Motorola introduced its new budget smartphone, the new Motorola Moto G Play 2024. The Moto G Play is Motorola’s entry-level budget smartphone. If you’re just looking for an affordable Android device for the bare essentials, this would seem kind of enticing. This year’s new 2024 Moto G Play looks to be way, way better. This is an all-new phone with a more modern design, better specs across the board. I think it might just be the entry-level Moto device that doesn’t feel like you got scammed into buying a dud, but rather a half-decent smartphone for the everyday essentials.
There are definitely a lot of specs with this phone, and I’m going to fill you in on everything else you need to know, including all the things Motorola improved from last year. So let’s review it.
Motorola Moto G Play 2024
Moto G Play Unboxing
The first thing you get is the phone itself, of course. It comes in one color, just like the previous year’s, sapphire blue. Underneath that, you get lots of paperwork, a SIM ejector tool, and a USB-A to USB-C cable for charging the phone.
Moto G Play Design
At 6.5 inches, this is still a fairly large device. The chunky black borders and bulbous bottom chin add just a bit more to its overall form factor. I think most of us are pretty much used to using something this size nowadays. But don’t let its fancy modern design and super sleek camera bump fool you, this is still an all-plastic budget build. The very minimal camera bump, though, is something I really do like. The phone now has a water-repellent design, which still doesn’t seem like an actual IP rating, but a splash here and there shouldn’t kill this thing. The only other thing of note with the design is it’s a very flat phone, no taper, no contours along the edges, but it has odd layering with the black plastic screen edge sitting over the rear housing.
On the left side, there is a SIM, SD card tray, and expandable storage. On the one hand, Motorola actually doubled the onboard storage this year for this phone, all the way up to a whopping 64GB. But yeah, you’ll still want an SD card for sure. On the right side, the volume button just above the power button, and this now doubles as your fingerprint sensor. At the bottom, the USB-C port alongside one of two speakers on this phone. The secondary speaker is within the earpiece, above the selfie camera. Around back, this is really odd, one camera lens and there is just the LED flash.
Moto G Play Display
When it comes to the viewing experience, it has a 6.5-inch display which is still just a 1600 x 720 resolution IPS LCD panel. At this size, you get some 270 pixels per inch, which just isn’t very sharp. It seems like Motorola may have increased the max brightness on the screen, which is a welcome change. There’s a Gorilla Glass 3 but the screen specs are as basic and as barebones as you can get. The only saving grace is this is a 90Hz panel, so when you enable that option in settings, you do actually get a more fluid, responsive, and visually pleasing look, and that’s not just due to the 90Hz alone. That’s also due in part because this phone actually performs better. It being so big is definitely a plus, but other than that, it’s very much still a budget display.
Performance
Motorola actually stuck a decent processor in this year’s phone. They added a little more RAM, they doubled the storage. The new Moto G Play is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 4G chipset.
This is a 4G phone, by the way. Yeah, that’s one of the reasons it’s still so cheap.
It also has 4 gigs of RAM vs 3 in last year’s device, and 64GB of storage. The hardware in this phone isn’t new or even all that powerful, but that’s how Motorola keeps the costs down. The specs are decent enough now, though, to where this phone doesn’t just clunk along barely loading the simplest of apps. It’s a perfectly fine Android experience, at least with all the basic stuff.
The bummer here is this phone is still running Android 13. Motorola isn’t one to push software updates all that quickly. So who knows if or when Android 14 will ever hit this phone, but I’ll say this, Motorola’s Android setup is so bare bones and basic that it may not even matter what version of Android this is. You get just the essentials as far as the apps and the Motorola Android experience. It’s so simple and familiar, and I think it’s something that longtime Motorola users have thoroughly enjoyed. A dual speaker setup for your out loud listening pleasure makes a triumphant return on a Motorola device here, and actually, the speakers sound kind of decent.Â
Motorola G Play Battery
The big 5000mAh battery crammed inside this phone is also something Motorola did right. All their phones have big batteries. You get 15 watt wired speeds now, so it’ll juice up a tad quicker when it finally does die, though that is the only charging option this phone has.
Moto G Play Camera
Finally, when it comes to the camera setup, this is one area where you get both a noticeable improvement in some capacity along with obvious omissions. This phone has one single camera lens around the back. It’s a vastly improved 50MP f1.8 aperture lens. There’s an equally large LED flash that pretends to be its second lens underneath. The selfie camera looks to get a bump in spec as well, to a whole 8MP. I can’t imagine even the cheapest ultra wide lens couldn’t have been added in.
Inside the camera app, you get the same set of moto shooting modes and features we’ve seen for a number of years.There’s only like 8x digital zoom. There’s no 4K video recording capabilities. It has a high resolution picture mode which presumably uses more of the quad pixel lens technology for a sharper shot. And there’s other essentials like night mode. But most of the stuff here is like some combination of filters and the illusion of features. This is just a super basic camera setup and the images you do capture with this phone match that for sure.
Moto G Play 2024 Price
The Motorola Moto G Play price is $150 in the USA.
Conclusion
The new 2024 moto g play is a completely new and totally improved device. This phone has got a fresh new design that’s modern and matches the other moto phones now. It has twice the storage, more RAM and a more powerful processor for better performance. It charges faster, the screen is maybe a little brighter, it has dual speakers which is a nice little cherry on top, and it’s cheaper too. For $150, it just might be a decent deal all things considered.
