Moto G8 Power Review
Fast Facts
Dimensions: 155.95 x 75.84 x 9.63mm
Weight: 197g
Operating System: Android 10
CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 Octa-Core Processor
GPU: Adreno 610 Graphics Processor
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 64GB of internal storage. Can be expanded with a MicroSD Card
Battery: 5000mAh & 15W TurboPower Charging
What’s in the box?
The Moto G8 Power comes bundled with the bare necessities to get you started, a USB-C Cable, 18W Fast Charger and a somewhat pleasantly surprising flexible clear gel case to protect the device.
Design
The Moto G8 Power has a simple, somewhat unremarkable design. It’s bezel-free with a slightly larger chin at the bottom and a hole punch camera to the top left. It lacks the premium materials in its build that you often find its flagship devices, yet for a paltry £219 RRP, it feels robust enough. It sports a 6000 series aluminium frame, with a polycarbonate rear and a glass front. The plastic on the back is a total fingerprint magnet so you may want to pop a microfibre cloth in your pocket for those frequent wipe downs.
The rear of the device has a subtle curve to the edges, which helped to grip the phone and never felt unbalanced in hand.
Packed into the body of this phone, you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack (still clinging on), a USB-C charge port, Dual-sim support, Micro SD expansion and Dual Stereo Speakers that are Dolby tuned (and rather good I might add).
Display & Sound
The display weighs in at 6.4” and incorporates Lenovos Max Vision display technology. It’s an FHD+ IPS LCD Panel, so no OLED deep blacks in sight, but a nice visual experience and an 88% screen to body ratio to boot. The display is a notch-free experience, which is a joy, particularly while gaming and watching movies. Zero distractions, just an immersive experience. The colour palette is exceptionally bright and colours pop, contrast is to the max! With no HDR on show, this is likely the best course to create a visually appealing experience for the user. Authentic? No. A treat for the eyes? Absolutely.
Talking of movie watching, the Dual Stereo speakers on show in the Moto G8 Power are LOUD. They are Dolby tuned and create a sense of space that felt beyond its price bracket. The sound was clear and distortion-free through all of my testing. A big thumbs up from me!
Cameras
Yes, 4 of them, and that’s just on the rear. The Moto G8 Power includes a 16 Megapixel primary lens, an 8 Megapixel Ultra-wide, an 8 Megapixel telephoto an a 2 Megapixel depth sensor. There’s an awful lot of combinations for how all of these cameras can work harmoniously and be put to work, and for the price bracket, on paper its fantastic value for money.
The primary camera used for the clown photo delivers a cool and naturally balanced image; colours appear true to life and don’t suffer from saturation and overblown contrast. As such detail is clear and shot into a sunny day, do a great job on composition.
The low-light performance is serviceable but does introduce some artefacts and blur into darker spots. The wide-angle lens does a really good job of including a significant amount of additional detail to the shot with minimal amounts of stretching and curling around the edges (something I’ve seen far more expensive wide angles do a poor job with).
Battery
Here’s where it gets very interesting. As its namesake suggests the Moto G8 Power packs a whopping battery, coming in at 5000mAh with a low power LCD, and Qualcomm’s most energy efficient Snapdragon processor it advertises up to 3 days battery life. I don’t think anyone’s had three days of battery life since the Nokia 3210.
Yet here we are, and in my testing, it’s entirely true. At this precise moment, I have 29% battery life, and it was last fully charged 2.5 days ago. It has had 14-hour screen on time, including 10 hours of YouTube video streaming over Wi-Fi. That’s an unbelievable performance from any device, and I’m comfortable, it will last at least two days for even the heaviest of users, it is battery life wizardry!
OS
Motorola and now Lenovo has always kept a near-stock Android OS experience, and the G8 Power is no exception. It incorporates a clean version of Android 10, with minimal additions from Moto, just a few navigation optimisations but otherwise a smooth experience all round. The software itself runs smoothly on the silicon provided with the slightest of judder now and then as you load into the multitasking switcher. Still, otherwise, it feels incredibly well optimised to the hardware.
Performance
The Snapdragon 665 chip drives the Moto G8 Power alongside 4GB ram. It’s typically touted as their mid-range processor, but it held up really well to anything thrown at it in my usage. The RAM meant that there wasn’t much of a window for apps to sit in multitasking before the system nuked them. App wise nothings crashed, nothings lagged or slowed down.
For gaming, it held up superbly to Call of Duty and PUBG, two massive resource-intensive games, and both requiring adequate frame and render rates to remain competitive with other online players. I have to say, I was impressed with the performance, and unless you had a flagship sat side by side, I don’t feel any typical user would feel any noticeable impact to how it performs.
Conclusion
Price to performance, the Moto G8 Power is fantastic value for money. When you consider that for most people the three most important things you would want from an Android Smartphone is a great screen, great battery life and great performance, the G8 Power ticks all of these boxes. Its simple design, smart optimisations and with battery life sponsored by Berocca its resulted in my favourite android experience for a while and a device I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone in the sub-£300 price bracket.
Rapid Reviews Rating
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