
Ultimately, however, the
Motorola Moto G31 falls short of a recommendation. I can’t ignore the 5G omission, which will become a bigger issue over the coming months, and perhaps more important are its lack of speed or ruggedness. Motorola would be right to point out that you have to make compromises at this price, and you will still be making them if you choose the G50: it has a lesser screen, for instance, and shares the G31’s mediocre camera. But, of the two, it’s more likely to give you satisfaction over the lifetime of the phone. JENNIFER ALLEN
SPECIFICATIONS
8-core 2GHz/1.8GHz MediaTek Helio G85
4GB RAM Mali-G52 graphics 6.4in 60Hz AMOLED screen, 1,080 x 2,400 resolution 64GB/128GB storage 50MP/8MP/2MP rear cameras 13MP front camera Wi-Fi 5 Bluetooth 5 NFC 3.5mm jack microSD slot USB-C connector 5,000mAh battery Android 11 73.9 x 8.6 x 162mm (WDH) 181g 1yr warranty