Recently, with the exception of the Razr, Motorola have been focusing their efforts on producing budget and mid-ranged smartphones. The G8 range is no exception to this, with 4 handsets sat squarely at the budget end of the market.
The G8 is the vanilla version of the family, with the Power, Play and Power Lite making up the rest of the range. They are all pretty similar with minimal differences, so in this Quick Review, we will focus on the G8 itself.
Low resolution big screen
The G8 has a 6.4” LCD screen (not Gorilla Glass), plastic back and plastic frame. Nothing special to report here as many similar priced phones are now packing Gorilla Glass front and back as well as some being AMOLED. This particular display delivers an 82.2% screen to body ratio, 720p resolution and a quite low 268ppi density. With such a big screen, the 720p resolution is likely to make things look fuzzy.
Inside it runs the mid-range Snapdragon 665 processor with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage. It has a rear mounted fingerprint scanner, single speaker and a 3.5mm headphone jack. All this is powered by a decent sized 4000 mAh battery, though not with fast or wireless charging. You should be able to get a couple of days out of this battery with casual use.
Standard triple camera array setup
The rear camera array is a triple setup arranged vertically in a black frame on the left of the back. It consists of a 16MP f/1.7 wide, 8MP f/2.2 ultrawide and a 2MP f/2.2 macro. This seems to be the standard setup for low-end triple camera arrays in 2020, though the more enterprising manufacturers are also adding a telephoto lens to really beef up their offering.
On the front is an 8MP f/2.0 selfie camera positioned to the top left of the screen in a neat pinhole. This can also take 1080p videos at 30fps.
Need to do better
Available in Prism White and Capri Blue, the G8 will set you back around £179, not a bad price for what you get. However, it doesn’t stand up very well against similar priced handsets from the likes of Xiaomi, Realme and Oppo and outside of the US the Motorola brand does not really count for much. You might be better going for the G8 power. For an extra £50 you get a 1080p resolution screen, an extra telephoto lens and a fast charging 5000 mAh battery.
Considering the G8 was only released in March 2020, they really need to do better if they want to start regaining market share. Let’s hope the shortly to be release Edge and Edge+ are something special
