Moto G84 5G reviewed: a budget bargain

The mid-range keeps heating up, and Moto’s G84 5G could be one of its most compelling sub-$500 phones yet. Especially at under $400.

Design

Surprisingly slim and slender, the G84 5G doesn’t look like your regular mid-range or budget phone. It looks much more premium, even if the matt plastic casing suggests otherwise.

The design is basic: a big 6.5 inch screen on the front with a punch-hole 16 megapixel front-facing camera, while the back is flat save for a camera block with two cameras.

Still, it’s pretty enough and slim enough, measuring 7.6mm thin and weighing a meagre 167 grams.

Features

The design may look fresh for a G-series Moto, but what’s inside is not, as Motorola recycles much of a spec sheet from a phone we loved previously. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but it’s pretty clear from what’s on offer that Moto is reusing what worked a couple of years ago in the G82.

We reviewed the G82 5G in 2022, and many of the specs on offer in the G84 5G are like taking a page from that phone and repurposing it for today.

As such, there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G just like in that phone, a 50 megapixel rear camera, and a variant of OLED for the screen running 120Hz. Granted, some of the features have changed slightly, such as how the screen is now pOLED and not AMOLED, measuring 6.5 inches compared to 6.6 in the G82.

There’s also one less camera in this model, with only a 50 megapixel main and 8 megapixel ultra-wide on the back, while the memory has been upgraded from 6GB RAM to 12GB and the storage doubled from 128GB to 256GB.

Some features have remained the same while others upgraded slightly. Given we thought the G82 was one of the best phones the year it was released, nailing value for buyers, this isn’t a bad decision, at least on paper.

In-use

Like most Android phones, using the Moto G84 5G is a cinch, thanks in part to just how easy to use Android is lately.

You’ll find Android 13 on the G84 5G, and while that’s not the very latest version of Android, it’s still close enough for most folks, running only one behind right now. As to how many OS updates Moto will bring, you can probably expect this to max out in the next year or two, but it’s friendly enough all the same.

Logging in offers a decent amount of biometrics, with both an in-screen fingerprint sensor and facial login, making it easy to come back to the phone from standby.

And Motorola has kept its cute little gesture tweaks, such as how you can shake the phone to launch the camera. That might seem irrelevant, but it’s one extra way to launch the camera when you want to snag a photo in a jiffy.

Performance

One area you won’t find strength in is the performance, which delivers ho-hum speed in benchmarks, but an acceptably reliable time for almost everything else.

Inside, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G feels like it should be faster, but isn’t, and really showed as we ran the benchmarks, taking what felt like a rather inordinate time to execute the tasks. The results were a bit of a giveaway, and while synthetic benchmarks aren’t everything, the vibe was “this’ll be fine for most things, but gamers won’t likely be altogether happy”.

To Motorola’s credit, however, including 12GB RAM helps to keep the performance peppy, which means apps aplenty can be opened in the background and much can be running.

Synthetic benchmarks aside, you can probably do most of what you want on the Moto G84 5G, and it’ll keep you going no problems.

There’s a similar situation for the 5G component, which can offer fast speeds, though it’s dependent on your phone, telco, and where you happen to be at the time.

Tested with the Telstra 5G network by way of Mate’s bandwidth limited connection, we found speeds as high as 240Mbps in our tests, though for the most part achieved something a more like 50Mbps to 120Mbps as we used the phone.

As always, the phrase “your mileage may vary” applies when talking about mobile download speeds, thanks to a variety of factors, including the telco you use, the place you happen to be, and how many other people are on the network downloading as many cat videos as you might be, or anything else, for that matter.

Camera

Next up is the camera, and this is one place where the G84 5G departs from its sibling in the G82 5G.

Back in 2022, Moto’s top G-series phone would nab you three rear cameras, made up of a 50 megapixel wide F1.8, an 8 megapixel ultra-wide F2.2, and a 2 megapixel macro F2.4 camera to work with.

In the G84 5G, Moto has ditched the spare macro camera, and just made the macro do that job, too. So you get two cameras as opposed to three, but with the same capabilities.

In practice, the 50 megapixel F1.8 on this model feels very familiar to what we saw on the G82, giving you acceptable images in daylight, but not so fantastic at night or when the light begins to drop.

The downside is that can mean blurry photos when the light indoors isn’t as fantastic, which makes us feel like what it was like in that first model, and the firing performance is much the same, as well.

As such, you might find the camera runs a half second or so behind when you fire the image, often giving you a slightly blurry image or not quite the one you wanted in the first place.

The good news is that the trigger time from shutter to shot doesn’t seem as poor from what we saw a year ago, and we suspect the extra shot in the arm that is twice the RAM is helping there, but the performance is about as reliable as the image quality, which is to say it’s acceptable for a budget or mid-range phone, but there are phones with better responsiveness.

Battery

While the cameras aren’t great, the battery goes the other way, delivering a solid performance of intermittent use and hitting as much as two days of battery life.

Folks who use their phone heavily and rely on the screen will see 4 to 5 hours of battery life on the Moto G84 5G, while anyone using it less with 2 to 3 can expect the roughly two days of life, charging in that second night. Tested as our daily driver, we found two full days was possible, which is virtually unheard of for most phones.

That’s a stellar result, with a minimum of a full day hours and a maximum of two, a result flagship phones often can’t achieve.

There’s no wireless charging, but the G84 5G does come with a 33W fast charger, so you can get the battery back up quickly if you need to.

Value

Combine the excellent battery life with an equally excellent price, and the Moto G84 5G makes so much sense for budget and mid-range buyers.

Priced at $399 in Australia and found at a street price closer to $349 at the time this review was written, the G84 5G feels like tremendous value for the parts on offer.

With a great price, battery life, design and screen, there’s so much going for this mid-range phone.

What needs work?

The camera isn’t amazing, that said, and could do with some tweaks, while the performance can feel like it needs the occasional bump in a positive way, as well.

We can’t give points to Motorola for originality, either, as this phone just rehashes what worked brilliantly in 2022 for a new handset. This was released last year (in 2023) and we’re just now getting to it in 2024, but we have to wonder if this year’s model will be a presumably similar G86 5G, and whether Motorola will actually change… anything major.

It’s not that Motorola necessarily needs to change anything, as this G-series phone may as well be pegged as under the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix” logic of product making.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but this is now version two of the same template, and Moto has applied tweaks, rather than updated or refreshed the phone properly. It’s the same chip, pretty much the same cameras, the same vibe. You get a new design and some more RAM and storage, but the things that weren’t fantastic in the last generation are still not brilliant here.

Oh, and there’s no wireless charging, either. That’s not a deal breaker in this price range, though, and you do get a hint of water resistance, which is something Motorola’s G-series has been missing for a while now, and is nice to see it returned.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

Another of Motorola’s excellent mid-range options, the Moto G84 5G will win fans because of the sum of its parts. It offers a solid battery and screen, yet so-so performance. But for the $399 price point, you may not care about that last one. And for the $349 we’re seeing the G84 at the time of publishing this review, you won’t care one iota.

At the price Moto has made this thing, it feels like a steal. The solid battery and screen help to make it a bargain, and the slim and slender style means it isn’t your ordinary mid-range mobile.

There are definitely things Moto could make better, but for the price, it doesn’t really matter. This is as close to a budget bargain as you can find and worth checking out.