This year Motorola has already come out with a bunch of mid-rangers in its G-series and the Moto G30 is one of the latest. Let's see what it's all about in our full review.
The Moto G30's design is fairly conventional and vanilla. It has a curved plastic unibody that tapers into the edges, ours is in the pastel sky colour scheme a gradient ranging from yellow to lavender regardless of the colours. Though it looks like glossy plastic and the material feels plasticky to the touch as well. I prefer the look and feel of the cheaper Moto G10, which is plastic too but has an interesting wavy texture.
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As we've come to expect from a Motorola mid-ranger the Moto G30 has water repellent coating on its internals. This gives you some extra peace of mind, but the Moto G30's standout feature is its high refresh rate display. Well just moderately high at 90Hz but besides that, the screen is nothing too exciting. It's a 6.5 inch LCD with a 720pixel resolution and a notch for the selfie camera with a pixel density of just 270 PPI. This isn't the sharpest screen around and if you look closely you can see some graininess here and there.
However, its contrast is remarkable the blacks here are some of the deepest. We've seen on an LCD colour aren't the most accurate here, though you can achieve some okay results. If you play with the colour settings and brightness is just average. We measured around 400 nits with the slider and a boost to nearly 470 nits in auto mode when in the bright sun.
As far as the high refresh rate goes, there are three modes to choose from 60Hz and 90Hz. Which lock in the rate and auto mode, which is adaptive it will dial back to 60 when you're not interacting with the screen. We suggest sticking to 90Hz as the penalty and battery life is pretty small.
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For audio, the Moto G30 has a single speaker on the bottom and it isn't too loud scoring an average rating on our charts. The quality is just average here too, although we did prefer the sound of the highs here over the cheaper Moto G10. You also have a 3.5mm audio jack for traditional headphones and you can listen to FM radio if you have headphones plugged in.
Waking up and unlocking the Moto G30 is done with the rear-mounted fingerprint scanner. Which is stamped with the Moto logo, it's reliable but the wake-up animation is on the slower side. There's support for NFC on the Moto G30 for your contactless payments and connectivity and storage is expandable here on top of the 64 or 128GB built-in through a hybrid not dedicated slot.
One feature you won't find just anywhere is a dedicated button for summoning the Google Assistant. It's convenient to have, I guess but is pretty high up on the phone and hard to reach the Moto G30's. The interface is near-stock android 11 with some neat Motorola features sprinkled in the Android experience here is smooth and straightforward and you get Google's newest additions, which include one-time permissions notification grouping and messaging bubbles.
If you explore the Moto app you will see pretty much all of Motorola's customizations laid out for you. You can personalize the phone with many options for icons, colours, fonts and wallpapers too. Motion gestures are kind of Moto's signature thing by karate chopping or twisting the phone, you can activate customizable shortcuts.
There are some display-related features too the attentive display disables, screen timeout, while you're looking at the phone and the peak display, which is a nice alternative to an always-on display. Showing you the time and notifications every time you pick up the phone. Behind all of these features is a Snapdragon 662 chipset, built on an 11-nanometer process. It's a relatively recent mid-range chipset. Which prioritizes power efficiency. The G30 doesn't blow away the competition performance-wise but we didn't encounter any hiccups or problems with the UI and lighter games run pretty well too.
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The Moto G30 has a large 5,000mAh battery and its life is impressive; it was able to score an endurance rating of 131 hours in our proprietary tests. This is less than battery champions like the Moto G10 but still awesome charging speed is acceptable for the class but nothing special, with the bundled 20W quick charge adapter we were able to charge from 0 to 32 per cent in half an hour.
Now onto the Moto G30's cameras, there's a 64 megapixel quad rear main camera, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera, a 2-megapixel macro camera and a depth sensor. what's weird about this camera, is how it handles resolution? The selector and settings let you switch between 16 and 11 megapixels for some reason, across both the main and ultra-wide cameras so you can't shoot in the ultrawide's native 8-megapixel resolution.
Photos from the main camera come out at 16 megapixels by default and they are overall very good. There's a lot of fine detail with natural-looking textures, nice contrast lively colours and excellent dynamic range. Portraits are taken with the help of the depth sensor and these look good with competent subject detection and convincing bokeh. Even around busy looking hair, the results are decent. Like I mentioned earlier the G30's 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera can't shoot in its native resolution. We opted for 16 megapixels because the resolution setting is shared with the main cam. The photos are rather soft it's true but they're not bad for the class. You get an excellent dynamic range and the distortion correction is well done.
The macro camera of the Moto G30 takes unimpressive close-up photos which are low in detail. After all, it's just 2 megapixels plus the fixed focus means the shots take some trial and error to get sharp in low light, the Moto G30's main cam puts out an unreliable performance. You get a fair amount of detail but the auto HDR may or may not kick in resulting in clipped highlights and the focus can miss sometimes and quite often the white balance is off too. Turning on night mode addresses many of these issues and results in better-developed highlights and shadows and some of the noise gets smoothed out. The Moto G30's ultra-wide camera doesn't do well at night. You get underexposed and soft images with low detail and narrow dynamic range and there's no net mode support here.
Now onto selfies from the 13-megapixel front-facing camera, if your face is well lit these come out good with nice detail and appealing skin tones. Videos can be recorded in 1080p resolution and the footage from the main camera is pretty underwhelming. The detail looks highly processed and the dynamic range is rather narrow, at least there is low noise the ultra-wide cameras footage is softer and has an even narrower dynamic range. There is electronic stabilization available and it works well, for the most part, ironing out shakiness in your footage.
So that's the Moto G30 you get a large high refresh rate display, excellent battery life, a clean software experience and decent camera performance during the day at this price, it's hard to be too. Critical of this sort of phone sure I'd rather have a higher-res display a better speaker, decent low light photography and 4K video recording but most likely I'd have to pay a lot more but that isn't always the case and smartphone manufacturers are always surprising us. So while the Moto G30 is a solid phone for its class. I'd keep a lookout for competitors that can offer better bang for your buck.
