Motorola Moto G8 Plus review: a battery boost for the budget king

Over the last few years, Motorola’s Moto G-series phones have been consistently excellent budget devices. In fact, the Moto G7 is our current pick for the best budget phone available today.

Now Lenovo-owned Motorola is back with the first of its G8 range of devices. This is the £239 (€269 or about $306) Motorola Moto G8 Plus, which sits at the top end of the affordable G-series lineup thanks to its more powerful processor and higher-resolution main camera. It’s available in Europe, Australia, Mexico, and Latin America, but it’s not currently scheduled to release in the US.

The Moto G8 Plus is another capable inexpensive smartphone from Motorola, and honestly it’s been a pleasure to use. Its battery life is excellent, and the tweaks Motorola has made to Android continue to do a great job of making its devices that much more user-friendly without ever feeling like they get in the way. The only real compromise you’re making here is with the phone’s camera and the fact that it’s launching with Android 9 rather than this year’s Android 10, but I think these are acceptable trade-offs at this price.

On paper, it’s hard to get too excited about the specs of the Moto G8 Plus, especially since they’re so similar to the Moto G7 Plus from earlier this year. It’s received a slight spec bump in terms of its processor (it now has a midrange Snapdragon 665 rather than a midrange Snapdragon 636), and its storage and RAM are unchanged at 64GB and 4GB, respectively. Its LCD screen is a fraction of an inch bigger at 6.3 inches rather than the G7 Plus’ 6.2 inches, but it’s still a 1080p affair with a small teardrop notch up top. Oh, and there’s still no IP certification, so you’re best keeping it away from water.

Motorola has made a more significant change with the capacity of the phone’s battery, which is now a respectable 4,000mAh. That’s not quite as much as the G7 Power’s 5,000mAh capacity, but it was still more than sufficient for my needs. While I wouldn’t have the confidence to claim you’ll get multiple days of battery life out of this phone, I will say that I struggled to drain the phone past 50 percent even on my longest days of use.

It’s a shame to see that the 27W fast charging that Motorola included on the Motorola G7 Plus appears to have been reduced to just 15W here. That means you’re likely to have to wait close to two hours to reach 100 percent rather than the sub-one hour that was reportedly possible on the G7 Plus (although this was likely helped by its smaller battery). You still get a 3.5mm headphone jack, though, which is always appreciated.

The camera performance of the Moto G8 Plus is a little more complicated. The Moto G8 Plus technically has a triple-camera array on its rear, one more than the dual cameras on the G7 Plus. The main camera’s resolution has been bumped up from 16 to 48 megapixels (though the resolution of the photos themselves are capped at 12 megapixels), but the secondary camera is still a 5-megapixel depth sensor.