Motorola Moto G55 5G Review: Awkwardly Average

The Motorola Moto G55 5G isn’t bad value for money… but it’s not good value either, leaving it in the awkward position of just being average. Who really wants an average phone?

Score: 2.5/5

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In this review

Moto G55 Specifications
Moto G55 Design
Moto G55 Camera
Moto G55 Performance
Moto G55 Battery
Moto G55 Conclusion

One of the ways that Motorola has managed to maintain such a strong presence in the budget phone space in Australia is by having a lot of actual phones to choose from.

It’s not – and pretty much never has been – the case that there’s only one Motorola phone to choose from. Often there’s more than a few covering just about every possible price point you might want to hit.

At $299 outright, the Motorola Moto G55 sits beneath phones like the $399 Motorola Moto G85 or the $499 Moto G75 that I’m in the middle of testing right now, but above phones like the Moto G34 or Moto G04.

Here’s the issue with having so many phones at so many price points.

Eventually, you hit a point where the differences become harder to quantify, and that can especially squeeze the phones in the middle, where they’re not so cheap that you’d overlook a few flaws, but they’re not quite so powerful as the phones that only cost a little bit more.

That’s the story of the Motorola Moto G55 in a nutshell. It’s not a terrible phone, but it has its problems, and at the exact same time, it’s possible to get the both technically and actually superior Motorola Moto G85 for not much more money at all.

All of this at-best-average performance leaves the Motorola Moto G55 as a phone that really fails to stand out at all – and who wants that?

Design

The Motorola Moto G55 is, to the shock of nobody, the follow-up to the Motorola Moto G54, a phone I really rather liked last year, because it fixed so many of the glaring omissions from the Motorola Moto G53.

In design terms, the Motorola Moto G55 very much plays steady in design terms compared to its immediate predecessor. We’re talking the same size screen at 6.5 inches 2400x1080 120Hz LCD for a start. That does make it a somewhat compact device if you don’t like the trend towards larger Android phones, though it’s also not terribly exciting as a result.

In terms of colour choice the Motorola Moto G55 comes in Smoky Green, Forest Grey and Twilight Purple. The model loaned to me for review purposes was the Smoky Green variant, which has a Vegan Leather back, as does the Twilight Purple. The Forest Grey version has a PMMA finish which I’d prefer, because as regular readers will know, I’m not a big fan at all of the feel of vegan leather.

Mind you, with the Motorola Moto G55 this hasn’t been a concern at all, because the Motorola Moto G55 ships with a case already installed on the phone, so my interactions with it have been minimal.

If you’re hyper sensitive to weight, the the PMMA Forest Grey version is ever so slightly thinner and lighter than the vegan leather versions, though you’d have to possess some level of superpower to pick the 3g weight difference or 0.1mm thickness difference.

The Motorola Moto G55 omits any level of stated water resistance, instead falling back on simpler “water repellent” status. As I explain here, Water Repellent isn’t a term that should fill you with a lot of confidence if the Moto G55 does get soaked.

Camera

The camera is one area where Motorola’s made some significant improvements over what came before. The Motorola Moto G55 has a dual rear lens array with a 50MP wide and 8MP Ultra-Wide sensor that also does double duty as a macro camera. At the front, selfies are handled via a 16MP sensor. The big step up here is in the ultra-wide camera, because it’s replacing the very low rent 2MP macro lens on the prior models.

That means that it’s not just good for for your landscape shots, but also a lot better for actual macro shooting as well.

Decent macro quality for the price, though as with most macro shots, you need patience.

Motorola tends to avoid the excesses of over-beautification that I see from some other budget brands for selfies, though it can do little to not make me, well… me.

Mental note: Have a shave.

What you don’t get here is any kind of actual telephoto, not that this is surprising. That leaves you with digital zoom – mostly just a crop of that primary 50MP lens, of course, with diminishing results.

Here’s an ultrawide shot of a local fountain.

Here’s the same shot taken with the primary wide lens.

The colour presentation difference between the ultrawide and wide lenses is quite noticeable here.

The default zoom is just 2x, and that works well enough.

8x zoom is, however, pushing it to its limits, so it’s not a bad call on Motorola’s part to stop it there.

While it’s improved over the Motorola Moto G54 and is entirely suitable within its price range, that’s as far as I can take it.

Mental note: Concrete Wombat would make a great band name.

The issue here (again) is that phones ever so slightly up the scale in Motorola’s bevy of budget options are that bit better, and right now they’re not that much more expensive.

Performance

The Motorola Moto G54 featured a Mediatek Dimensity 7020 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, so you’d expect that the Motorola Moto G55 would up the ante across the board, right?

Well, you might, but you wouldn’t be entirely right to do so.

Motorola giveth and Motorola taketh away, because the Motorola Moto G55 runs off a Mediatek Dimensity 7025, so there’s a slight uptick there at least. Storage hasn’t changed at 128GB, plus whatever microSD card you want to throw in there, but then there’s the issue of the RAM. It’s just 4GB, a significant downgrade from last year’s model.

At this point it’s inevitable that I’ll get reader or viewer feedback pointing out that it supports virtual RAM to push it up to the same 8GB of RAM.

It’s true that it does support virtual RAM, but that’s not the same thing as having 8GB of actual RAM ready to be addressed; there are always speed and storage considerations that come into play here – and they certainly do.

At a benchmark level, the Motorola Moto G55 performs about where I’d expect it to be, though it was surprising to see it best the Snapdragon 6s-toting Moto G85 in Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

That dominance did not continue at a GPU level, where the Moto G55 lacked the necessary grunt for 3DMark’s Wild Life test, which meant that the point of comparison has to be the older and more limited Slingshot Extreme test. Here’s how it compares:

It’s not a good look when you’re less adept than the phone you’re replacing or the even cheaper model below it, especially when that relates to shifting around onscreen graphical elements.

A fair proportion of the Motorola Moto G55’s audience might declare that this is fine and they don’t play games so it doesn’t matter… but it really does.

The experience of using the Motorola Moto G55 is one that’s beset with instances of lag. It’s hard to say if that’s a GPU or a RAM bottleneck – and it’s entirely feasible that it’s both – but compared to other Motorola phones I’ve tested this year, it definitely felt like I hit more instances where I was waiting for an app to respond, or the camera to take a picture, or just plain waiting for an app to load in the first place.

Adding googly eyes (optional) to the Moto G55 makes it look like a slightly goofy vampire.

It would be ridiculous to suggest that a $299 phone should be notably speedy in a premium phone sense, a little lag is to be expected at this price point – but the Motorola Moto G55 really ought to be better than the phone that it’s replacing, and it’s not.

To be 100% clear, this isn’t a horribly slow phone all of the time, but you will hit instances of lag a little more than I’d like to see, even at this price point.

One area where Motorola appears to be slowly improving over prior phones is regard to Android updates. The Motorola Moto G54 only got a single Android update, where the Motorola Moto G55 will see two, starting from Android 14.

Two isn’t immense, but it is at least backed up by the promise of a full four years of Android security updates, delivered on a bimonthly schedule. That’s quite pleasing to see at this price.

The Motorola Moto G55 does have a number of preinstalled apps that you probably don’t want. Yes, Booking.Com is amongst them, as is Tik Tok, Adobe Scan and a number of fairly low-rent games. You can, thankfully, easily uninstall them at will.

On the network front, the Motorola Moto G55 has its 5G suffix because it’s a 5G phone using sub-6Ghz frequencies. Testing using the Telstra network in Sydney hit my typical 200-400Mbps down figures, but as always, network conditions where you are and 5G coverage could alter those figures markedly.

Battery

Continuing with its journey of being just a bit too like every other Android phone, the Motorola Moto G55 5G comes with a 5,000mAh battery, bang on the average for most Android phones in 2024.

As always, battery endurance is a question of how you use a particular phone, and everyone’s usage differs. To give this some comparative perspective, I ran the Motorola Moto G55 5G through my YouTube battery test, running a 1080p video across a span of 3 hours to see how its battery life ran down.

The switch to three hours has been a recent one, so I don’t have figures for every phone for that test beyond one hour. Here’s how the Motorola Moto G55 5G compares:

93% for the first hour isn’t a bad figure on the face of it. I really only worry about phones and battery endurance if they drop below 90% on that test after an hour, and the Motorola Moto G55 5G managed that.

However, it’s disappointing that its battery endurance is actually worse than that of the Moto G54 it’s replacing, and the bad news doesn’t stop there; comparatively its three hour figure of 78% remaining is on the lower side.

Motorola does supply a 33W USB-C charger in the box to top the Motorola Moto G55 5G up when the battery runs low, along with a standard USB-C cable, but wireless charging is not supported. That’s not surprising for a $299 phone.

Motorola Moto G55: Alex’s Verdict

At a certain level, it's not unreasonable for a budget phone to deliver average performance. There's little that's awful about the Motorola Moto G55, but at the same time there's so very little that really stands out amongst the many, many phones that Motorola wants to sell you.

It's inevitable that the Motorola Moto G55 will hit some discounts over time, and if it were a little cheaper again than its $299 list price, I'd say it would be a decent value buy. As it is, it's just average, and you should always shoot for better than average when spending your money on a new phone, even a budget one.

Motorola Moto G55: Pricing and availability

	Buy The Motorola Moto G55 5G!	Buy On Amazon

	Buy The Motorola Moto G85!	Buy On Amazon

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