Thought you’d had enough of Motorola smartphones? Following the Moto One Macro, Motorola is back with yet another option in the mid-range segment. The Moto G8 Plus, part of the legendary Moto G line up that has been central to the company’s mid-range strategy, brings some much-needed feature updates as well as a gimmick or two up its sleeve.
Will that be enough to challenge the wide range of excellent options available to consumers? We try to find out in the Android Authority review of the Motorola Moto G8 Plus review.
The Moto G8 Plus brings sweeping changes in terms of design, internals, and the camera modules. Building on the design legacy of the Moto G7, the phone manages to push forward in all the right ways and tick all the checkmarks for current-gen mid-rangers.
That said, the competition hasn’t been sitting quietly either. Phones like the Redmi Note 8 Pro have pushed what the definition of a mid-range smartphone should be. Between the high-quality imaging, excellent performance, and top-notch build quality, it is hard to overlook the Redmi hardware.
There are also several options from Realme and Nokia, amongst others, that offer a boatload of hardware features, and in the case of the latter, even stock Android.
In other words, Motorola has a lot to prove here.
The Moto G8 Plus ships with a pretty standard package that includes a 15W fast charger and USB-C cable. You’ll find a SIM ejector tool and quick start guides. The included TPU case isn’t of the highest quality, but you’ll definitely need it to prevent fingerprints and smudges. Given the lack of Gorilla Glass or a similar solution, it would have been nice to see a screen protector thrown in the box as well. There are no headphones.
The 6.3-inch display takes center stage on the Moto G8 Plus. Equipped with a waterdrop notch, it keeps up with current design trends. The bezels on the sides of the screen are reasonably sized and don’t detract from the user experience. Even the chin isn’t particularly big. The large earpiece grille at the top has me concerned about water damage, but Motorola claims that the phone has a water repellant design so you should be alright. The phone sports a nano-coating layer which should make it resistant to splashes, but you’ll want to be careful around the pool. IP68 certification, it seems, is still reserved for higher-end devices.
The tactile feedback of the buttons on the side isn’t quite the best. The volume rocker and power button sit on the right side of the phone, and there’s an inherent wobble to them. The buttons have mushy feedback that isn’t very reassuring. The headphone jack is placed on top of the phone, while the USB-C port and speaker grille are placed on the bottom.
I have mixed opinions about the quality of materials used in the construction of the Moto G8 Plus. On one hand, the polycarbonate feels strong enough to take a beating. The phone’s heft comes across as reassuringly solid. However, the plastic is a fingerprint magnet and definitely cheapens the look of the phone. The black/purple colorway of our review unit looks smart, as long you are able to keep it free of fingerprints. It just doesn’t feel premium in the hand.
You’ll want to invest in a quality case if you plan to buy a Moto G8 Plus, if only to prevent fingerprints.
Motorola placed a fingerprint scanner in the middle of the rear panel and it has the classic Motorola batwing logo in the center. The scanner was as fast as anything else on the market, and unlocking the phone is fast and hassle-free. The phone supports NFC as well, which comes in handy when trying to quickly pair with headphones and wireless speakers.
The first thing you notice about the display of the Moto G8 Plus is the extreme skew towards blue tones. The color accuracy is way off, and with peak brightness levels of about 450nits, outdoor visibility in bright sunlight can be challenging.
Switching over to the natural color profile compensates for the blue tint to a degree. Beyond that, this is a strictly run-of-the-mill panel. There is also a bit of color shift when viewed at extreme angles. Black levels aren’t that deep due to the LCD tech, so if you prefer watching darker content, you might not enjoy it much here.
The Moto G8 Plus is powered by a Snapdragon 665 chipset, which is a minor update to the Snapdragon 660 platform. The chipset architecture is based on the 11nm process, compared to the 14nm process of the Snapdragon 660. This should make the chipset a bit more frugal. Elsewhere, the GPU received an upgrade, too. Interestingly, this is the same chipset powering the Redmi Note 8 and the Realme 5. Both these phones retail at much lower price points.
4GB of RAM is good enough for day-to-day use, but heavy multitaskers might miss having an option for more.
Performance on the Moto G8 Plus is aided by the stripped-down, clean Android build. In my time with the phone, I did not observe any noticeable lag or deal-breaking issues with performance. Daily use of music streaming apps, email, and social media presented no challenge for the phone. For that matter, the 4GB of RAM proved to be sufficient. However, if you plan to hold on to your hardware for a year or longer, this could become a multitasking pain point down the road. Competing devices offer options with up to 8GB of RAM, and it would have served Motorola well to create a 6GB or 8GB variant on the G8 Plus for performance seekers.
I tested out popular games such as PUBG on the phone and the performance was satisfactory. Pushing graphics to high settings definitely puts a strain on the hardware, and you can easily see a drop in frame rates. The phone heats with extended gaming, too, but never to the point of being uncomfortable.
Benchmark results were exactly in line with what we expected from the Snapdragon 665 chipset. The AnTuTu score of 167,860 points is slightly behind the 170,973 scored by the Redmi Note 8. The Moto G8 Plus, however, pulls ahead in the 3DMark benchmark. Regardless, the overall performance is well behind the Redmi Note 8 Pro, which is the real competitor for the Moto G8 Plus.
While we’re starting to see mid-range phones move towards 5,000mAh batteries, the 4,000mAh cell on the Moto G8 Plus is perfectly good for all-day use. The phone ships with a 15W USB-C charger in the box, which allows you to top it off pretty quickly. A full charge from empty took just 140 minutes, which is in line with the charging speeds of the Redmi Note 8.
The included 15W charger tops-off the phone in a little over 2 hours.
My daily activities include heavy use of Slack, email, and social media applications, as well as a few hours streaming music. By the end of the day, the G8 Plus would be down to about 20%, which is reasonable. Extended gaming will, of course, put a bigger dent in battery longevity.
We ran our standard battery tests on the Moto G8 Plus. It managed just under 14 hours of continuous playback in our video loop test. Similarly, continuous web browsing results clocked in at over 15 hours.
My favorite aspect of Motorola hardware is the near-stock build of Android. Other than the Motorola app, which adds a suite of actions and gestures, the phone is free from extraneous additions. The phone ships with Android 9 Pie out of the box and Motorola has promised an update to Android 10 soon.
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