Design and Build: Practicality Over Premium
The Motorola Moto G Power 5G doesn’t pretend to be a flagship killer. Its design philosophy is unapologetically utilitarian, prioritizing function and durability without a lofty price tag. The device features a plastic frame and a plastic back, but Motorola has implemented a subtle textured finish that serves two critical purposes: it provides a surprisingly secure grip, significantly reducing the chances of an accidental slip, and it does an excellent job of resisting fingerprints and smudges. Available in colors like Midnight Black and a more vibrant Pearl White, it’s a conservative but clean look.
The physical layout is straightforward and user-friendly. A side-mounted fingerprint sensor is integrated into the power button, offering a fast and reliable way to unlock the phone. It’s positioned perfectly for natural thumb placement. The volume rocker sits just above it. On the right side, you’ll find a dedicated Google Assistant button, which can be handy for voice commands or remapped for other functions. A significant and welcome feature is the inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top edge, a rarity in modern smartphones that budget-conscious users and audio enthusiasts will appreciate. The bottom edge houses the USB-C charging port and a single, downward-firing speaker.
While it doesn’t have an official IP rating for water resistance, it does feature a water-repellent design. This means it has an internal nano-coating that protects it from minor accidental spills, light rain, or splashes, but it is not designed to be submerged. At 200g, it has a substantial heft, a direct result of its massive battery, but the weight is distributed well, making it feel solid rather than cumbersome.
Display: A Capable Large Canvas
The Moto G Power 5G sports a 6.7-inch IPS LCD display with a 120Hz refresh rate. This is a standout feature at this price point. The high refresh rate makes every interaction with the phone—scrolling through social media feeds, navigating menus, or browsing the web—feel noticeably smoother and more responsive compared to the standard 60Hz displays common in the budget segment. The resolution is 1080 x 2400 pixels (FHD+), resulting in a pixel density of about 393 PPI. This ensures text is sharp, and images are clear without any visible pixelation.
The LCD technology means you won’t get the inky blacks or infinite contrast of an OLED panel. Blacks appear more as dark grays, especially in a dark room. However, the trade-off is that it gets exceptionally bright, peaking at around 500 nits. This makes the screen highly usable outdoors in direct sunlight, a practical advantage for everyday use. The colors are accurate and vibrant enough for consuming media, watching YouTube videos, or playing games. It also features a standard 60Hz mode to conserve battery life if desired. The bezels are reasonably slim for a budget device, with a slightly more pronounced chin at the bottom. The punch-hole cutout for the 8MP front-facing camera is small and unobtrusive.
Performance and 5G: Capable Efficiency
Under the hood, the Moto G Power 5G is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 930 chipset, paired with 6GB of RAM. This is a capable mid-range processor built on a 6nm architecture, which prioritizes power efficiency—a perfect pairing for a phone whose main selling point is battery life. Performance is more than adequate for daily tasks. Apps launch quickly, multitasking between social media, messaging, and email is handled without significant slowdown, and the 120Hz display ensures the interface always feels zippy.
For gaming, it handles casual titles like Among Us, Candy Crush, and Pokémon GO with ease. More graphically intensive games like Genshin Impact or Call of Duty: Mobile will run, but you will need to dial down the graphics settings to Medium for a consistently smooth frame rate. This is the expected performance for this tier; it’s a device for the casual gamer, not a hardcore mobile enthusiast.
The “5G” in its name is a major part of its value proposition. It supports sub-6GHz 5G networks, providing future-proofed connectivity. Users on carriers with robust 5G infrastructure will experience significantly faster download and upload speeds, lower latency, and a more responsive network experience compared to 4G LTE. This makes it an excellent choice for someone looking to hold onto a device for several years as networks continue to expand.
Battery Life: The Uncontested Champion
This is the headline act, the feature that defines the entire Moto G Power lineage. The Moto G Power 5G is equipped with a colossal 5000mAh battery, and combined with the power-efficient Dimensity 930 processor and software optimizations, the results are nothing short of phenomenal. For the vast majority of users, this is a two-day phone. Under moderate usage—a mix of several hours of screen-on time involving web browsing, social media, messaging, some video streaming, and light gaming—it is entirely possible to end a 16-hour day with 50% or more battery remaining.
With more intensive use, including prolonged GPS navigation, video recording, or heavy gaming, it will easily last a full, long day from wake-up to bedtime with power to spare. In standardized video playback tests, it can achieve over 20 hours of continuous runtime. This endurance liberates users from the “range anxiety” associated with most smartphones. You can leave for a weekend trip and confidently leave your charger at home.
When it does finally come time to recharge, the included 30W TurboPower charger provides impressive speed. Motorola claims you can get up to 50% charge in just about 20 minutes, which our testing corroborated. A full charge from zero takes roughly an hour and fifteen minutes. There is no wireless charging, a standard omission at this price point that is more than forgiven given the wired charging speed and mammoth battery capacity.
Camera System: Functional for Well-Lit Scenes
The camera system on the Moto G Power 5G is pragmatic, designed to capture decent photos in good lighting conditions rather than compete with imaging flagships. The main sensor is a 50MP shooter that uses pixel-binning technology to output 12.5MP photos by default. This process combines data from four pixels into one, resulting in brighter, cleaner images with better dynamic range. In daylight, the main camera captures photos with accurate colors, adequate detail, and decent contrast. HDR processing is effective at balancing bright skies and shadowy foregrounds.
The 8MP ultra-wide-angle camera allows you to fit more into the frame, which is great for landscapes or group photos. However, there is a noticeable drop in detail and image quality compared to the main sensor, and distortion is evident at the edges of the frame. The third sensor is a 2MP macro camera, which is largely superfluous. It requires perfect lighting and a very steady hand to capture usable close-up shots, and the results are often soft and lacking in detail.
Low-light photography is the system’s biggest weakness. While the main camera features Night Mode, which uses multi-frame processing to brighten shadows and reduce noise, results are merely passable. Images can look processed and lack fine detail. The ultra-wide lens is not recommended for night use. The 8MP front-facing camera housed in the punch-hole is sufficient for clear video calls and decent selfies in good light. Video recording tops out at 1080p at 30fps on all cameras, with electronic image stabilization (EIS) that does a fair job of smoothing out handshake but can introduce a warping effect during movement.
Software and User Experience: Clean, Android
The Moto G Power 5G runs a near-stock version of Android 13. This is one of its greatest strengths. The user experience is clean, bloat-free, and intuitive, closely resembling what you would get on a Google Pixel device. Motorola adds a few genuinely useful features on top of vanilla Android, known as Moto Experiences. These include:
- Chop twice for flashlight: A quick, chopping motion with the phone turns the flashlight on and off—incredibly handy.
- Twist for quick launch: A double wrist twist quickly launches the camera app, even from sleep.
- Peek Display: Instead of a full always-on display, it shows a minimalist preview of notifications and the time when you lift the phone or tap the screen.
The software feels snappy and responsive, aided by the 120Hz display. Motorola has committed to two years of major Android OS upgrades and bi-monthly security updates for two years, which is becoming standard for the budget segment but ensures the device remains secure and somewhat up-to-date.