The Motorola Moto g15 occupies an unusual space in the Motorola Moto G family, given that the Moto G05 is about as fast but the Moto g14 is in some respects faster.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Good battery life | Not exactly an improvement on the Moto g14 |
| Better display than the Moto g04 | No OS upgrades, just security patches |
| Moto Actions are still fun | Some Moto Actions are very slow to respond |
Score: 2.5/5
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In this review
Moto g15 Specifications
Moto g15 Design
Moto g15 Camera
Moto g15 Performance
Moto g15 Battery
Moto g15 Conclusion
Motorola’s long held to a strategy with its Moto G series phones where it has a little something at nearly every possible price point in the budget range.
I love the idea that there can be flexibility and choices for consumers, because that’s great, but it does often lead to the company releasing phones that really don’t sit well within their price niche.
The Motorola Moto g15 is one such phone.
It’s not a bad phone for its asking price, but sitting as the successor to the Motorola Moto g14 and arriving on my test bench at the same time as the cheaper but broadly similar Motorola Moto G05, it’s put in a position where it’s a really hard phone to see as the ideal option for many consumers at all, unless you can get one at a significant price cut.
Design
At $229, the Motorola Moto g15 sits in the budget phone space, and that’s an area where there’s still quite a lot of scope for compromises when it comes to design.
Like its sibling Motorola Moto g05, the Moto g15 runs from a 6.7 inch LCD display. It does outdo the Moto g05 in terms of screen resolution, packing in 2400x1080 pixels making it properly Full HD, but in return for that you don’t get the 90Hz refresh rate of the cheaper g05 model. This is a fixed 60Hz only phone, something of a rarity for Motorola, a company that’s really pushed higher refresh rate phones even in the budget space for some years now.
Hello 60Hz. Why are you 60Hz when the cheaper model can do 90Hz?
Controls on the Moto g15 sit on the right hand side with standard volume buttons above a combination power button and fingerprint reader. That’s a very standard combination for budget phones right now, almost certainly because it’s cheaper to implement than an in-display biometric solution. It’s not especially fast, a trait it shares with the Moto g05 again, but it’s not actually locked me out of the phone during my review period.
The Motorola Moto g15 as supplied to me for review was a dual Nano SIM model – you can’t really expect eSIM at this price – and nicely, it’s one of only a handful of phones that supports two physical SIMs plus a microSD card. This does make the SIM card tray rather long, but you’re only ever going to notice that if you’re swapping out SIM or MicroSD cards.
Here I am, testing gravity with the Gravity Grey Motorola Moto g15.
The models of Moto g15 sold in Australia ship in Sunrise Orange, Gravity Grey and Iguana Green. Checking internationally it appears that it’s also available in Sea Blue and Glacier Blue finishes. I do love me a blue phone hue, so that’s a tad disappointing.
I also have to note – because I’m me – that the Moto g15 uses a (shudder) vegan leather finish. It’s 100% a personal quirk, I admit, but I do not like the feel of vegan leather. Thankfully there’s a case in the box, which I think is even pre-applied.
This is how the Moto g15 has lived most of its life during my review period. Because I'm me.
Mine was, but then I suspect Motorola Australia knows my position on vegan leather all too well now, so I can’t dismiss the possibility that they slipped the case on my review sample specifically.
Water resistance isn’t usually a specified feature of budget phones, and here Motorola falls back on its old standard of calling the Motorola Moto g15 “water repellent”.
As I explain here, that’s a term with very loose meaning.
What’s odd here is that the cheaper Motorola Moto g05 does have some level of IP-rated water resistance. It’s only IP52, so the differences in real-world moisture survival might be a little moot, but it’s again deeply weird for the slightly more expensive phone to be worse at a technical level.
Camera
The Motorola Moto g15 swaps out the 50MP Wide/2MP Macro of the Moto g14 in favour of a 50MP Wide/ 5MP Ultra-Wide sensor set at the rear, while keeping an 8MP sensor at the front for your selfie-taking purposes.
Selfies are reasonable, but the classic AI fake bokeh problem is very much present.
That does put it a step above the Moto g05, which lacks an ultra-wide capabilities, but we’re still very much playing in the budget phone space here, so you do have to temper your expectations of what’s possible.
On the positive side, in 2025 what you can get out of even a cheap phone in decent conditions can be quite pleasing.
Hello, small spiky lad!
The issue is that while you can choose between the two rear lenses (or the front for the egotistical-for-the-‘gram types), if there’s much in the way of challenging conditions, whether that’s low light or fast motion, you quickly lose detail.
It definitely didn't look this dark... but yet here we are.
The Moto g15 does support zooming, but it’s all purely digital zoom, with a preset at 2x and a maximum zoom rate of 6x.
Hello Mr Seagull. The wide lens likes you, but there's not much of you in shot.
That's a bit better, but it would be nice to get in even closer.
At maximum zoom... I have regrets.
You don’t have to test the Moto g15 for all that long to see why Motorola capped it at just 6x, because even there, the results are not particularly compelling.
All of this isn't surprising at all, given the phone's particular price. If camera quality in variable conditions is a must for you, while the budget end of the phone market is slowly improving, you've got to step up into the $500+ price space to get it.
Motorola Moto g15 Sample Photos
Performance
The Motorola Moto G15 is built around a MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme chipset with just 4GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage. Here it gets a storage boost over the cheaper Motorola Moto g05, but no actual RAM or CPU boost – and those choices always have a significant impact on overall application performance.
To test that out at a synthetic level, I put the Motorola Moto g15 through Geekbench 6’s CPU test, comparing it against similarly priced handsets, as well as its immediate predecessor. Here’s how it compared:
The difference between the Moto g15 and Moto g05 isn’t surprising given their internal similarities, but it’s not a good state of affairs when the more expensive phone can’t beat either the cheaper model or even its immediate predecessor in performance terms. I’d never expect some huge leap in performance, because we’re still talking a moderately inexpensive phone, but they should get better year on year, not regress in performance terms.
The switch from the Unisoc T616 found in the Moto g14 to the MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme does show what I’d expect in performance boost terms a little better when we look at GPU performance, via 3DMark:
Again, though, it’s hard to look at those figures and not figure that within this price bracket, the Moto g05 isn’t the better buy. It has less internal storage on board, but the price difference could rather easily buy a microSD card to cover that gap with change to spare.
In day to day usage, the Motorola Moto g15 is not particularly fast. If your needs are only basic that might not be a huge issue, but I did find that any extended usage led to noticeable slowdown. Yes, for the pedants, even though it supports virtual RAM.
The Motorola Moto g15 runs Android 15, but in terms of updates, that’s all it will ever officially run, with Motorola stating outright that it’s not getting any Android updates. You do at least get two years of security updates to keep it current.
This is a rather common story in the budget space, and while I appreciate that it’s often down to processing power and not wanting to promise updates that could ultimately slow down a phone due to new features, or incompatibilities with features due to a lack of power, it’s still hard not to look to the mid-range where we’re seeing a real uptick in OS support, especially from the likes of Samsung and Google itself.
The Motorola Moto g15 also installs a number of apps by default that you may or may not want; I’m no longer at all surprised to see Booking.Com’s app preinstalled on any Android phone, or for that matter TikTok, because clearly money has changed hands there. The slew of incredibly generic Android games that ship on the Moto g15 aren’t particularly welcome either.
You do at least get the good old stalwart Moto Actions built into Motorola’s Android launcher, though again the speed of the phone does sometimes betray it. Chopping the phone through the air launches the flashlight reliably, but twisting – which should open the camera app at any time – often involves a lot of repeated motions before the Moto g15 caught up with what I wanted it to do.
Battery
The Motorola Moto g15 packs in a 5,200mAh battery, again similar to the cheaper Moto g05. At 5,200mAh, both phones sit just slightly above the Android average for battery capacity, but then there’s the question of actual battery endurance.
To test that out, I ran the Motorola Moto g15 through my standard YouTube battery test. Here’s how it stacks up:
That’s quite pleasing battery life, just sneaking past the Moto g05 for the first hour of tested performance, though slipping behind it in the second and third hours. It’s notable here however that the Moto g15 was capable of running with the full 1080p version of the video test file where the G05 was on the 720p stream owing to its lower display resolution.
What this boils down to is a phone with decent all-day performance for most uses, and, I’d argue, for most users it’ll have more than enough power to get them through what needs to be done before being dropped onto a charger.
Here you will have to supply the charger yourself, because there isn’t one in the box; just a USB-C to USB-C cable. Motorola was one of the last companies to particularly put a standard charger in many budget phone boxes, but it’s shifted over to just providing a cable. If you’ve already got a USB-C plug to hand this isn’t an issue, but I suspect more than a few budget phone buyers are likely to have a USB-A type plug instead.
Motorola Moto g15: Alex’s Verdict
If the Motorola Moto g15 existed in isolation as Motorola's "budget" model for Australia, it would be a fair offering, maybe not the most exciting phone but not a bad phone either, especially considering its battery endurance.
However, that's not the story here. This is a phone that costs more than the Motorola Moto g05 while being essentially identical at a performance level. You get a sharper screen, but at a lower refresh rate and without stated IP-tested water resistance. It's also beaten out by the phone it's replacing in straight line CPU performance terms, which is just plain weird, because newer phones should by definition be a little better, not worse.
All of this leaves the Motorola Moto g15 in an awkward position, because while I won't say it's bad, I do struggle to come up with a reason why you might want to buy one when Motorola itself has better options available for less money.
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Motorola Moto g15: Pricing and availability
The Motorola Moto g15 retails in Australia for $229.
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About the Author
Just got one for a hundred euro’s and Just finished installing 5 updates including an OS overhaul of almost a 1Gb. The price is not bad for a 128Gb/8Gb version with dual sim. It looks cheap and that’s a plus. What’s better then a phone nobody wants to steal? It will be finished updating in a year that’s a plus too. The big changes of a newer OS are never on the front end but always on the back-end of the system and those changes you certainly can do without, if you know what I mean. Good to know that’s it’s dual sim with dual standby and good to know that not much profit can be made on this phone regarding that these devices are being shoved through “the throat” in anyway possible. Motorola tries to squeeze a few extra cents out of it by installing unwanted Apps and games but after wiping them away several times the device gives up. It’s slow and that’s a plus too. Slow stuff does not overheat easily and is small in weight for it’s size. I can’t wait for it to get even more ugly (i.e. used) the plastic leather look back seems perfect for that purpose especially if the blue yellows a bit and scratches in the soft plastic start to retain some dirt.
It’s a bad phone for me.
The battery optimisation default settings keeps closing apps and are tricky to change. The Android version is full of unecessary bloatware and changing settings from defaults is tedious compared to other cheap android phones I’ve owned.
I would not recommend this phone. I get that the low specs drive the decision to have such aggressive battery optimisation but it’s still frequently resetting webpages when swapping between apps, and music and streaming apps kept cutting out when the screensaver kicked in. That’s it really – might not be a problems for some users. But it has been a dissapointing phone for me.