Hot take: There are not enough affordable phones on offer in the smartphone market, particularly in the North American Market. The biggest brands’ prices are considerable, even for the base units, and many brands offering a budget phone are the epitome of “you get what you pay for.” Motorola’s moto g – 2026 smartphone claims great performance and battery life for less than $200 USD. Even if it doesn’t live up to a flagship, is it worth it?
The moto g – 2026 smartphone came packaged with only a USB cable and SIM ejection tool and the phone. The smartphone sports a leather-feeling (but not leather, to be clear) backing that is scratch resistant and IP52 water repellant and even covers up the camera bump on the rear of the phone. It has a sizeable and uneven bezel around the 6.7” display. The latest model sports a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 screen, which is a considerably older generation of screen and won’t offer the same scratch resistance as newer models.
The specs on the moto g – 2026 smartphone are interesting because, for a budget phone, some line up with my expectations and some things are offered that don’t come with even the newest phones. The 2026 model is running on Android 16 with a MediaTek Dimensity 6300 processor with an Arm Mali-G57 GPU, hardware that ranks in the low to mid-range level.
The moto g – 2026 smartphone comes with 4GB of RAM, that is expandable to 12GB with RAM Boost, using your storage as virtual RAM, which may be problematic with the phone at its base, offering only 128GB of built-in storage. What the moto g offers that none of the major brands have offered for years, which is expandable storage via a micro SD card (up to 1TB), which is a fantastic way for the phone to limit the number of versions it manufactures, saving more money on production.
“The specs on the moto g – 2026 smartphone are interesting because, for a budget phone, some line up with my expectations and some things are offered that don’t come with even the newest phones.”
Another thing offered on the moto g – 2026 smartphone that you don’t see as much of is the inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack. While the need for wired headphones has dropped off significantly, the ability to use them, especially if you are buying this as your kid’s first phone for example, is most welcome.
The moto g – 2026 smartphone has a 50MP f/1.8 main camera with a 2MP f/2.5 macro camera and a 32MP f/2.2 selfie camera. The phone actually takes really nice pictures. The detail is there as is the colour accuracy. The selfie I took looked great with excellent colour and a beautiful bokeh. The sharpness went a little hard on my pores and the natural lines on my face, so the quality is good for the phone and maybe a little hard on the ego if you hit a certain age. I truly was impressed by the photo quality that I saw in the moto g.
Video on the moto g – 2026 smartphone is… fine. The main camera and selfie camera captures video at 1080p/30fps while the macro camera captures at 720p/30fps. If you’re just taking video to take video or make very simple social media content, then sure, you can get away with this. But if you want to take video that you can look back on on your TV, or you plan on using it for vlogging, then a budget phone is not the way to go.
Gaming is also a dicey proposition on the moto g – 2026 smartphone. I’m not saying you can’t game, but it is certainly not a “gaming phone.” The 120Hz refresh rate offered on this model is really a waste, because the internals don’t provide the performance needed to game at that framerate and you can only shoot video at a quarter of that framerate, so it really only comes in handy for smooth scrolling through your menus. You can play most popular games in the Play Store, but the resource-heavy titles will grind the moto g to a halt.
The proof of its performance is in the benchmarks, where the moto g – 2026 smartphone scored a dismal 674 on Geekbench 6’s single-core benchmark, scoring just above the four year old Samsung Galaxy A22 5G, a multi-core score of 1445, just above the eight year old Oneplus 5T, and an OpenCL GPU score of 1440, less than 10% of the Samsung Galaxy S 24’s score and in line with another eight year old phone, the Sony Xperia XZ1.
Where the moto g – 2026 smartphone does quite well, though is in battery life. The phone’s 5200mAh battery combined with the smaller amount of resources that virtually everything on the phone needs gives this smartphone a fairly simple two days of life before charging. In the last 6 hours since charging the phone, I have only lost 4% of the battery while using it normally.
“Where the moto g – 2026 smartphone does quite well, though is in battery life.”
So at $199.99 USD for the moto g – 2026 smartphone, is the price a fair trade for what you lose in terms of features and performance? I would say that the answer is a qualified yes. This phone isn’t going to be for most people. It can make for a good stop-gap phone if your phone dies and you are between contracts. You’ll probably pay more for a refurbished phone that you are just planning to replace anyway. This phone can give you most of what you need in the meantime.
Who this phone is an amazing buy for are people who don’t take anything about their phone too seriously. Serious photographer/videographers can skip this, but someone who is happy to have a camera that can take a pretty selfie for Instagram will be happy. Serious gamers can look elsewhere, but someone who is knocking out some Angry Birds levels on their commute should have no issues. This truly could be an ideal first phone for your kids or for anyone who just wants a phone that works and does what it tells you it can do, which this is.
While I am sure there are people wondering why I would have been so hard on the moto g – 2026 smartphone over the course of the review and still have people to recommend it to, it’s because advertising can be slick and tell you that you are getting a lot more for a lot less. What you are really getting in this phone, however, is less than most brands offer, for a lot less money, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just not a revolutionary phone and that needs to be well understood before the price tag lures you in like a siren.
