Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Decent mid-range performance
- Water and shock-resistant
- Five years of updates
- Lots of bonus features
Cons
- Underwhelming cameras
- Disappointing display
- Questionable battery life
Our Verdict
A water and drop-resistant phone with wireless charging and cameras, plus a charger and headphones in the box? That’s nice. But would’ve been better if Motorola had cleaned up the buffet of features and spent the budget on improving some basic features instead, like the screen and battery life.
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In the shadow of Motorola’s more lavish Edge and Razr phones, it’s easy to forget that they were first established as a manufacturer of really good mid-range and budget phones with their Moto G and Moto E mobiles.
But the Lenovo-owned company hasn’t stopped making them, with the Moto G75 one of its crop for 2024. Here are my thoughts after testing the device.
Design & Build
Motorola has packed a lot of good hardware features into a relatively cheap phone. The list of features that usually appear in high-end handsets is long.
It has a large screen and elegant styling similar to the Motorola Edge 50 series, Motorola’s top phones of 2024, with two of the three colours you can choose in so-called vegan leather. My black model has a luscious matt-black finish. It’s a chassis with plastic edges and back, but you still get a sense of quality.
Mattias Inghe
The Moto G75 has wireless charging support, great-sounding stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos support and a triple camera on the back. It’s fully water resistant with an IP68 rating, and also exceptionally durable.
It meets MIL-STD-810H requirements for up to 1.2m drops and is said to be usable in extremely high and low temperatures.
Specs & Performance
The system is based on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3, a fairly new (at the time of the phone’s launch) but not exactly powerful 8-core processor that works alongside surprisingly capable graphics.
With 8GB of RAM, it’s enough for all everyday use and even some multitasking. Avoid really heavy mobile games and the most demanding apps and you get a pleasantly fast experience.
Mattias Inghe
Battery Life & Charging
The newer the chipset, the more energy efficient it gets, and since the maximum performance is limited here, it’s promising on paper. However, the 5,000 mAh battery doesn’t last as long as I’d hoped. With mixed use, you have to keep your fingers crossed that it will last all day – if I take more photos or videos than usual, I’m screwed. Video streaming is a little better, provided the phone is set to a 60Hz refresh rate, but only a slight improvement.
You get USB-C fast charging of up to 30W, and one of Motorola’s own TurboPower chargers of 33W is included. That’s unusual these days. With it, it’s fully charged in an hour. The Moto G75 also gives you the option to charge wirelessly, though this is limited to 15W.
The charger isn’t the only thing you get in the box. It also comes with a protective transparent case and a pair of in-ear headphones with a USB-C connection.
Headphones that come with your mobile phone? It almost feels a bit nostalgic. I can’t remember when I last saw it. Are they any good? Yes, they sound okay for a pair of “free” headphones. Do I want to use them? Not in the least. A decent pair of true wireless doesn’t cost much and eliminates the cord clutter.
Mattias Inghe
Cameras
The triple camera on the back is a bit of an illusion.
Actually, there are only two cameras to choose between: a 50Mp main sensor and an 8Mp ultrawide lens.
The main camera’s Sony Lytia sensor has good light sensitivity without being too noisy, which means I get a pleasant image with accurate colours and good dynamic range, even in dim December light.
At night it doesn’t keep up as well, but that seems to have more to do with the Motorola software. The sensor is not that fast, and the mobile phone has a hard time compensating for that.
The less said about the ultrawide camera, the better. It only works in really good light, otherwise, the dynamic range is limited and the colours are dark and murky. It does, however, have autofocus rather than a fixed focus point, which means it can be used as a macro camera – a better one than most budget phones.
So what is the third camera? Motorola calls it a “flicker sensor” and… well… maybe it is? I can’t think of any situations where I can’t film indoor light with otherwise flickering lighting. But it’s nothing unique to this phone. Good flicker compensation is usually just a software thing.
Mattias Inghe
Screen & Speakers
The screen promises more on paper than in reality. It is an LCD panel of some type – it’s not specified by Motorola that it’s an IPS panel, but it behaves like one.
It gives excellent wide viewing angles, half-decent contrast and deep blacks, plus acceptable brightness for most situations. The colour gamut isn’t the best, though, so it lacks a lot of punch while displaying photos or streaming movies.
You can choose between 60Hz and 120Hz refresh rates or an auto mode that switches between them. Usually I’d recommend auto or 120Hz, but here I’m not so sure. As the image is unusually laggy and gets blurry when I scroll quickly on a long web page, you won’t get much joy from high refresh rates.
Like many budget phones, the Moto G75 combines a single downward-firing speaker with the earpiece for a stereo setup of sorts. Audio is decent, but not demonstrably better or worse and most similarly-priced phones.
Software & Apps
A key positive aspect is that Motorola promises a full five years of Android updates from the Android 14 the phone comes with.
So far, however, there is no upgrade to Android 15, with no word on when it might arrive.
Motorola’s Android skin is impressively light-touch, with only a handful of extra apps that you can easily ignore. If you’ve used any Android phone recently, switching to the Moto G75 should be a relatively smooth transition.
Price & Availability
At full price, the Motorola Moto G75 costs £269.99 in the UK. It’s available directly from Motorola, or via AO and Amazon.
No UK networks are selling the phone on contract, so you’ll have to buy outright and pair it with a SIM-only deal. See the best options below.
Unfortunately, the phone isn’t available to buy in the US at the time of writing.
That starting puts it just outside our usual budget phone territory, but regular discounts mean you might be able to get it for a lot less.
Should you buy the Motorola Moto G75?
At this relatively affordable price point, you shouldn’t ask for too much from the Moto G75.
But too much is exactly what you get here. Too many different features, at the expense of the quality of the most important ones. Apart from acceptable performance, most basic features such as screen, camera and battery leave something to be desired.
If Motorola had thrown out wireless charging and the headphones and offered a better and more energy-efficient OLED screen instead, it would have been better. However, in its current form, I can’t recommend it.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication M3 and was translated and adapted from Swedish.
