Motorola Moto G24 Review: Budget Battery King

 

 

In many respects, the Motorola Moto G24 is just yet-another-cheap-Motorola phone – but it’s made more worthy thanks to impressive battery endurance.

 

Pros	Cons
Range of colour choices	Camera is only average at this price
Good battery life for its price	Not that much more powerful than the cheaper Moto G04
Three years of Android security updates…	… but zero actual Android OS updates

Score: 3.5/5

 

	Buy The Motorola Moto G24!	Buy On Amazon

In this review

Moto G24 Specifications
Moto G24 Design
Moto G24 Performance
Moto G24 Battery
Moto G24 Conclusion

The Motorola Moto G24 is yet another budget-centric smartphone amongst many that the company has offered up in recent years.

Priced at $229 outright, it sits between the Moto G04 and Moto G34 in Motorola’s current budget lineup. I’ve recently reviewed the Motorola Moto G04, finding it an effective budget option.

Also read:
Motorola Moto G04 Review

The Motorola Moto G24 is, as you might expect, a small scale upgrade on what the G04 can do, which by itself wouldn’t really make it all that remarkable.

Where it really steps up is in battery life – and for many budget phones that’s a particular problem, making the Moto G24 a considerably more interesting smartphone.

Design

The Motorola Moto G24 is built around a 6.6 inch 1600x720 pixel LCD display – no OLED at this kind of price – with support for up to 90Hz refresh rates.

That’s a recipe that Motorola rather likes for much of its budget fare – it’s identical, for example, to what you get with the Motorola Moto G04 – and like that phone, there are bezels present, along with a small holepunch array for the front-facing camera.

While the model that Motorola Australia sent me has a metallic tinge to it, the actual body of the Moto G24 is resolutely plastic, in your choice of Matte Charcoal, Pink Lavender or Ice Green finishes; it’s the latter variant that was sent my way.

Green is not a particularly common colour for smartphone choices, but honestly you don’t often see three choices at all at this kind of price. There is a fourth colour, Blueberry available internationally, but it’s an all-too-common story to see some colours not make their way to our shores. At least there’s more than one on offer.

On the right hand side of the Moto G24 there’s a dual power button and fingerprint reader sitting below a standard volume rocker. The top of the phone houses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, while the right hand side is where you’ll find the SIM card tray.

One nice touch here is that it’s dual Nano SIM plus microSD, rather than being Dual Nano with MicroSD taking up that second slot if you need it. Sure, that leads to quite a long SIM card tray, but I’d rather have the flexibility here.

Camera

Motorola Australia’s pitch for the Motorola Moto G24 is that it is a “ a camera centric HD screen phone”, which is a big call to make in the budget space. All too often, the way manufacturers keep phones this cheap is by providing cheaper camera sensors.

Honestly… that’s pretty much what Motorola has done with the Motorola Moto G24. At the rear you’ll find twin lenses, one 50MP primary and a 2MP macro lens.

I’ve lost track of how many phones in the budget and mid-range space I’ve tested over the last few years that run with a 2MP secondary macro lens, and the Motorola Moto G24 is really just another one of them.

At the front, there’s a holepunch lens housing an 8MP selfie camera, which again is about average for a budget phone these days.

Some strong beautification (I've earned my wrinkles, dammit) here.

It’s worth noting that Motorola also has a variant of the Motorola Moto G24, the Motorola Moto G24 Power which – like most Motorola “Power” suffix phones – primarily differs in battery capacity, but also curiously in the front-facing camera department, doubling up the megapixel count to 16MP from the Motorola Moto G24’s 8MP.

As Motorola Australia hasn’t yet shown any sign of releasing the Motorola Moto G24 Power in Australia – it’s been some years since any of the “Power” phones landed on Antipodean shores – I can’t really comment on its actual selfie prowess, however.

The Motorola Moto G24 is an upgrade over the cheaper Moto G04 if you’re comparing like for like in camera terms, but it’s still an overall ordinary performer in all but optimal conditions. Any darker areas can quickly wash out, and while it does offer zoom by way of cropping the primary 50MP lens up to 4x, results are predictably ordinary.

You do get digital zoom, maxing out at 4x which keeps matters fairly close and not terrible for zoom shots. For example, on my recent EV trek to Adelaide I had some time at Bendigo Woollen Mills, where I captured this shot of a nearby tram. Here’s the standard shot:

And here it is at 4x:

It’s workable, but not really exceptional, and that’s very much the story of the Moto G24’s camera chops. All of which shouldn’t be a surprise, because this is still just a $229 phone. It’s not bad in camera terms within that context, but I do feel that pitching it as “camera centric” at this quality is just a touch hyperbolic.

Motorola Moto G24 Sample Photos

Performance

Lower end phones tend to use just a handful of processor choices, and it’s pretty rare to see anything exceptional here. The Motorola Moto G24 runs on the MediaTek Helio G85, which isn’t exactly a new processor kid on the block – but then that’s precisely why it’s available in a phone that costs so little. In Australia, Motorola’s pairing up the Helio G85 with 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, along with Android 14.

All of that is an acceptable but not world-shaking recipe for phone performance, and it shows in benchmark terms. Here’s how the Motorola Moto G24 compares against similarly priced handsets:

Interesting to note the benchmark performance difference here between the older Motorola Moto G14 which launched here last year at the same $229 price point, though the reality of scores like these is that they’re not so much larger as to point to massively faster performance per se.

Also read:
Motorola Moto G14 review

The G24 does fare a little better when looking at GPU benchmarks, scoring significantly over the same competition using 3DMark Slingshot and 3DMark Wild Life Extreme:

Having just come off testing the Motorola Moto G04, the Moto G24 didn’t feel as though it was responding much faster, though it’s a solid enough basic workhorse for basic Android tasks. It will handle most Android games, but given the basic 720p screen, don’t expect to be pushing the highest possible visual quality there.

The Motorola Moto G24 is an Android phone, and like the Moto G04 I’ve recently reviewed, sadly that’s all it will ever be. Motorola hasn’t committed to any OS upgrades for the Moto G24 at all, though it does do a little better than the cheaper G04 for security updates, with the promise of three years worth of updates, delivered every two months. That’s probably a fair bet of the phone’s likely life cycle for many users, but it would still be nice to see a broader commitment to actual OS upgrades here as well.

For these cheaper phones I often get queries about phone call quality, and I just want to briefly address that. The issue here is that outside of egregious antenna issues – and I’m going way old school here with flashbacks to the whole iPhone 4 antenna issues that most phones do very well to avoid most of the time – call quality is nearly always a function of network variables rather than the handset in question.

The Motorola Moto G24’s speakers are certainly decent, as is its microphone pickup, but that’s essentially table stakes these days for any phone not made out of two tin cans and a piece of string.

Battery

Like just about every Android phone you can buy right now, the Motorola Moto G24 has a sealed 5,000mAh battery lurking within its frame. Here I was keen to see what kind of difference the use of the Helio G85 might have over the G04 in battery terms.

First stop, my standard YouTube battery test, where I run a full screen video at maximum brightness, refresh rate and moderate volume from an hour and a fully charged battery.

Under 90% there is problematic, because it suggests a phone that will struggle with even one day of battery life, though thankfully it’s been a while since I’ve tested a phone that failed in that way.

Here the Motorola Moto G24 compared quite well in its category:

It’s always nice, even in the budget space to see a phone that’s just a little bit more powerful do a little bit better in that test. You’re still typically talking one day of battery life under most circumstances, though very light users might make about a day and a half or so based on my more anecdotal observations.

There was a time when Motorola bucked the trend of not including a charger in the box, but that time, it appears has passed, based on the retail sample Motorola sent my way. You’ll need to provide your own charger with the capability to charge at up to 15W from a USB-C connection.

Motorola Moto G24: Alex’s Verdict

The Moto G24 sits in that awkward position between the slightly more premium Moto G34 and the cheap-as-chips Moto G04, and that’s usually a tough sell, especially in the budget space. If your money is really tight, the Moto G04 does a lot of what the Moto G24 does while leaving just a little more money in your pocket.

However, the Moto G24 is a tad more powerful, has slightly better cameras and critically in my view, considerably better battery life – and that’s a big plus in its favour.

Motorola Moto G24: Pricing and availability

The Motorola Moto G24 retails in Australia for $229 outright.

	Buy The Motorola Moto G24!	Buy On Amazon

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