The Motorola Moto G05 is a budget phone, first and foremost – which means it’s not fast, but it could be fair value for basic phone needs.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Inexpensive | 4GB of RAM really tests my patience |
| Decent battery life | No OS upgrades at all |
| Cameras are decent for this price | Vegan leather back still squicks me out |
Score: 3.5/5
 |
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In this review
Motorola Moto g05 Specifications
Motorola Moto g05 Design
Motorola Moto g05 Camera
Motorola Moto g05 Performance
Motorola Moto g05 Battery
Motorola Moto g05 Conclusion
The Motorola Moto g05 turned up for review at the same time as its slightly pricier sibling, the Motorola Moto g15, and my honest expectation was that the cheaper phone would be compromised to a level where it would be rather evidently worthwhile suggesting you invest in the pricier model.
That’s precisely what… did not happen. While the Motorola Moto g05 has some performance issues, if you’re after a budget Motorola phone, it’s the one to buy.
Design
The Motorola Moto g05 is a budget phone, priced at just $179 outright in Australia, and that price point brings with it some design compromises straight out of its very plain – but environmentally friendly – box.
It features a 6.7 inch display with a refresh rate of up to 90Hz, but it’s only packing in a resolution of 1604x720, which means that this is a 720p screen. You really don’t have to spend much more to get slightly more visually pleasing 1080p screens in an Android phone right now. The 90Hz refresh rate sounds appealing, but it’s a dynamic setting that can’t – as far as I’ve been able to ascertain – be switched to a fixed 60Hz (if you prefer battery savings) or 90Hz (if you prefer fluidity). There simply isn’t a refresh rate setting within the Motorola Moto g05’s settings panel at all.
Controls are confined to the right hand side with standard volume buttons above a combination power button and fingerprint reader, which has worked without fault in my review period, though it’s not especially fast. One pleasing inclusion is a SIM card tray with full dual nano-SIM plus microSD expansion, a feature which is fast becoming a rarity in mobile phones these days.
In Australia, the Motorola Moto g05 ships in Forest Green, Plum Red, Misty Blue and Fresh Lavender finishes (with Fresh Lavender apparently a Big W exclusive colour), and they’re all… shudder… vegan leather.
For those new to my reviews, I’m not a fan of vegan leather – which is just, to be clear, soft plastic – at all. There’s something about the feel of it that sets off my nerves in precisely the wrong way. Thankfully the Motorola Moto g05 comes with a simple clear plastic case in the box, so I’ve not had to handle it all that much. Your tolerance for vegan leather can naturally vary.
At this price point it would be genuinely surprising to see a proper level of water resistance.
Colour me surprised then that Motorola claims the Moto g05 as being IP52 rated, thought that’s also qualified with the term “water repellent” directly afterwards. What that boils down to is that a very light shower or sprinkle of water should be OK for the Moto g05’s survival chances, but immersion would assuredly be deadly to it.
Camera
When I reviewed the Motorola Moto g04 last year, I noted that its camera performance was rudimentary, which wasn’t surprising, because it was a cheap phone, and cheap phones never have spectacular cameras. They wouldn’t be cheap phones if they did.
Motorola has improved the camera hardware on the Moto g05 relative to the g04, offering up a single wide 50MP rear lens and front-facing 8MP selfie sensor, compared to the 16MP rear and 5MP front sensors on its predecessor.
It’s nice to see improvements in camera technology filter down to the budget level, but you absolutely do still have to temper your quality expectations for this price point.
Images in fair light are fine enough for everyday use, but predictably not great if you push it in any real way with low light, moving objects or any need for zooming in.
You do get in-camera zoom at up to 6x, but it’s predictably a digital crop, and not one that presents well.
Big boat looks fine with no telephoto zoom.
Big boat looks awful with 6x zoom.
You do get a portrait mode approximation for both front and rear lenses, but as with so many of these AI-led efforts, the end results can end up looking awfully artificial.
I promise you that I was in this park, not photoshopped into it.
Ultimately, while there’s some small improvement here over the Moto g14, and a bit more flexibility in camera terms than you get with the g05, this is still a budget phone with cameras to match.
Motorola Moto g05 Sample Photos
Performance
The Motorola Moto g04 ran on a Unisoc T606 processor with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. For 2025, the Moto g05 ups that, but only slightly, switching out the T606 for a MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme CPU, but the same 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, expandable via microSD card. The slightly pricier Moto g15 shares the same basic recipe, just upping the storage to 128GB.
As a result, it’s not surprising that the two phones perform nearly identically in a benchmark sense, but then the Moto g05 isn’t alone in the budget phone space right now. Here’s how it compares using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:
Here's how it compares against those same budget handsets at a GPU level using 3DMark:
The improvements over the Moto g04 aren’t that much to talk about, and none of this is helped by the inclusion of just 4GB of RAM. Yes, you can sacrifice some storage for a virtual RAM boost, but that’s not the same thing, or a feature that every app will address in the same way regardless. The Motorola Moto g05 isn’t particularly fast, though this is largely in line with what I’d expect out of a budget phone.
On the software side, the Motorola Moto g05 is an Android 15 phone with Motorola’s own lightweight launcher on top. Motorola is at least being upfront about its update future… in that it doesn’t really have one. The Moto g05 will see no official Android OS updates from Motorola, though it will get 2 years of security updates.
Lots of budget phones skip out on updates altogether, or at least promising them, so at least there’s transparency here, but it’s also a little disappointing given that many of the Moto g05’s likely customers aren’t going to want to (or in some cases be in the position to) easily update if future apps they need require better Android versions on board.
The Moto g05 does support Motorola's fun "Moto Actions", though it has fewer available than the Moto g15 does. Specifically while both phone support a chopping motion to activate their flashlight features, the Moto g05 lacks the ability to launch the camera with a double twisting motion on the phone. No, I've no idea why either.
The Moto g05 only has 64GB of onboard storage, and by default Motorola installs quite a few additional apps as part of the ordinary setup sequence. The booking.com app is present, because it’s always present on every Android phone these days it seems, along with TikTok, Candy Crush and a bunch of rather bland Android shovelware games.
Can you unistall them?
You totally can.
Did I uninstall them?
I totally did.
Battery
The Motorola Moto g05 packs in a 5,200mAh battery, a little larger than the 5,000mAh battery you’d typically expect to see on just about every non-folding Android phone right now.
As a result, 5,200mAh might feel like it’s a big battery, because mathematically it’s bigger than the batteries in competing phones – but as always the capacity of the battery is nowhere near as important as how well it actually runs for you, and that’s always going to be dependent on what you’re using it for.
While the Motorola Moto g05 isn’t the fastest phone, and as such you might not be hammering it with heavy duty apps unless you’ve got lots of patience, usage can vary, and with it expected battery life.
So first of all, I turn to my YouTube battery test to put a real-world scenario before the Motorola Moto g05. Here’s how it compared against similar budget handsets:
Here the Motorola Moto g15 slightly beats out the Motorola Moto g05 in the first hour, but the g05 takes over for longer term video viewing, suggesting a decent curve to its battery usage – no doubt helped by the fact that its display can only handle a 720p stream rather than 1080p.
The practical effect here is that the Moto g05 can pretty nicely handle a single day’s usage without too many issues. It’s especially pleasing to see it hit the same battery mark after two hours as its predecessor, the Moto g04 did in just a single hour.
One significant change in Motorola’s Moto G lineup – including the Motorola Moto g05 – is that you no longer get a charger in the box, so you’ll have to supply your own; all you get now is a USB-C to USB-C cable.
Motorola Moto g05: Alex’s Verdict
Expectations around budget phones always must focus around their price point, because when you’re building a cheap phone, by necessity you’re using cheaper, simpler and slower components. It’s how you make them work for you that matters.
The Motorola Moto g05 isn’t a fast phone, or one with a great camera in the budget space, but its battery life is good and it’s an overall decent package within the framing of its $179 price point, especially compared to the pricier Moto g15.
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Motorola Moto g05: Pricing and availability
The Motorola Moto g05 retails in Australia for $179.
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Buy The Motorola Moto g05! | Buy On Amazon |
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