The Moto G 5G Plus is a good all-rounder with a better chipset, battery life and screen quality than many other devices at its price point. It’s also got a bigger screen than its siblings. The fact that it’s also 5G-compatible makes it an even more tempting offer, as it’s the cheapest 5G phone at launch, although as with all Moto phones it has its fair share of annoying quirks. It’s good, especially as a cheap 5G handset, but not game-changing.
Moto G 5G Plus Review
The Moto G 5G Plus is emphatically a plus-sized handset, even compared to the Moto G8 Power. It’s bigger than its siblings, with a larger screen (as we’ll get into) but the G 5G Plus isn’t too wide, so it won’t be much of a stretch to hold it comfortably for most people.
The phone’s dimensions are 168 x 74 x 9mm so it’s y as long and thick as your average smartphone, just not as wide. At 207g it’s a little heavier than your average handset, but not by much.
On the front of the phone, the screen takes up the majority of the space, broken up only by a fairly minimal bezel and also the dual punch-hole cutouts for the cameras.
The back of the phone houses a square camera bump, which doesn’t stick out too far, as well as a large flash module and the Motorola logo. The phone has a plastic back, but it feels sturdy, and not cheap as can be the case with some other plastic phones.
The Moto G 5G Plus has the drawback common to all 21:9 phones, in that it’s quite long and can be hard to fit into a pocket, but it has the advantages too: as we’ve mentioned, it’s relatively thin and so fairly easy to hold, and you’ve also got enough space to view two apps at once, while movies can generally be watched without blacked ‘letterbox’ bars at the top and bottom.
The Moto G 5G Plus screen measures 6.7 inches diagonally, making it the biggest Moto G phone in some way and also one of Motorola’s biggest handsets, along with the Edge devices.
Generally, the screen is nice to look at, with its HDR10 rating ensuring a good dynamic range. It has a 90Hz maximum refresh rate too which makes navigating the phone feel smooth; you can turn this down to 60Hz if you want to save some battery life, but given the phone’s impressive battery life we didn’t feel the need to.
This is the first Moto G phone to have a 90Hz display, and depending on where you are it may well be the cheapest phone to offer the feature, which has so far been limited to higher-end devices.
The Moto G 5G Plus has a whopping six cameras – four on the back and two on the front – which is quite the haul when you realize that even the iPhone 11 Pro Max only has four. As with most smartphone camera setups, however, quantity isn’t necessarily indicative of quality, and the phone is only okay for photography, not great.
On the front is a 16MP f/2.0 selfie camera, which is joined by an 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide camera for group shots. Pictures look pretty good when taken in well-lit conditions, although they’re perhaps a bit grainy when the light drops. There’s plenty of detail in selfies, especially when you use the main camera, and bokeh effects in Portrait mode generally look good.
The Moto G 5G Plus runs on the Snapdragon 765G chipset – that’s tech you’d typically find in a high mid-range phone, but some more affordable devices like this have it too. Thanks to its presence, the phone feels way snappier to use than most other Moto G phones, with the 4GB or 6GB RAM helping too.
Apps load quickly, you can flick between apps with little delay, and games play smoothly. Sure, this isn’t a top-end processor, and now and then an app will load slowly or crash unexpectedly, which will remind you of that fact, but this is a rare occurrence.
When testing other Snapdragon 765G phones we’ve enjoyed long battery life; it seems that this is partly down to some optimizations in the chipset, and this is also likely the case with the Moto G 5G Plus.
The Moto G 5G Plus runs Android 10, and it’s ‘stock’ Android, just as Google designed it, without the bells and whistles most companies add when they fork it for their devices.
That said, Motorola does bring a few tricks of its own to the party, and foremost of these is Moto Actions, which let you access various functions using gestures: Fast Torch turns on the flashlight when you shake the phone twice, twisting the phone opens the camera app, and so on. These take a little while to get used to, but they can be pretty useful and fun once you do – well until you take the phone out on a run and find yourself endlessly triggering them all.
Motorola tends to pack pretty big batteries into its Moto G line of phones, and there’s no exception here, as the Moto G 5G Plus has a generous 5,000mAh power pack.
The Moto G 5G Plus will get you connected to 5G without you having to pay a premium – if that’s what you want from a phone, look no further.