Motorola Moto G30 Review: A solid all-rounder with some major blemishes

Now before you give me the argument that a good-looking design is not possible in this price segment, I implore you to look at recent launches like Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 10. It is priced only a fraction higher than the G30 and looks significantly better.

The main issue with the design of the G30 is that its just so plain looking. It looks like nearly every other phone in this market and that’s a bad thing when you are trying to woo a customer to buy your product.

Once again, you can make the argument that design is not everything and yeah, you would be right but in a vast sea of products where a new phone is just a stone’s throw away, does it not make sense to at least try and stand out from the crowd?

On the front of the phone is the 6.5-inch display which is flanked by three hardware buttons on the side. The buttons are not flush with surface like recent phone designs but are super consistent to use. They also feel well tuned, requiring just enough pressure to register a response. The power button has a nice tactile texture to it that gives it some grip and allows you to distinguish between the buttons without having to look at what you are pressing.

The volume rocker is solid and did not really give me any issues, other than a few times when I noticed that I was making much more of an effort to turn the volume down but its not too bad once you get used to it.

Rounding out the buttons is the dedicated assistant button which I did not really end up using much but its nice to have. The front facing camera is the usual teardrop design at the top of the display. At the back of the phone is the new 64-megapixel camera module that sits on the top left and just slightly above centre is the Motorola logo that doubles as a fingerprint scanner.

The scanner is not super responsive like the ones seen on recent releases in this category, but it does its job well-enough to not frustrate you. There is also a handy little setting that allows you to use the scanner to pull down the notification shade. It is not a new feature but its appreciated.

At the bottom of the phone is the lone speaker grill, mic, and a USB Type-C port for charging. At the top is the headphone jack flanked by another mic.

Display and performance

The Moto G30 runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 662 SoC paired with 4GB of RAM. The performance is admirably smooth for most use cases and works without a hitch most of the time.

There are some odd performance issues though, for instance, the G30 seems to have a really hard time maintaining performance with certain UPI apps like GPay or PayTm.  There is a huge chug in performance when you open GPay for instance and the app just does not run smoothly. PayTm slows down when you open the code scanner for payment taking well over a few seconds to get your interface ready.

There are occasional slowdowns in general use as well, most noticeable when switching to the task manager or waking the phone up from sleep after a while. To be clear, these are not deal breakers but are noticeably small blemishes on an otherwise smooth experience.

Gaming performance is decent, but you can hardly expect top-tier game performance at this price point. If you are mostly into casual games or play the occasional battle royale round, this should work well enough.

As is expected from a Moto phone, the UI is nearly stock Android 11, and I would wager that has something to do with how smooth the phone feels during general use. That and the 90Hz refresh rate on the screen.

The screen itself is nothing to write home about sadly. As weird as it sounds, I would rather Motorola just stick with the 60Hz refresh rate and just give us a higher resolution screen. As it stands now, the HD+ (1600*720) LCD display is not bad and is quite sharp with nice contrasts and blacks but compared to what the competition is offering for the price, it fades into the background.

The 90Hz refresh rate is nice but the phone does not really have the power to maintain that refresh rate through a sustained period of time which make the hitches (when they do happen) look considerably worse.

I also ran into a couple of strange bugs during use, noticeably there were a couple of times where the charging indicator would not go away even after I had unplugged the charger. A quick restart fixed the problem and to be fair, I have not been able to replicate this glitch since. Another bug I noticed were the animations for home screen to app transitions either crashing mid-way through or the animations not playing at all. These will obviously be improved as the phone gets more updates, but it is a little weird that they are here in the first place.

Camera

The quad camera module on the back has a 64-megapixel primary sensor along with an ultra-wide 8-megapixel sensor, a 2-megapixel macro sensor and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. Right away, you can pretty much write off the 2-megapixel macro sensor because it is really bad, and the depth sensor has no real use on this phone. The wide-angle setting also has some questionable quality output, so the real meat of the camera is the 64-megapixel primary sensor.

Thankfully, it does capture some good photos but under the right light conditions. In low light, you can pretty much forget about using this module for any decent results. While the critique seems harsh, its on par with what is available in the price segment, you are not really going to be buying a phone at this price range for pro-level photo quality.

Battery

A 5000mAh battery powers this phone and routinely gets through more than a day with a single charge. Its impressive at how easy it is for the Moto G30 to power through casual use. Things obviously change when you put the device under load but even with a ton of apps open and a couple of heavy gaming sessions, the G30 still lasted me well into the night.

Conclusion

The Moto G30 is a solid all-rounder and adds to the company’s line of decent if somewhat unremarkable phones in this series. It gets a lot of things right – its priced aggressively and beats most of the competition in the spec sheet war – but the problem is this lead will always be temporary. Given the cycle of phone releases we see each year, it will not take long before the G30 is overshadowed by something much better at the same price point.