Motorola Moto G75 5G Review: The new king of not-quite-budget phones

While its pricing puts it at the very top of the Moto G family, you get a lot out of the Motorola Moto G75 5G in return.

And because YouTube won’t let me edit videos…

Score: 4/5

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In this review

Moto G75 Specifications
Moto G75 Design
Moto G75 Camera
Moto G75 Performance
Moto G75 Battery
Moto G75 Conclusion

Motorola’s Moto G series phones trade on their affordability and the fact that Motorola has a lot of phones within that group to target just about anyone looking for a budget phone.

At $499 AUD outright, the Motorola Moto G 75 is Motorola’s most expensive “budget” phone, just sitting marginally below what I’d typically call the bottom of the mid-range price space.

As such, it’s got to seriously deliver the goods when it comes to performance to really stand out, because a discounts applied to slightly pricier mid-range phones could also tempt you.

This challenge is one that the Motorola Moto G75 handles quite well. The inclusion of Moto Buds in the box for the Australian model as standard is also a plus, though it does leave me wondering what the real local price might be without them.

Design

The Motorola Moto G75 5G is built around a 6.8 inch 2388x1080 pixel 120Hz capable LCD display with minimal bezels and a standard holepunch cutout for the front-facing camera. In style terms though it more closely mirrors Motorola’s slightly more expensive Edge phones with a sleeker camera bump at the rear and a choice of slightly more attractive colours to pick from.

You can choose between Charcoal Grey with a matte finish, or Aqua Blue or Succulent Green, both of which have a Vegan Leather finish.

I’m no fan of Vegan Leather, which is probably why Motorola Australia sent me the Charcoal Grey version to test out instead, though, like the recently reviewed Motorola Moto G55 5G, the phone comes with its simple clear plastic case pre-installed, so it’s not a huge issue for my own sensory tastes in any case.

6.8 inches might sound like a big phone – and it is – but with a 19.9:9 aspect ratio, this is solidly a more tall than wide phone, measuring in at 166.09x77.24x8.34mm and 205g for the model tested. The Vegan Leather colours are slightly bigger and heavier at 166.09x77.24x8.44mm and 208g. Who knew Vegan Leather could also be fat?

One surprising – but quite welcome – feature of the Motorola Moto G75 5G is a proper level of IP-rated water and dust resistance, along with MIL-STD-810H drop durability. No, I didn’t hold the Motorola Moto G75 5G under in a barrel full of water to see how long it lasted before expiring, because (as I’ve explained before) most of those online tests are not performed well at all.

Controls follow the near standard template for most budget phones in 2024 with volume controls and a combination fingerprint sensor and power button on the right hand side, while the base houses a USB-C socket for power and data transfers.

The left hand side houses a single SIM card/microSD card slot, with the option for eSIM also present in the Australian model.

(Alex's note: An earlier version of this review stated it was dual Nano SIM, because that's what Motorola Australia's specification sheet stated at the time... but it's not the case, it's single Nano+eSIM)

Adding googly eyes (optional) to the Moto G75 5G makes it look like a multi-eyed spider.
So maybe don't do that.

What’s also missing – though not entirely unexpected at this price point – is a 3.5mm headphone jack. Motorola’s solution to this isn’t a set of simple USB-C wired buds or just omission entirely, however.

When you buy the Motorola Moto G75 5G (at least for the model sold in Australia), you’re not just getting the Motorola Moto G75 5G, however.

You also get a set of Motorola’s Moto Buds true wireless headphones included, which is why the external packaging, while bland in the new Motorola style – it’s more environmentally friendly, that’s not really intended as a criticism to be clear – specifically calls this out.

Including wireless headphones with phones isn’t an entirely new idea, but I’ve typically seen it more as a redemption offer for early buyers or pre-order buyers, not as a standard inclusion.

To be clear, these are slightly less impressive than the Motorola Moto Buds+ I’ve already reviewed, and I’m not going to go into a full audio review here, but I will say that they’re a very nice step over and above the kinds of wired headphones you typically get with budget phones – and even some premium ones too.

My one thought here is that not everyone will want or need another set of wireless headphones, and there’s no doubt that including them will have upped the price of the Motorola Moto G75 5G to a degree. It might have been nice to have the option of an even less expensive phone without them, but they’re not a bad inclusion.

Camera

The Motorola Moto G75 5G features a dual camera array at the rear comprising a 50MP primary wide lens and 8MP ultra-wide lens, while the front-facing selfie camera has a 16MP sensor.

Selfie quality is reasonable, even if the subject matter leaves a lot to be desired.

On paper, that’s a very “Moto G” kind of arrangement, but then again this is a phone that’s just shy of the mid-range space where you can start to get some really good and really creatively interesting cameras.

Decent quality for everyday shots -- but that absolutely should be expected.

My prior experience of Motorola’s cameras in the Moto G range has been one of generally fair performance, but not much more than that, so I was rather pleasantly surprised by how well the Motorola Moto G75 5G shoots.

Close up work could be better, but it's acceptable within this price range.

Colour reproduction tends more natural than many phones -- and I do like that.

I do have to balance that by saying that there are obvious limitations, such as the lack of telephoto, but its general presentation for most photos is a bit better than the models just down the line.

Lower light quality with movement struggles a little.

You can get some pleasing shots from the Moto G75 even when the sun has gone down.

However if camera quality is a key buying decision for you it’s feasible to get even better for not much more money – or maybe the same if you can score a discount deal.

Anyone would think Christmas is coming soon. Wait... it is? Where did the year go?

Performance

The inclusion of the Moto Buds in every Motorola Moto G75 5G sold in Australia could have given Motorola an excuse to ship a slightly lesser processor and RAM combination on board, because hey, you’re getting a high-value set of buds in the box, right?

Thankfully that is not what Motorola has done. The Motorola Moto G75 5G is built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6s Gen 3 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage, expandable via microSD card. Not a bad recipe at this price for sure – and that’s very apparent in benchmarks, too.

Here’s how the Motorola Moto G75 5G compares against a range of similarly priced handsets, as well as a slightly wider field of Motorola-specific handsets:

Here’s how its GPU stacks up for graphics tasks against the same set of competing phones:

All of this adds up to a phone that performs well for most tasks. You do – as you’d expect by now – get access to Moto actions like twisting the phone to launch the camera or shaking it to launch the flashlight, which is always fun and often quite handy too.

Motorola’s track record when it comes to Android updates, especially for its Android phones has historically been woeful, but in recent times it has been making more efforts to properly compete and offer phones that’ll stay current and secure for longer periods of time.

The Motorola Moto G75 5G is its finest effort to date in this respect, with the promise of 5 Android OS upgrades – starting from Android 14 – and 6 years of security updates to boot. While that’s not quite matching the best that Samsung or Google offer on their flagship devices, it’s the best deal going in the price range that the Motorola Moto G75 5G lives in.

Battery

If you skipped past the specifications section of this review, take a wild and crazy guess as to the battery capacity of the Motorola Moto G75 5G.

Go on, guess.

If you guessed 5,000mAh, congratulations, you win a special ART No-Prize. Just like pretty much every other Android phone released in the past few years, the Motorola Moto G75 5G runs with a 5,000mAh power pack and the promise of extensive battery life.

However, as I’ve seen so many times with phones your actual experience of battery endurance can vary a lot. Naturally that’ll depend on the apps you run, but to give this some comparative weighting, I ran the Motorola Moto G75 5G through my standard battery test.

This runs a 1080p YouTube video for up to 3 hours – in the recent past it was only 1 hour, but I’ve extended it out to 3 to give a wider viewpoint – to see how its battery fared. A phone that drops below 90% in that test is likely to struggle to last out a day’s typical usage, I find.

Here’s how the Motorola Moto G75 5G fared:

As a straight up result, 93% gone after the first hour isn’t a bad figure, but clearly other phones have done a little better there at this price point – and battery life is one of those key factors in phone buying decisions, simply because a phone with no power is just a fancy glass-wrapped silicon brick. The Motorola Moto G75 5G at least managed a little better over the three hour test than the competing Moto G55 did – but I could wish for it to be just that little more power efficient.

You do at least get a charger in the box with the Motorola Moto G75 5G to keep it topped up via USB-C, or wireless charging at 15W

Alex note: An earlier version of this review mistakenly missed wireless charging as a feature; the error was mine there.

Motorola Moto G75 5G: Alex’s Verdict

Is the Motorola Moto G75 5G the best of Motorola’s 2024 Moto G crop?

Yes, it is. If you’re a die-hard Motorola fan and want the best that Motorola does within its more affordable family of phones, this will suit you nicely. The commitment to a decent level of OS upgrades, the hardened shell and water resistance of the Moto G75 5G and even (for many) the inclusion of the Moto Buds adds up to really rather good value proposition.

It’s not all flowers and rainbows, of course. The battery life of the Moto G75 5G, while not ostensibly bad is comparatively not as good as some other competing phones in this price bracket. If you’re after more advanced photo features, and especially if you’re happy buying a slightly older handset model, it’s also not that hard to get slightly better cameras on a smartphone for around this price right now.

Motorola Moto G75 5G: Pricing and availability

The Motorola Moto G75 5G retails in Australia for $499

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