Motorola Moto G84 5G review

The Motorola G84 5G is a new budget Android phone priced at the very competitive £250.

Essentially an upgrade to last year’s Motorola Moto G62, the Motorola G84 5G is aimed at buyers who want to buy a phone outright (or get a phone on a very cheap contract) and get the best possible value for money without having to spend an iPhone 15 amount of cash.  

So what does the Moto G84 5G have to offer? Aside from 5G support, you get a big 120Hz display, a battery that promises to last you a couple of days, a 50Mp main camera, 256GB of storage, and 12GB of RAM. That’s quite a lot for £250. 

In the context of budget phones, the Moto G84 5G is roughly £50 more expensive than the Motorola Moto G23, which we’ve already scored highly, and about £40-80 more expensive than the Samsung Galaxy A14, our current best budget phone at the time of writing. It’s reasonable then, to expect the G84 to offer better performance than both of these. 

I road tested the G84 5G to see whether it’s deserving of a space in our best budget phone round-up, and deserving of a space in your pocket. 

Design & Build

• Slim and lightweight
• Available in three colours 
• 87.2% screen-to-body ratio

The Motorola Moto G84 5G is a fairly tall phone, but it’s slim, lightweight, and not unwieldy. It’s just 7.3mm and under 170g.

It comes in two versions, two with a vegan leather back. One is white but known as Marshmallow Blue and the other is Viva Magenta offering a bright red hue.

The alternative is a PMMA acrylic glass coating in Midnight Blue and this is the sku on test here. While very pleasant to the touch, the rear coating tends to pick up pocket fluff, which spoils the look somewhat. You’ll definitely want to buy a protective case for this. 

In terms of connections, you get both a Type-C USB 2.0 port and a 3.5mm headphone jack, both of which are found on the base of the phone, next to a noise cancelling mic hole, and the main external speaker. 

Thomas Newton / Foundry

The camera module rises up from the body of the phone, which would otherwise be flush to whatever surface you’re resting it on.

The usual Motorola ‘M’ logo sits in the centre, where a fingerprint scanner might be, had Motorola not decided to build one into the Moto G84’s display. The fingerprint scanner itself is very good, working first time nine out of ten times, unlocking almost instantly.

Screen & Speakers

• 6.5in Full HD+
• pOLED
• Up to 120Hz
• Stereo speakers

The Moto G84’s 6.5in display may just be the best thing about it. It’s certainly the most attention-grabbing – it’s big, bright, detailed, and has a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, meaning games and videos look extra smooth. That’s not far off what you get with the Google Pixel 8 Pro, which is about four times as expensive. 

In lay terms, all of this means that photos, video content and games look pretty sensational. As it’s an OLED-type display, contrast is excellent, with dark areas looking marvellously inky, and bright areas not ever looking blown out.

Brightness is more than good enough to punch through glare from the sun. With auto-brightness turned off, I recorded a maximum brightness of 1453 nits, which for a budget phone, is incredible. Compare that with the Motorola G62 5G from last year, which managed a max brightness of just 438 nits.

On the negative side, the display is perhaps a hair too sensitive – when holding the phone in landscape mode, I found it all too easy to accidentally trigger the Home and Recent Apps buttons, and ruin a photo opportunity. 

Thomas Newton / Foundry

All in all, it’s an excellent display, one which will have you going ‘I can’t believe this phone is so cheap!’

The Moto G84’s stereo speakers are absolutely fine for putting calls on loudspeaker, listening back to voice notes, and playing acoustic singer songwriter stuff, but they’re not very bassy, so if you want to play tunes with loud guitars, heavy bass, drums, and for everything to not sound squashed, make sure to pick up a Bluetooth speaker. 

Specs & Performance

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G
• 12GB RAM
• 256GB internal storage

Powering the Moto G84 5G is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 695 5G eight-core processor, which allows for things like fast charging, fast photo taking, and naturally, fast 5G. 

You get 12GB of RAM here, which is generous for a budget phone. Likewise, 256GB of storage is very impressive (double the cheapest iPhone 15 and Pixel 8!), but if that’s not enough room for you, you have the option to increase storage with a microSD card. 

Thomas Newton / Foundry

Generally speaking, the Moto G84 zips through most tasks, a feeling accentuated by the very slick 120Hz display. It’s not perfect though, it’s slow to power up, and while the camera is quick at taking photos, the camera software (more on that shortly) struggles if you try to do too much at once, especially if you zoom in and out quickly. 

Running benchmarks, you can see how well it compares with other phones in its class, beating the Samsung Galaxy A14 in GFX Aztec Ruins OpenGL normal graphics test and just inching above the Motorola Moto G62 and Nokia G60 5G in the same benchmark. 

Motorola Moto G84 5G benchmarks

As we’ve not run the newer Geekbench 6 all-round benchmark on all of these phones, it’s harder to make a straight comparison, but we have run it on the Moto G23, which gave us an average multi-core score of 1,436 – the Moto G84 gave us 2,049. 

The hefty amount of RAM you get here means that you can have lots of applications running at once, and you shouldn’t experience much slowdown. I didn’t encounter much during testing, and could happily have music blaring away, while I jumped between emails, the browser, WhatsApp and social feeds. Only on a couple of occasions did YouTube and Spotify lock up and crash. 

Cameras

• Dual 50Mp+8Mp rear camera
• 16Mp front-facing camera
• A steady hand (or a tripod) is required

The Motorola G84 5G’s main camera is a dual lens set up, consisting of a 50Mp sensor with f/1.88 aperture combined with an 8Mp sensor with f/2.2 aperture, designed to let you take ultra-wide shots and detailed macros. 

Generally, the Moto G84 is very quick on the draw – I didn’t encounter any shutter lag at all. Unless I was taking photos somewhere dark, in which case the cameras were taking longer exposures, every photo was taken virtually instantly. 

You can expect OK results in daylight, or in well-lit areas, but you’ll need a steady hand if you want to capture anything decent. 

Thomas Newton / Foundry

Provided that you can, you can take some very detailed stills, as evidenced by the zoom in on the ‘Take Courage’ sign in the gallery. The Moto G84 offers digital zoom up to x8, although after x2, things become markedly less well defined, as you might expect. 

The macro mode is not good – it took a long time to focus on anything, and once done, colours tended to be exaggerated. Take a look at the photos of the pink geranium above. The first one in the gallery is taken with auto mode and the second, macro mode, both shots of the same subject, taken at the same distance. The first image is not only more detailed, but the colours are also far more lifelike. In the second image, the colours are oversaturated, and the petals aren’t in focus.

At night time, or in any location where there’s not a great deal of light, natural or artificial, results tend to come out looking messy, even if you take photos with Night Mode on. Pets, or indeed any subject that isn’t prone to sitting still, are especially hard to take decent snaps of. 

Likewise, the 16Mp front camera takes decent selfies, if you’re somewhere well-lit. If you’re not, then results may vary. As there’s no front flash, the Moto G84 will just flood the screen’s edges with white light, creating a pseudo-flash, which just doesn’t result in great snaps. The portrait mode as well tends to blur stray hairs, which can give your head a weird halo-type effect.

The camera’s controls aren’t always as responsive as you’d like them to be. Trying to zoom by pinching with two fingers is especially frustrating. All of this adds up to an awkward experience. Hopefully the camera can be improved with future software updates. The phone is clearly capable of taking good photos, it just doesn’t make it easy for you.

Battery Life & Charging

• Two days use with adaptive brightness
• Over one day with the display locked at 120Hz
• Charges to 90% in an hour with 30W adapter

The Moto G84 features a 5000mAh battery, which will easily give you a days’ worth of power, maybe two, if you push it. 

After 12 hours of use – making calls, checking emails, browsing, using Google Maps and streaming Spotify playlists –  even with the display locked to the 120Hz refresh rate and auto–brightness on, I would often end a day with around 46-48% left. 

That’s good going, but what’s better is the fact that using the supplied 30W Trubopower charger, you can almost recharge the battery from flat to full in an hour. After 15 minutes on the charger, I was at 31%, and after half an hour, I was at 55%. After an hour I was at 90% – it took one hour and 21 minutes to fully recharge the Moto G84 5G. 

Thomas Newton / Foundry

See also  Asus ZenWIFI AX Mini XD5 review

Running the PC Mark Work 3.0 battery life test with the refresh rate set to 120Hz gave me a score of 14h 30mins. That’s better than what you get from the Samsung Galaxy A14 and the Realme C35’s batteries, which are 5000mAh units as well. 

Interestingly, the Nokia G60 5G, which has a 120Hz display but a slightly smaller 4500mAh battery returned a similar score. While we couldn’t run the same benchmark on last year’s Motorola G62 (another phone with a 120Hz display and 5000mAh battery) and therefore we can’t be as certain, battery performance appears to be roughly the same here. 

Software & Apps

• Android 13 with MyUX 
• User interface is minimal and uncluttered
• The Moto app is a welcome addition

The Moto G84 5G comes with Android 13 with Motorola’s MyUX custom user interface stacked on top. 

As custom UIs go, MyUX is very good. If you’ve used an Android phone before, you’ll feel right at home, as it’s not wildly different to the experience that you get with a Pixel phone. 

Thomas Newton / Foundry

If you’ve never used an Android phone before, then the pre-installed Moto app is worth investigating. This is essentially a menu of shortcuts to some of the phone’s settings, such as the lock screen and the font style, presented in a very user-friendly way. 

There’s nothing here that can’t be found in the phone’s settings, but, it serves as a nice intro for anyone who’s not used an Android device before. 

It’s less obvious why anyone would use Motorola Notifications – an app which lets you sign up for surveys, how fun – and it’s a bit annoying that it can’t be removed, but it only takes up 96.10MB, so not the worst example of bloatware. 

Price & Availability

You can buy the Motorola G84 5G directly from Motorola UK now, for £249.99, in white or ‘marshmallow blue’ as Motorola calls it, midnight blue, or viva magenta. 

Amazon UK also has it in stock, currently on for £249.99 for the blue and magenta versions, with the white (Marshmallow Blue) version on for slightly more at £260.84. 

Mobiles.co.uk also has both the midnight blue and magenta versions of the Moto G84 5G available to buy for £249. 

The Motorola G84 5G is not currently listed on Motorola’s US site. 

Thomas Newton / Foundry

Should you buy the Motorola Moto G84 5G?

The Motorola G84 5G is an excellent phone offering buyers long-lasting battery life, solid performance and an excellent display. The only dull mark on an otherwise spotless score sheet is the camera, which is a mixed bag. 

If you want an inexpensive phone that will take good photos, then the Nokia G60 5G might be a better option. Other than that, you’re going to have to think about shelling out a bit more. Consider the OnePlus Nord 2T, or the Google Pixel 6a, which are about £100 and £150 more, respectively, and feature very good cameras – or read through our best mid-range phones round-up. 

Specifications

• Android 13
• 6.5in Full HD+ (2400 x 1080) pOLED display
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G
• 12GB RAM
• 256GB internal storage
• 5000mAh battery
• 30W wired charging
• 50Mp f/1.88 main camera
• 8Mp f/2.2 ultrawide camera
• 8x digital zoom
• 16Mp f/2.45 front camera
• 5G
• Wi-Fi 5
• Bluetooth 5.3
• 160 x 74.4 x 7.6mm
• 166.8g (plastic) / 168.3g (vegan leather)