In a highly competitive smartphone market, Motorola has seen it all and continues to innovate and stay competitive. Now it’s been a little while since we last reviewed a Motorola. This review focuses on the motorola Moto G15, which is available for just under £140. This phone targets those with a small budget who want a phone that ticks the boxes without hitting them in the wallet. 

First Impressions

The Moto G15 offers you all the basics for any phone, such as a large battery, a sharp display an adequate camera, and the design is not too bad either. All for a budget-friendly price tag. 

Design & Build

Motorola has experience making quality handsets at cheap prices then other brands, and the G-Series has been the go-to for budget-friendly handsets. The G15 does exactly what you expect decent build, a classy-looking handset that, like it should, costs more than the £140 price tag. Motorola has made the handset look more expensive, like the Moto G85. The sign’s it’s a budget-friendly device is the bulging camera module. That said, the use of faux-leather material gives you grip and no sign of fingerprints. At this price point, it’s hard to find fault apart from a very basic camera, but more on that in the review. 

The review sample we were sent was the Gravity Grey, but it also comes in Iguana Green and Sunset Orange, which are both very eye-catching. Let’s start with the front of the phone, you get a large display bezel, which is another sign of the budget-friendly offering; however, it’s better than the teardrop solution that some cheap phones offer. 

 

The phone is an average size, measuring 165.67 x 75.98 x 8.17mm with a weight of 190g and a plastic build, making it tricky to flex or creak and can even handle dust and water damage thanks to the IP54 rating.  This makes the G15 value for money. 

Screen & speakers

When considering buying a phone is the screen and display and the Moto G15 the screen is an LCD panel compared to an OLED display you will find on phones over the £200 mark. 

You notice the use of LCD over OLED is that the media content looks somewhat washed out here, with murky greys taking the place of deep blacks and a relative lack of contrast. It’s not all bad. Motorola has been able to implement an ambient display of sorts, so you can see the time and any notification indicators. This allows you to see any notification when you tap on the screen, but it’s achieved by making the display dim. 

When you look at the screen, it comes with a large screen 6.72 inches and the display is 1080 x 2400 FHD+, which is good as a phone under £150 would not normally have. When it comes to brightness, it comes with an extra brightness option, lending even more on a summer’s day. 

The only negative you will notice is the 60Hz refresh rate, which could be a deal breaker but for a phone in this price point its not a surprise also with the limited function of the G15 processor 60Hz feels just right. 

We next discuss the audio and its strengths, You get a proper stereo speaker along with support for Dolby Atmos and a boost for the bass. If you want to hook them to wired headphones there is a 5.5mm jack if thats your pererence. 

Battery & Charging  

Motorola has given the Moto G15 a 5200mAh cell. If you consider low powered processor and the 60Hz offers you 2 days of usage with light to moderate usage. In a day of moderate usage of 3 hours of screen time, you will be left with 60%. This will give you enough to sustain you through the 2nd day. The phone supports 18W wired charging, but does not come with a wire charger but it comes with a USB-C port, which most people have a USB-C charging cable. When it’s time to charge, it comes from zero to 100% in just over 1 hour and 45 minutes. 

Performance

Motorola has worked hard, even with a limited budget, to successfully give you a solid approximation.  The G15 chipsets contribute a fair amount to the bill of materials. The G15 comes with a MediaTex Helio G81. The Moto G15 will be a painful experience for anyone used to something more. Switching from the home screen and menus comes with a noticeable amount of stutter when loading media-rich content. Accessing websites and jumping to the camera uses Motorola’s double twist seems to take an age.

 

Put this phone through its paces and benchmarks, such as Geekbench 6 multi-core result that falls 50% short of even the Samsung Galaxy A16. The GPU performance is even worse with the Moto G15, coming in at half the frame rate of the Galaxy A16 5G. 

Software & Features

 

The Motorola software is famously lightweight and refined, and Android is permitted with Android 15. Menus and icons are Google-intended, but there are some unwelcome signs of intervention from Moto G15’s new apps service foisted upon you. I was not happy with the bombarding me with notifications to try the New Apps from set-up, add this to a bunch of regular bloat, such as Booking.com, Facebook, this isn’t quite the super-clean UI we once knew. Motoola’s UI remains one of the nicest to use in the entire budget phone space. 

Camera Review

Welcome to my camera segment of the Moto G15 review, as you all know from past reviews, I am a photographer and phonetographer, all my reviews are impartial, honest and the photo’s that I take for reviews are photos that we are likely to take every day, unedited and straight from the camera. So that’s me.
Now let’s get down to business and let’s look at one of the latest offerings from Motorola, the G15.. So first of, spec wise what does this phone pack in terms of camera specs, so the main camera hits the mark with 50MP wide and only a 5MP ultra wide, 1080p video recording capabilities with a rather low 30 frames per second, the selfie camera comes in at only 8MP! the phone also holds Duel-LED flash, HDR and panorama.  So in terms of specs, it’s not bad at all for the price point of the phone. In terms of functionality, it’s got the settings that we now come to expect on Android software, so what does it have?
  • Slow motion function
  • Video
  • Photo
  • Portrait
  • Pro
  • Panorama, time lapse and Night vision in more settings
  • QR Code (more on this feature later)
So as you can see, the phone comes with several settings that, as I said, we come to expect now from Android software. This phone also comes with QR reader, so what this is, it just makes it easier to read and scan QR codes, we seem to be going more and more on QR codes and even instructions now, I bought a bit of tech recently and the instructions were on a QR code and not in the box, so QR reader is a nice little touch.  Using QR codes on my iPhone can be a battle, but on this phone, no issues at all..
Using the camera itself and the functions was quite smooth with very little lag swiping out between settings, the zoom on “Photo” mode only hits a 6x zoom, and a 0.5 wide angle, which seems to be the norm for wide angle. The zoom in Pro mode was also that of a 6x zoom. In Pro mode, you can do the usual fettling with camera settings such as white balance, ISO, etc. Back to Zoom, the only downside is you seem to get a little bit of camera shake, but once you have taken the photo, the software will automatically sharpen the image, so it’s not a biggie at all.
To be honest, with the price point of the phone itself, spec-wise wise it’s quite loaded and Motorola have kept this in mind as nowadays a phone is more about the camera than anything else. Sure, if you want to make your photos stand out and give that big hit on social media such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, then I would recommend one of the free-to-download photo editing suites such as Snapseed, which is free on the Google Play store.
First up, we have Pro mode. Now with Pro, it’s basically having a DSLR camera in your pocket. The performance on this phone is pretty good overall photos, and gets the colours and tones quite well.

Zoom – when zooming, some cameras give off a bit of camera shake and can be hard to get a desired result, however, on this phone, all is okay, a little bit of camera shake but as its only a 6x zoom it wasn’t that bad and picture quality wise pretty good overall.
Normal point and click – This phone, given its price point, performed well and brought out the picture with a nice, clear, crisp result with good colours, clarity and tone to the picture. I have to say I was a little bit impressed.
The all-important portrait shot, now I love shooting in portrait. I love the subtle background blur and the crisp result of the subject you’re shooting, as always, my best friend and model was the subject, and the picture was really good and came out hitting the desired outcome.

The most important of.. selfie.. Now with this phone, you can shoot a straight-up selfie or a selfie with portrait. Both photos exceeded expectations and came out with a good quality finish.

 In conclusion, what do I make of this camera? You know what, this day in age you get what you pay for, but again, Motorola seem to have kept the end user in mind on this device and made sure that the camera works well, it’s bold and takes some good photos. There really are no negatives or gripes, okay, it’s not got the capabilities of Samsung in terms of zoom, but it’s a decent bit of kit.
Overall, again because of the price point, I have to give this 5/5 BUT that is due to the price point if the cost was more north upwards then maybe it would be a different conversation but Motorola have come up trumps and put the camera at the focus and heart of this little device.
Thanks for reading my camera segment, and to see more of my “Phonetography”, head over to Instagram @lifesizephotography. I will see you all at the next one.

Verdict

The Moto G15 is not the best phone on the market, but it’s not all bad. In fact, with its a pleasant design, a clean UI, a sharp screen, and decent battery life. The performance is distinctly sub-par, the display and the fact that you use the OLED. There are a couple of annoying elements to Motorola’s usually well-judged software, and poor updates; meanwhile, the camera and battery life are perfectly adequate, but certainly nothing to write home about. 

Overall, the Moto G15 shows that spending less than £200 on a brand new phone, this device is fine if you’re looking for a basic device, but if you’re looking for good value, you’d be better of buying a more premium phone instead.

Product Rating    

Design: 4.0 out of 5.0 stars

Features: 3.0 out of 5.0 stars

Audio Quality: 3.0 out of 5.0 stars

Battery life: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars5.0

Value for Money: 3.0 out of 5.0 stars

 

Overall ranking: 3.6 out of 5.0 stars – 3.6 stars

The Moto g15 smartphone is available from Amazon for £108

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