Is the Motorola G9 play a good phone? - Moto G9 Play review
Low cost, high cost
OUR VERDICT
The Moto G9 Play is an affordable and durable Android phone without major problems that will be superior to the Xiaomi and Realme alternatives in terms of screen sharpness.
FOR
Good talker
Low price
Useful night scene mode
VS
Some rivals have sharper screens
No 5G (obviously)
Plastic assembly
Two minutes
The Moto G9 Play is a budget Android phone. It is quite difficult to overcome if you completely ignore Chinese brands such as Realme and Xiaomi, which are relatively new in Western countries.
You get a large screen, good memory, solid overall performance, and a camera that can produce good images in some situations.
A couple of small additions push the Moto G9 Play from an acceptable Android phone to a pretty good one. It has a smart Night Camera mode and a louder speaker than usual.
Sure, other Moto G series phones have stereo speakers instead of the mono speakers used here, but the Moto G9 Play doesn't really fall behind on anything at four times the price in terms of midrange volume and amplitude.
As for the night mode mentioned above, this is Motorola's low-light night vision camera mode, which is usually only available on slightly higher-end Moto phones. This dramatically improves night photography, even if it doesn't actually improve performance in places other than the entry-level camera.
This phone is much better than the Nokia 3.4 we reviewed recently, bringing the performance to a level we are happy with. And you get more for your money here than you get with the Samsung Galaxy a21s.
The competition heats up if you look deeper at the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9. It offers comparable hardware in many respects, but has a full HD + display instead of 720p.
We did not let the Moto G9 Power want more pixels, but full HD + screens always look better.
Price and availability of Moto G9 Play
It is now in the UK and Australia.
He is unlikely to come to the US. UU.
It costs £ 159.99 / AU $ 299 (approximately aproximadamente 210)
The Moto G9 Play is currently available in the UK and Australia, where it costs £ 159.99 / AU 2 299 (approximately $ 220). This makes it the cheapest of the G9 line so far, just below the power of the Moto G9.
The situation in the U.S. UU. It's a little complicated for this phone. The company introduced its Moto G Play at CES 2021 and it seems to be similar to the Moto G9 Play, but it's not exactly the same.
This phone has a lower specification than the Moto G9 Play, but costs $ 169 (around £ 124 / AU $ 217). In the near future, we plan to do a separate Moto G Play Review for those in the US. UU.
Design
Plastic hoops and bottom
It looks much more expensive than from a distance
The Moto G9 Play is the cheapest you can buy a phone that still looks like it could cost $ 400 / £ 300 or more. At least from afar.
It has a large screen, an elegant teardrop notch, and a design that mimics the curved rear glass and aluminum sides used in many more expensive phones. However, the back and sides are plastic. Even the side buttons are plastic.
The screen covers and camera body are glass, but that's your luck.
Do you want glass or metal? The Xiaomi Redmi Note and OnePlus 9 Pro Nord is one of the best phones available with a glass substrate. But they are much more expensive. The Moto G9 Play feels exactly as we expect for the price, but there are some serious complaints if judged in the proper context.
This phone has a convenient headphone jack, USB-C charging and a reliable rear fingerprint scanner. It takes about half a second to unlock the Moto G9 Play. This is a bit slower than some, but we noticed this by actively analyzing the phone rather than interacting with it like a normal user.
Motorola also uses a square shape for the phone's rear cameras, as in the iPhone 12 Pro. The Moto G9 Play doesn't look as sophisticated, which isn't surprising, but it's another element that can fool the viewer into thinking the phone is worth more.
The Moto G9 Play also has a water-repellent nano-coating under the rear panel. That doesn't mean you should start dipping your phone in water, but it does mean you're better prepared for the elements than many cheap phones.
Display
6.5-inch 720 x 1600 screen
Good quality, but you can get sharper displays for similar money
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The Moto G9 Play features a 6.5-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 720 x 1600. It doesn't have much high-end features, but good, cheap screens like this one now bring you closer to the experience of a more expensive phone.
The color is good, but not super-saturated, even if you use a "saturated" color profile. Moto G9 Play doesn't support HDR video, but whisper, HDR is useless on phones anyway.
There is no drastic change in the image on the screen at extreme angles, but some loss of brightness, which is a sign of a solid display panel. And we measured the maximum brightness of exactly 400 cd / m with the SpyderX colorimeter.
That's only about a third of the brightness of a phone like the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, but still enough to keep the phone reasonably clean outside. We just want there to be a little more when taking photos in bright conditions.
The Moto G9 Play has a great screen. However, we're already pretty used to 90 Hz and 120 Hz displays, and the transition to a 60 Hz screen with a decidedly sub-OLED pixel response time took a day or two.
But now, more than a week later? In fact, we didn't notice the slightly outdated handling of scrollable menus. Given the price of the Moto G9 Play, we are happy with the quality of the phone's display.
Its large size is also a big advantage for almost all games and apps. Can you do better for the same money? Yes, Xiaomi sells several phones for similar money with higher-resolution displays. The Xiaomi Redmi 9 and Redmi Note 9 have 1080p displays, just like the Realme 6.
This higher pixel density makes the text sharper.
Camera
A camera with three lenses, but only one field of view
Useful Night mode
The Moto G9 Play has three rear cameras, but it's like a single-camera phone because you only have one field of view. There is no zoom or ultra-wide.
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Two additional cameras are 2-megapixel macro photography and 2-megapixel depth for portrait mode. As usual, a low-resolution macro is hardly worth using. And the depth assist is so simple that it can't handle complex scenes, which leads to weird patterns of blurred and non-blurred areas if your subject is complex or too distant.
However, even though these two additional chambers may be filling up, we're glad that the depth help is here. This allows the Moto G9 Play to make blurry background images of any object, not just people (where depth can be calculated using face and object recognition). Some phones use smart methods to do this without a depth camera, but the cheapest ones usually don't.
Portrait mode can create striking images in the right situation.
For fans of statistics: The Moto G9 Play's bonus cameras use OmniVision OV02B f / 2.4 sensors. And the main one is the 48MP f / 1.7 Samsung GM1 used in many cheap phones, including the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 and TCL 10L.
It's not a bright sensor. It offers less detail and dynamic range than the rival Sony IMX586 used in a bunch of high-end phones.
The attributes present here, typical of phones for the price, include photos taken under interior lighting that look soft and desaturated, while just at the pixel level, images tend to look noisy or processed. However, considering the price, the Moto G9 Play works quite well.
In most situations, it makes extensive use of HDR to remove shadows while retaining the details of the backlight. And although many of our photos have a slight purple / red bias, The Color of the Moto G9 Play is realistic enough when shooting in daylight.
There is even a pleasant surprise for evening photos. Generally, the cheapest phones in the Moto G series do not have Motorola's night vision shooting mode, but the Moto G9 Play does.
This is a Standard Modern night shooting feature that takes a few seconds to combine multiple shots and improve the brightness, clarity and detail of images. Here it has a real effect.
Of course, the night images of the Moto G9 Play will not bother those who have a solid mid-range phone. But it is a sign that there has been a trickle towards this important function, which was previously only available on a few ultra-expensive mobile phones.
We recommend using night vision for indoor shots of Immobile subjects, as it more or less corrects the dim and opaque appearance you would otherwise get.
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The Moto G9 Play has an entry-level camera in general, but with a little knowledge, you can take some nice photos.
However, the video is strictly limited. You can only shoot at resolutions up to 1080p, 60 fps. And we recommend using 1080p, 30 fps most of the time, as this is the best quality mode that also allows electronic image stabilization (EIS). The footage looks spasmodic and ugly without EIS.
The front camera has an 8MP f / 2.2 sensor, which seems to blur fine details with non-Good lighting. But we think it's a perfectly acceptable selfie camera at this level. The Moto G9 Play also has a portrait mode for selfies, which is a lovely touch.
This blurs the background, performing a mental trick that makes your face look even sharper.
Specifications and performance
Snapdragon 662 Chipset and 4 GB of RAM
Solid gaming performance for the money
The Moto G9 Play uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 chipset with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. That's a good amount of storage, enough RAM to keep Android 10 software satisfied, and a solid basic processor.
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In everyday use, we notice that apps take a little longer to download than on a teléfono 400 / £ 300 phone and sometimes there is a partial pause while navigating to different parts of the interface. But there are almost no delays that make you feel like you have to wait for the phone to reach you. This is the bad thing we're trying to avoid.
What is the result? The Moto G9 Play is perfectly nice to use, and we were in no hurry to switch to another phone when the review period came to an end. For such an affordable phone, that's a solid backup.
It has a score of 1.376 on Geekbench 5, which is much better than the ~ 900 you will see on the Moto G8 Play. This phone uses the same processor as the Moto G9 Power.
Games are also not a problem. Fortnite runs at an acceptable speed of 20-30 fps, and only usually drops below 20 fps when dropped from a shuttle or takes off into the sky on a plane. PUBG works well with "balanced" graphics and still can't use the top modes.
Asphalt 9's frame rates are inconsistent as they are on most affordable phones, and it doesn't look as pretty as it could be on a more expensive mobile phone, but it's still fun.
The Moto G9 Play is a solid gaming phone. But for uncompromising gameplay, consider upgrading to the Snapdragon 7 Series processor. Realme X50 5G is one of the best and cheapest. It has better GPU, clearer screen and 5G.
The G9 Play software is exactly what we expect from a motorcycle phone. It's not standard Android, but it's so clean and simple that you can mistake it for one.
Motorola makes some gesture combinations, but a look is perhaps the most useful addition. This is the screen that appears when
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