Motorola Moto G22
Well built, great battery life and ships with Android 12 – but forget about 5G or cutting-edge speed
PRICE £117 (£140 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com
Motorola has form when it comes to building great smartphones at low prices. The Moto G22 certainly ticks the latter box, costing only £140 for a fully featured Android 12 phone, even it’s hard to get excited about a phone with so much evident cost-cutting.
Not that this is obvious at first glance. Though fairly chunky at 8.5mm, the G22’s casing is nicely curved and feels well put together. Unsurprisingly it’s all plastic, but it doesn’t feel flimsy, and both the Cosmic Black and Iceberg Blue finishes have a shimmer effect on the back that adds a touch of class.
Traditionalists will be pleased to see a 3.5mm headphone socket at the top of the case, with power and volume buttons on the right-hand side and a USB-C port at the bottom. A fingerprint sensor is built into the power button; while we prefer the underdisplay approach, it functions perfectly well. The case has no IP rating, but Motorola says it’s “water-repellent”.
The screen, however, has obviously been specified to a budget. It’s a 6.5in IPS LCD panel, and while the 720 x 1,600 resolution is reasonably sharp, it’s not especially bright or vibrant; even when you ramp the brightness up to maximum, it can be difficult to read in bright daylight, and videos and photos look drab. On the plus side, it has a refresh rate of 90Hz rather than the old standard of 60Hz.
The camera is a mixed bag, too. You wouldn’t expect a phone at this price to compete with the iPhone 13 Pro, but on paper the hardware looks good: it brings together a quad-lens 50MP wide camera, an 8MP ultrawide lens, a 2MP macro camera, a 2MP depth module and a single-lens 16MP wide selfie camera. Given decent lighting conditions, the
Moto G22 produces photos with plenty of detail and a natural-looking colour balance. The HDR processing does a decent job of balancing light and dark, too, although you don’t see the effect while shooting, only afterwards when the photo is saved.
However, low light and moving subjects cause problems. Noise is pretty much unavoidable, and it’s not at all certain you’ll get a usable picture. Good results can be obtained if you keep a steady hand, but I came to expect the worst.
Inside, the Moto G22 is powered by a MediaTek Helio G37 processor, partnered with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD). Those specs are just about enough to run Android satisfactorily, and I like the clean installation that Motorola has gone for, with minimal customisations and very few bloatware apps.
However, you can feel that this isn’t an ultra-fast handset when you’re opening menus, switching between apps and loading websites. I noticed moments of stuttering and lag, and while I could play some moderately demanding games on the phone, there were occasional skipped frames and lengthy loading times to put up with. It’s the same story with other intensive tasks, such as photo editing.
The Geekbench benchmarks reveal why, giving the G22 a single-core score of 171 and a multicore rating of 960 – among the lowest scores we’ve seen from any modern phone. This certainly isn’t the right companion for those wanting to do laptop-style tasks on the small screen. Connectivity is stripped down, too: there’s no 5G support, nor Wi-Fi 6, which means you won’t get the fastest download speeds even inside your own home.
Probably the best thing about the G22 is its battery life. In the absence of an ultra-bright screen or high-power internals, the 5,000mAh battery keeps this phone going well into a second day, and even a third if you’re careful. I found an hour of streaming video at full brightness and low volume only reduced the battery level from 100% to 95%. Then again, that’s just as well, as it recharges at a slow 15W: you’re looking at three or four hours to get to a full charge from zero once you’ve plugged in, and there’s no wireless charging option.
While it’s easy to find fault with the G22, it’s important to keep that absurdly low price in mind. For the money, it’s an impressive package. We like Motorola’s unintrusive take on Android, and the long battery life is a big plus.
If you want anything more than the basics, however, you’ll need to pay a chunk more cash. The Moto G22’s camera is merely satisfactory, and the screen won’t delight gamers or video addicts. Performance is a concern, too: if a phone already feels sluggish when you take it out of the box, that’s only likely to get worse over time as you load up on additional apps and OS updates. You’ll get a nicer all-round experience from the £299 Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G, for example, or the £199 Nokia G50.
Yet while the Motorola Moto G22 isn’t exactly an outstanding phone, it does the job and it’s currently one of the cheapest smartphones you can buy. For some, that will be all the recommendation that’s needed. DAVID NIELD
“The best thing about the G22 is its battery life . The 5,000mAh battery keeps this phone going well into a second day”
SPECIFICATIONS
8-core (2.3GHz/1.8GHz) MediaTek Helio
G37 SoC 4GB RAM PowerVR GE8320 graphics 6.5in 90Hz IPS screen,
720 x 1,600 resolution 4G 64GB/128GB storage microSD card slot quad 50MP/8MP/2MP/2MP rear cameras single 16MP front camera Wi-Fi 5
Bluetooth 5 NFC 5,000mAh battery 3.5mm jack USB-C connector Android 12 75 x 8.5 x 164mm (WDH) 185g 2yr warranty (via John Lewis)