Product: Motorola Moto G22
Taken: SEK 1,690 at Power
The latest mobile phone from Motorola, Moto G22, is well anchored in the budget class, with a launch price of SEK 1,699.
Rating 2.5 out of 5
Opinion
A budget mobile should be simple but hassle-free. The Moto G22 is ambitious and versatile, but few of the features are good. The rugged performance means that it can not get the most out of the camera, and the 90 Hz screen becomes pointless. A smaller mobile with a smaller screen of 60 Hz, a single or dual camera, more splashes in the processor and battery charging would have been preferable.
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Positive
- High quality feeling
- 90 Hz screen
- Large battery
- Good quality of the main camera
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Negative
- Significantly
- Low resolution and low light screen
- Thin mono sound
- Slow charging
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At first glance, it looks like a user gets a great deal for their money. Large screen with 90 Hz frame rate, versatile camera with four sensors, large battery and an eight-core processor. But the more we use the Moto G22, the more it becomes clear that Motorola has prioritized the wrong things.
Moto G22 has a solid build quality and a chassis that could just as easily have belonged to a twice as expensive phone. Most of it is of course in plastic, but of high quality and with a luxurious finish. It does not feel overly cheap and the construction is consistently solid. On the other hand, it is really big. With a 6.5-inch screen, relatively wide screen edges and also a design with its flat back, it can be a challenge to hold if you have too small hands.
The power button on the side is also a fingerprint reader. Although it is unusually narrow, we easily register a fingerprint and can use it for unlocking. On the opposite side we find a sim card slot, which has room for both dual sim and micro sd. Usually you are forced to choose, but here you can get both extra swimming and extended storage.
Fast but pale screen
The screen is a 6.5-inch ips panel with a 20: 9 aspect ratio, slightly rounded corners and a hole for selfie camera on one short side. The good thing about it, apart from the size, is that it can run at 90 Hz frame rate for smoother scrolling and interface animations.
What is less good about it is… everything else. First of all, it has only 720p resolution, which on such a large screen means that sharpness and details are lost. It is also possible to discern individual pixels up close. We do not mind 720p screens in budget class, but then on mobiles with smaller dimensions.
Colors are also pale, we only reach almost srgb class with noticeable deviations in color correctness. If we angle the screen just a little, the white point and contrast begin to shift markedly. Just straight from the front, however, white surfaces are neutral, the blacks deep and the contrast approved. However, the brightness is not much to cheer for. On a cloudy day, we can use the phone outdoors unhindered, but in sunlight it is not enough to shade the screen for it to look good.
The processor is the problem
In addition, we do not have much pleasure from 90 Hz frame rate, because performance is so substandard that nothing flows well anyway. The system circuit in the Moto G22 is the Mediatek Helios G37. With its eight cores, four of which on paper have a relatively high frequency, we had hoped for more, but this is going to be depressingly tough.
Websites hack to load and scroll, sweeps in the interface also lag, and many heavier apps are next to impossible to use. What works smoothly is video streaming. Here, the graphics circuit takes care of most things and what we have tried to watch from Youtube, Prime Video and Netflix flows well, although the apps for navigating to the right movie can be patient.
If you stream media, you also need to think about headphones, because the built-in mono speaker at the bottom has a thin sound and is anything but enjoyable to listen to. You get a 3.5 millimeter analog socket with normal sound quality and can connect to bluetooth headphones with aptx hd or ldac for high quality.
Quadruple camera to little use
The cameras in this budget mobile are surprisingly ambitious, with as many as four sensors. In addition to a 50 megapixel main sensor, you get an eight-megapixel wide-angle camera, a two-megapixel macro and a depth-of-field support camera. The camera app suffers from the same performance issues as the rest of the phone, which means that autofocus requires patience and a few retakes, and there may be small pauses when we switch camera modes.
Otherwise, the main camera actually takes good pictures. Detailed and with rich colors and well-approved dynamics. At least in daylight. In the evening it loses finer details and images get a certain noise, but colors are still correct and we get plenty of shades in dark parts of images.
The wide angle camera is not as convincing. It does well in daylight, but also has noticeably paler color reproduction and gets lost in dark environments. There is not much to say about the macro camera. We can take close-ups with neutral colors at the right distance, but we do not get a fantastic result.
Lasts a long time, charges slowly
With 5,000 milliampere-hours of battery and anything but demanding hardware, we get good battery life. We stream Youtube video for up to 13 hours at full brightness. We can surf and email with dimmed brightness nonstop between 14 and 18 hours with dimmed screen, depending on whether we run 60 or 90 Hz frame rate. It is not the best in the class, but absolutely well passed.
The only problem with the battery is that it does not charge very fast. Maximum power is 15 watts, the included charger also delivers only ten watts. Here, patient charging overnight will be your only viable option.
Motorola’s Android interface My UX is, as always, graphically clean and visually close to Android’s original design, and it’s pleasantly free of unwanted third-party apps. But it has some features of its own, such as extra gesture control and optional automation that can place frequently used apps on the home screen for you. It will reportedly get Android 13 sometime in the future and three years of security updates. More is not guaranteed. It’s stingy, but not unusual in this low price range.
No, this does not really work. Motorola aims high with the Moto G22 but hits wrong. It is well built, but so axially designed that it just gets uncomfortable. The fast screen does not come into its own when the processor and graphics cannot deliver a smooth image to it at 90 Hz. The surprisingly versatile cameras are really only good enough in one type of photo. Motorola could well have saved on screen and camera and opted for a slightly better processor instead.
Specifications
Product name: Moto G22
Tested: June 2022
Manufacturer: Motorola
Systemkrets: Mediatek Helio G37
Processor: 4 st Cortex A53 2,3 GHz + 4 st Cortex A53 1,8 GHz
Chart: PowerVR GE8320
Remind: 4 GB
Storage: 64 GB, space for micro sd
Screen: 6.5 inch ips, 720×1600 pixels, 90 Hz
Cameras: 50 megapixels + 8 megapixels wide angle + 2 megapixels macro, depth sensor with LED rear, 16 megapixels front
Connections: Usb 2 typ c, 3,5 mm headset
Communication: 2g, 3g, 4g, wifi 5, bluetooth 5.0, agps, galileo, nfc
Operating system: Android 12 med My UX
Other: Dual sim, fingerprint reader on the side
Bacteria: 5,000 mAh, hour min online video (wifi, high brightness, 60 Hz), approx. Hour mixed use (4g, low brightness, 90Hz), approx. X hour call
Battery charge: 15 W usb c, 10 W charger included
Size: 16,4 x 7,5 x 0,85-0,95 cm
Weight: 185 gram
Rec. price: 1 699 kr
Taken: SEK 1,690 at Power
Performance
Antutu Benchmark: 118 861 points
Geekbench 5: 951 points
Geekbench 5 and core: 171 points
3dmark Wild Life: Not measured
Storage, reading: 208.4 MB / s
Storage, writing: 117.8 MB / s
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