Motorola is dropping the price of its value-focused Moto G phone line. The new Moto G 5G, revealed Tuesday, starts at $200 and gets a higher-refresh-rate display than its predecessor. It arrives alongside a refreshed Moto G Power 5G, which sticks to the same $300 price of last year’s model while getting its own spec bump.
The pair of phones arrive come last month’s Moto G Play for 2024, which also received its its own price drop from $170 in 2023 to $150 for this year’s model.
The Moto G 5G’s new screen is a 6.6-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate, which supports Dolby Atmos audio. The phone comes with a 50-megapixel main camera, an 8-megapixel front-facing camera and it’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 chip. That processor isn’t the newest Qualcomm offers for this price range — there’s a Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 — but it should be optimized for photography and the phone’s display.
Unfortunately that 50-megapixel main lens is paired with a 2-megapixel macro camera, and we’re yet to see such a lens offer much help to photographers. The phone also has 128GB of storage, a 5,000-mAh battery and 18-watt fast charging.
The $299 Moto G Power 5G offers additional memory and a refreshed camera over the $199 Moto G 5G.
The Moto G Power 5G will have a bigger 6.7-inch display. Like the step-down model, it’ll also have a 120Hz refresh rate, 128GB of storage, Dolby Atmos audio and a 5,000-mAh battery. It steps up with the camera setup: There’s a 50-megapixel main camera paired up with an 8-megapixel ultrawide lens — which should help with zoomed-out photos. It also has a 16-megapixel front-facing camera and is powered by the Mediatek Dimensity 7020 processor.
New for the Moto G Power this year is 15-watt wireless charging, which is still a novel feature for phones in this price range.
Both phones are offering a “RAM boost” feature, which allows you to expand the onboard memory by dipping into the built-in storage. Motorola says the feature can bump up the Moto G 5G from 4GB of memory to an experience similar to 8GB, and the Moto G Power from its 8GB of built-in memory to 16GB. We’ll have to test the claim to see if the feature offers a noticeable improvement, which we’ve also seen on phones made by OnePlus.
Both phones are unfortunately sticking to Motorola’s policy of offering one year of software updates and three years of security updates. While it’s been a longstanding policy for Motorola’s G phones, it’s one that I’d like to see improvement on. Now that higher-end phones, such as those in Samsung’s Galaxy S24 and Google’s Pixel 8 lineups, get as many as seven years of software updates, it’s high time for lower-end phones to offer a few more years of support.
But on the bright side, both phones are also now getting NFC for contactless payments. That’s a feature that’s only just starting to hit $200 phones.
The Moto G 5G will be available from T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile on March 21, with an unlocked version coming on May 2. It comes in a sage green color. The Moto G Power 5G will release on Cricket first on March 22 before additional carriers, and an unlocked model will go on sale March 29.
