Motorola just announced its first budget 5G phone — the Moto G 5G Plus

It’s been about a year since we started seeing 5G smartphones hit the market and, thus far, they are generally considered expensive — large, flagship phones, with crazy specs, but crazy asking prices.

Well, in comes Motorola to do what it does best — offer a value-priced phone that has all the needed bells and whistles to be considered a contemporary device in 2020. The Moto G 5G Plus has just been announced. Let’s see what it’s about!

Moto G 5G Plus design and display

The Moto G 5G Plus is a modern-looking slab with an almost all-screen front. A 6.7-inch screen with an aspect ratio of 21:9 adorns its face, surrounded by an almost uniform bezel. The screen has a 1080 x 2520 pixel resolution and — get this — a 90 Hz refresh rate. Sure, it’s not as flashy as 120 Hz, but from our experience, 90 Hz also improves the smoothness of UI animations quite noticeably.

You will notice that there are two tiny cutouts in the display, housing two separate selfie cameras. On the back, we have a square camera module with 4 different sensors — a trend that seems to be kicking off in 2020.

Moto G 5G Plus cameras and hardware

So, what are all these lenses on the Moto G 5G Plus for? The front houses a main selfie and an ultra-wide selfie cameras. The main shooter has a 16 MP sensor, which can use quad pixel binning to group pixels stacks of 4 to greatly improve light collected in low-light scenarios. This will also result in a selfie with 4 MP resolution. The secondary selfie camera has an ultra-wide lens, allowing you to — quote — “fit 4x more of your friends in the frame”. It seems “four” is the running theme here.

On the back, we have… four cameras. A 48 MP main sensor, which bins pixels in packs of 4 and churns out 12 MP photos with — presumably — better low light performance; another ultra-wide camera — with an 8 MP sensor — that allows you to fit “4x times” more stuff in the frame; a depth sensor for Portrait Mode-like photos; and a 5 MP macro camera. Yes, it seems the macro trend is real and Motorola isn’t one to skip it.


The Moto G 5G Plus is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 processor, which is paired with the Snapdragon X52 modem, making the phone 5G ready.

The lights are kept on by a rather large 5,000 mAh battery — Motorola claims that a two-day life on a single charge is possible with this beast. We are inclined to believe this, but — of course — how much you stream over 5G and how many games you play will factor into all of this. Even if you forget to charge nightly or get carried off playing PUBG on your phone, there’s a 20 W TurboPower charger in the box.

The Moto G 5G Plus will come in two variants — 64 GB storage and 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB storage with 6 GB of RAM.

Moto G 5G Plus software and features

The Moto phones are known for not piling too many features on top of Android to slow it down (and loved for that by many). The Moto G 5G Plus will make no exception — Motorola makes a specific point to mention how committed it is to sticking with the Google services and not adding extra bloat to its phones.

Of course, there are a few Moto features, which we know from before — small details like gestures and navigation customization, which allows users to simplify their smartphone usage. The Moto G 5G Plus will come with a My UX app, which gives some more control over settings for video, games, and music. Additionally, users will now be able to customize their own themes by mixing up fonts, colors, and icon shapes to their desire.