As budget phones go, the Motorola Moto g06 is fine value, though the upgrades over last year’s model beyond the larger screen are marginal.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| It’s cheap (and that’s very much the point) | 4GB of RAM limits performance |
| Nice choice of colours (with silly names) | No more powerful than last year’s Moto g05 |
| Chopping for the flashlight is downright fun | No official OS updates. Period. |
Score: 3.5/5
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In this review
Moto g06 Specifications
Moto g06 Design
Moto g06 Camera
Moto g06 Performance
Moto g06 Battery
Moto g06 Verdict
Ethical disclaimer:
The Motorola Moto g06 used in this review was loaned to me by Motorola Australia, and it’ll be going back to Motorola Australia directly. Motorola Australia has no oversight on this review and all evaluations, test results and opinions are 100% my own.
Which feels like it should be obvious, but we live in an era of deeply compromised reviews and AI slop, and way too many sites bury any disclosure at the end of reviews, or omit it altogether.
I think that’s a dud deal for readers and journalism alike.
If you think likewise, please consider supporting ART so I can continue to produce ethical reviews that you can trust.
For more on ART’s Ethics position, see here.
Design
With an Australian asking price of just $179, the Motorola Moto g06 is a cheap phone.
I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense; there’s absolutely a need for lower-cost phones, but when you are producing a lower-cost phone, it’s almost always an exercise in compromises, because you have less money to play with when you’re building it. Higher quality parts cost more money, after all.
The Motorola Moto g06 follows on, naturally enough from last year’s Motorola Moto g05, and the biggest change between the two is that the g06 is substantially larger.
The Motorola Moto g06 is built around a 6.88 Inch 120Hz LCD, compared to the 6.7 inch 90Hz LCD on the g05. It’s not a particularly sharp display, however with a resolution of just 1640×720 pixels, or 720p for video watching purposes. That’s somewhat a function of its budget price of course, though you typically don’t have to push much higher in price terms before you do start to see smartphones with 1080p displays.
The rear of the Motorola Moto g06 is built around (shudder) vegan leather, AKA “soft touch plastic that gives Alex the sensory heebie-jeebies ™” but thankfully Motorola does supply a simple clear case in the box with the phone so I didn’t have to handle it all that much.
Did I use the case a LOT while testing the Motorola Moto g06? You bet I did.
The Motorola Moto g06 is a cheap phone, but it does technically benefit from one of Motorola’s no-doubt pricey alliances with colour authority Pantone, because all three of its available colours are Pantone certified. It’s still not uncommon to see budget phones launch with just one colour choice, typically black, so having three is quite nice.
I’m going to digress here slightly and play a little game with you now.
The Motorola Moto g06 sells in Australia in three hues, and I want you to guess what those colours actually are:
- Pantone Tapestry
- Pantone Arabesque
- Pantone Tendril
You can almost certainly guess that one of them is going to be blue, because I’ve already shown you the back of the phone, but which colour name does that match up with – and what are the other two?
I’m running this game because everyone I’ve asked while reviewing the Motorola Moto g06 has gotten it at least partially wrong, and often completely wrong.
For the record, the blue is Pantone Tapestry, while Pantone Arabesque is an orange hue and Pantone Tendril is green. It appears that there’s a fourth colour in some markets, Pantone Laurel Oak, but your guess is as good as mine for that one.
I’m even going to digress from my digression here and point out that Tendril is an awful name for a phone colour.
Has anybody ever gone into a phone store and said “Ooh, yes please – can I have the Tendril coloured model?
No.
No, they have not. I now return you to your regular review.
Controls on the Motorola Moto g06 are kept simple, with volume and a combo fingerprint reader/power/assistant button on the right hand side, USB-C power at the base and a headphone jack at the top of the phone.
It never ceases to amuse me that while wired headphones are definitely a retro step, you only really find them as a feature on these cheaper phones. You might think that pricier phones would come with more features, but in this respect, it isn’t true.
The durability of budget phones is often a concern, and the Motorola Moto g06 does go a little further than most in this respect, given that it’s rated as IP64 water and dust resistant with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protecting its front display.
Camera
On the camera front, the Motorola Moto g06 shares the same camera sensors as its predecessor, with a 50MP primary wide sensor at the rear and a front-facing 8MP sensor for your selfie needs. It’s a basic recipe for a phone camera with predictably basic results.
It is a little disappointing to me that Motorola couldn’t at least marginally improve the cameras year on year, because it did so shifting from the Motorola Moto g04 to the Motorola Moto g05, but it’s just not so.
As such, you absolutely have to temper your expectations around the camera on this phone. It’s slow in just about every aspect, and outside ideal daytime conditions you’re likely to struggle at least a little to get particularly interesting or satisfying photos.
Zooming is 100% digital and limited to 6x, and it’s entirely ordinary even at that distance:
This fountain shot is fine under normal daylight conditions.
It’s not really worth pushing it to 6x zoom in camera — you’d almost certainly get better results post-cropping in a photo-editing app.
6x zoom on this Brush Turkey did not result in a pleasing photo.
Portrait mode effects can be applied to photos, but they do have a distinctly artificial sheen to them.
Am I in this scene, or was I photoshopped in? (Spoiler: I’m in this scene)
This is probably my favourite accidental Moto g06 photo for stylistic reasons — but it certainly looks artificial thanks to the portrait effect being applied.
None of this should be a surprise. We are at least past the point where budget smartphones came with truly awful cameras, so for your basic shots the Motorola Moto g06 is fair enough at this price, but I’m once again struck by the fact that there’s no real upgrade here over the Motorola Moto g05, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect at least a little forward improvement year on year.
Getting good close-up shots is an exercise in testing your patience.
Shock discovery: GAME CONSOLE also comes in a Tendril colour!
That is, I feel, too many copies.
The Moto g06’s camera is best suited to slow-moving objects, like books.
Would Ginger Meggs have a smartphone these days? He’s certainly got the grip for it.
Performance
The budget price of the Motorola Moto g06 once again has to be taken into consideration when looking at performance. Put simply, if you’re spending very little money on a phone, you can’t expect fast, but it doesn’t feel unreasonable to me to expect that a newer phone in a given series should have some level of speed bump over its predecessors, even if it’s only marginal.
Meet the new phone… basically the same as the old phone.
The Motorola Moto g06 is built around a MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme processor with just 4GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard memory for the Australian model as tested; it does appear that Motorola does have variants of this phone that bounce up to as much as 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, but that’s not what’s officially on sale down under.
The big critical point here is that compared to last year’s Motorola Moto g05… there are no differences at all.
That’s also a phone that runs on a MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme processor with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, so my expectations for a performance boost were low even before I’d taken it out of its box.
Still, you can get quite a range of phones in this sub-$200 price space. So how does the Motorola Moto g06 compare against similarly priced phones and its predecessors?
Here’s how it stacks up at a CPU level using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:
It’s not a huge surprise that the Motorola Moto g06 and Motorola Moto g05 run neck and neck here, because they’re basically the same phone under the hood.
While the Samsung Galaxy A05s – not exactly a “new” phone by any measure, but still commercially available in Australia at the time of writing – leads the pack, the reality here is that there’s not much difference between the top 4 phones in this respect at all.
At the GPU level, there are some differences between what you can get, but again it’s a story of broadly similar performance. Here’s how those phones compare using 3Dmark’s Slingshot Extreme benchmark. That’s an older benchmark, but the newer Wild Life Extreme often fails on hardware this slow:
Budget phones are typically slow, and the Motorola Moto g06 definitely fits that description. It’s certainly not impossible to use, but be ready for reasonably long loading times, some shuddering when scrolling web pages and sluggishness when switching between apps.
Matters certainly aren’t helped there by the inclusion of just 4GB of RAM on the Australian models, but again that’s all about building to hit a certain price point.
You do at least get one of my favourite Moto Actions, the fast double chop to initiate the rear camera flash as a quick and simple flashlight, though the Motorola Moto g06 is sometimes a little twitchy about whether or not that action will initiate.
The Motorola Moto g06 is built around Android 15 – the same as the Motorola Moto g05 – and like its predecessor, it’s quite limited in terms of the updates and upgrades you can expect to see.
Motorola promises just two years of security updates for the Motorola Moto g06 and precisely zero software updates. Officially speaking, this is an Android 15 phone and it always will be. Budget phones rarely go all in on promising OS upgrades for particularly lengthy spans of time, but I’m definitely not a fan of simply giving up just because a phone is a little older and slower. Do better, Motorola!
Battery
The one advantage with a low powered CPU is that it should sip more lightly at the battery. The Motorola Moto g06 does have to balance that against its slightly larger display, because that’s rather obviously another area where a phone can use a lot of power.
I ran the Motorola Moto g06 through my standard YouTube-based battery test — you can read more about how I test mobile phone batteries here – to see how it compares against other phones in its budget price range:
At last we find an area where the Motorola Moto g06 bests its predecessor, even if it’s only by a single percentage point. The Motorola Moto g06’s 5200mAh battery should be fine for most everyday users to last out a day as long as you’re not punishing it too heavily between charges.
Where Motorola’s budget line used to include chargers in the box, that’s not the story for the Motorola Moto g06.
It charges via USB-C and does so at a maximum of 10W, which is on the slower side. Charging overnight while you sleep would be the wise move here, because this is not a phone that recharges all that rapidly.
Motorola Moto g06: Alex’s Verdict
The key reason for the Motorola Moto g06’s existence is for Motorola to have a low-cost phone to sell in Australia that can do the basic functions of a smartphone without depleting your wallet too heavily.
The Motorola Moto g06 meets that remit just as the Motorola Moto g05 did last year, and it does it with a slightly bigger screen and more durable build too, which is good to see.
Still, it’s only a very small shift in terms of overall power and battery life, and the fact that it’ll never see a single OS upgrade and it’s starting from an older Android version to start with does raise concerns about its long-term usability and security.
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Motorola Moto g06: Pricing and availability
The Motorola Moto g06 retails in Australia for $179 through major retailers.
The Pantone Tapestry model is also available through Vodafone as a postpaid model at $1/month over 36 months plus plan costs, or as a prepaid model for $149 outright.
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About the Author
wow this review just comes out a week after i get the g04s for $99 at jb unlocked. im not sure how longg i’ll have the g04s for, thinking of getting a phone again in late 2026 or 2027 that has a little more onbord storage, but besides the fact that this phone runs android 14 and a little more storage, i liked the phone i got.
i am a little interested in the feeling of the g06, however, and think i might like it?