Motorola Moto g30 review

Then, there's a fingerprint scanner on the back — a tiny circle with the Moto logo on it. Pretty classy, and it works quite well for what it is — it's quick to scan your finger and unlock the phone.

Moto g30 camera

We have a triple camera here — a 64 MP main camera an 8 MP ultra-wide camera, and a 2 MP macro camera. On the front, there’s a 13 MP selfie shooter.


So, let’s go through them. Photos with the main camera look OK — the Moto g30 bins the pixels of the 64 MP sensor in groups of 4, so — by default — you take 16 MP photos with extra-large pixels. Still, the dynamic range is not fantastic, even with auto HDR kicking in, but it will do the job in most daylit scenes. Details look sharp — actually, a bit oversharpened. Indoors, photos can start getting soft and fuzzy — just a regular issue all midrangers have when the lighting drops.

There’s an Ultra-res mode, which takes full 64 MP photos, but this one keeps HDR off and I wouldn’t say the difference in detail is something worth bothering over.

There’s a Portrait Mode on board here, but I’d rather act like there isn’t one — it’s just bad at detecting subject edges and the faux bokeh looks… well, very fake.

The ultra-wide camera does what it says on the tin — great for artsy or landscape shots, but the 8 MP sensor is soft and noisy. Then there is a 2 MP macro camera, which is pretty much there just for show. Yes, I know that there is a small audience that is really rooting for macro cameras out there, so I won’t dog on it, but having a 2 MP sensor under that lens pretty much defeats the purpose of a camera that’s supposed to capture great detail at close ranges, right?

The selfie camera is also not something to write home about. Especially since it has a beautify mode switched on by default, and it was plain awful. After disabling it, I could take some OK selfies, but they’d still lack in some respect. Outside — it’s easy to get overblown highlights on my face. Indoors, the shutter speed drops down significantly, and it’s very, very easy to take a blurry selfie.


As for video — it isn’t great. It looks jagged and choppy and there’s absolutely no stabilization. As you can see in the sample clip, it might cause a bit of nausea.

There's a good amount of delay between taking a photo and being able to view it — the phone takes a while to process the picture first and add its pinch computational photography fine-tuning. It's a minor annoyance when trying to get that "perfect" shot and tapping to check multiple times whether you got it.

In short — the main camera is OK for a $220 phone, but any secondary modes or video recording are not on par.

Moto g30 specs, software, performance

The Moto g30 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 — an octa-core, 2 GHz processor that’s through and through a midrange chip. It’s neighboured by 4 GB of RAM and a 128 GB storage chip (there’s also a slot for a microSD card). The performance is nothing staggering, but it can run light games and go through day-to-day apps with little trouble. There’s a bit of touch input lag observed when typing on the keyboard, but I could live with it. Heavy websites are a bit choppy until they load up, but in general — using the Moto g30 is not a slow ordeal.

This is partly because Motorola still uses a pretty clean build of Android — there are not many bells and whistles, just the vanilla Android 11 experience, as it was meant to be. There are just a few enhancements — like Moto gestures, which allow you to turn the flashlight on via a chopping motion, or launch the camera with a twisting motion. There’s also a new Gametime overlay for gamers. It lets you record gameplay, block calls and notifications, or quickly launch other apps from within your games.

The Moto g30 only has a mono speaker on the bottom — it sounds surprisingly deep and detailed, and there’s an EQ enhancement within the Moto app, which allows you to somewhat fine-tune it. It almost does not sound like a tinny phone speaker and I didn’t mind consuming media through it.

Moto g30 battery life

The Moto G phones generally have phenomenal battery life and the g30 does not disappoint. The 5,000 mAh cell here can easily deliver a full day of usage and even stretch that to two days if you go easy on the gaming.