Motorola Moto G85 Review: Still the budget king

Motorola’s Moto G85 takes what was great about the Moto G84 and makes it even better… mostly.

Pros	Cons
Very nice design for the money	Only a minor improvement in performance
eSIM and NFC capable	Cameras are still only average
In-display fingerprint sensor works well	Only one Android OS update!

Score: 4/5

	Buy The Motorola Moto G85!	Buy On Amazon

In this review

Moto G85 5G Specifications
Moto G85 5G Design
Moto G85 5G Camera
Moto G85 5G Performance
Moto G85 5G Battery
Moto G85 5G Conclusion

Motorola’s G series phones have long been its value play, and also pretty much my go-to when considering and comparing budget value. If you’ve got a phone in the budget space – typically under $500 AUD – then I’ll probably consider what it’s like relative to what Motorola does in that area, because much of its wide product line is quite good.

The Motorola Moto G85 continues the trend of Motorola’s “top” tier of budget phones offering good overall value, though this year’s implementation is more around the redesigned look of the phone rather than a huge boost in performance per se. The Motorola Moto G85 is one of the best phones in its price range, though I do wish Motorola could work out providing more OS upgrades for its budget phones, as it’s an area where it’s falling badly behind its competition.

Design

Over its many iterations, the Moto G line has largely relied on quite plain designs that match up to their budget positioning. If you want fancy, that costs extra.

Clearly nobody told the Motorola Moto G85 5G’s design team this truth, because it’s a big step up from last year’s Motorola Moto G84, borrowing the essential style of Motorola’s much pricier Motorola Edge phones with a sleek curved screen design.

Curved screens are something of a divisive design choice, with some folks absolutely adoring them while others find them troublesome in the extreme. I sit somewhere in the middle there, but for the Motorola Moto G85, it adds a design style that you wouldn’t typically expect to find in a $399 phone.

The display on the Motorola Moto G85 is a 6.7 inch 2400x1080 pixel 120Hz capable pOLED, a little larger than last year’s phone with its 6.5 inch screen. At 161.91 x 73.06 x 7.59 mm it’s nearly the same size, however, a testament to the smaller bezels on the Motorola Moto G85. At the sides you’ll find the power button and volume control, while the SIM card tray/microSD tray sits at the bottom, next to USB-C power.

The one omission that was in last year’s model is that the Motorola Moto G85 lacks a 3.5mm headphone jack. That’s quite common for mid-range and especially flagship phones, but the budget space is one where I’d typically expect to see cabled headphone options.

While Motorola has started to offer proper water resistance in some of its more premium phones, you won’t find any IP-rated water or dust resistance in play here, just a claim that the Moto G85 is ‘water repellent’. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, most phones are water repellent to at least some degree, otherwise they’d be sold as sponges. Be careful with the Motorola Moto G85 around water, in other words, because it isn’t particularly protected against it.

The Motorola Moto G85 sells in three different colour choices in Australia, with Olive Green, Cobalt Blue or Urban Grey to pick from. It appears that there is a fourth colour, Magenta, but we don’t see that here.

Olive Green and Cobalt Blue come with (shudder) Vegan Leather backs (AKA soft plastic that personally makes something in me shudder, yes, that’s totally personal, deal with it), while the Urban Grey as tested has a more standard slick PMMA (Polymethyl Methacrylate) plastic finish. Not that Vegan Leather isn’t plastic anyway, but I digress… and especially so as the use of Vegan Leather for once is one that shouldn’t have bothered me, because the Motorola Moto G85 ships with a case already installed in the box. I’d literally never have to touch the back unless I was swapping out SIM or microSD cards.

Camera

Budget phones don’t have great cameras, because if they did, they wouldn’t be budget phones. It’s absolutely the area where phone makers cut back on performance, sometimes through lenses and sensors, and sometimes as a result of the underlying processors. Either way, stepping into the world of budget phones involves seriously tempering your expectations, and then some.

The change for the Motorola Moto G85 from its predecessor is a bump up to a 32MP selfie camera, up from the 16MP model on the G84, while at the rear you’re using a 50MP wide lens and 8MP ultra-wide 118° secondary lens.

The selfie camera is fine, but it’s absolutely in line with what I’d expect at this price point.

Who is this man, and why is he currently tired and thirsty? Donate now to help buy him a coffee.

Results are likewise fair rather than great whether you're shooting wide, ultra-wide or using the ultra-wide lens as a macro lens, though there the results tend more towards the mediocre.

I took a LOT of photos of this bee. This is the best one, which tells you everything you need to know about the Moto G85's macro mode.

The choice of lenses does leave you without a direct telephoto option, though Motorola does allow for digital zoom.

A quick word of advice here if you’re thinking of using the Motorola Moto G85’s cameras for any kind of zoom work.

Don’t.

Even a 2x shot can be a stretch for the Moto G85.

Even with the camera’s default 2x zoom the results quickly show their limitations, and it only gets worse if you push out to the maximum of 10x.

There's a bird in there somewhere. I think it's the white splotch, but it could equally be the tree-looking bit for all I can tell.

Again to be fair, it’s not as though actual telephoto exists at these kinds of price points, but still, I was left wanting if I shot with just about anything but the primary lens.

My cat Nyssa is not impressed with her photo (and she's usually quite photogenic.)

Even there, results were ordinary, and that’s precisely the issue I had with last year’s Motorola Moto G84 too. It’s not a bad camera, but it’s certainly not a good one either.

This shot looks darker than the room it was shot in actually was. Like so many budget phones, the Moto G85 isn't a low light star.

As they say, the best camera is the one that you’ve got with you, and in ideal situations the best you can expect from the Motorola Moto G85’s cameras are shots that are acceptable. In any kind of challenging light or faster moving situation, you’re probably going to have to take multiple shots to even reach the level of fine.

Performance

The recipe for last year’s Moto G84 was to match up a Snapdragon 695 with an impressive 12GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. Motorola’s retained the RAM and storage, but it’s bumped the processor up to a Snapdragon 6s Gen 3, a considerably newer processor choice.

It may be newer, but the bump here in benchmarked performance terms isn’t substantial at either CPU or GPU level. Here’s how the Motorola Moto G85 compares against its predecessor and comparably priced phones (at the time of writing) using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

A little better there, and the 12GB of RAM will give it headroom for multiple or misbehaving apps without becoming too sluggish, relative again to its price point.

It’s much the same story if we consider GPU performance, not surprisingly given that both the Motorola Moto G85 and Motorola Moto G84 use the same Adreno 619 GPU:

In network terms, the Motorola Moto G85 is a 5G (sub-6Ghz) phone with support for a single Nano-SIM, though its SIM tray is double sided to allow for microSD expansion. That’s not where your networking story finishes out, however, because the Motorola Moto G85 5G is also eSIM capable, making it a good match for those who like virtual SIMs – and especially travellers, because there’s a huge array of travel eSIMs available that make it a cinch to keep your existing SIM in place when you go overseas.

The Motorola Moto G85 is also NFC capable – that’s not assured at this kind of price point – so it should be good to go for contactless payments via Google Pay as well.

Motorola keeps matters light in terms of its own launcher on top of Android 14, with the typical “Moto Actions” – chopping twice to enable the flashlight, for example, or twisting to enable the camera quickly – present and correct. I’m a big fan of keeping it simple with Android, because it makes it easier to then customise it to your tastes, rather than taking over and making it look just the one specific way.

I’m not a fan of Motorola by default installing a selection of apps I “might like” on the device – the ever-present Booking.com app for example – but at least I can delete them, and there’s plenty in this space that install a whole lot more than Motorola does.

One aspect of the Motorola Moto G84 5G that actively disappointed me was Motorola’s decision to ship that phone offering only one single Android OS upgrade. Sadly, nothing’s changed in the Motorola budget space, because that’s all the Motorola Moto G85 5G is going to see as well. You do get three years of security updates, delivered every two months, which is welcome, but seriously, Motorola, your competition is doing more in this space.

Right now if you’re happy to spend just a little more, you could score a Samsung Galaxy A35, a phone that comes with four years of Android updates. Do better, Motorola – and soon.

Battery

Thinner phones of late have meant smaller batteries, but Motorola keeps it simple with a 5,000mAh battery inside the Motorola Moto G85’s sealed body. Recharging is via USB-C with a supplied 33W charger in the box.

What does this equate to in battery life terms? As always battery life is relative to your usage – I can send any phone ever made flat within a day if I work at it enough – but using my YouTube rundown test, the Motorola Moto G85 5G performed well, if not ahead of its particular pack. Here’s how it compared:

While the Oppo and TCL phones there do ever so slightly edge out the Motorola phones, it’s worth noting that the TCL 40 NXTPaper score there is with that phone in its “NXTPaper” screen mode; switching to regular LCD mode saw its battery life drop to 93%.

In any case, you shouldn’t have too many issues with the Motorola Moto G85 lasting through a regular day’s usage before needing to be plugged in.

Motorola Moto G85 5G: Alex’s Verdict

The biggest and most profound changes in this year’s iteration of the top of the Moto G family tree are the visual design ones, bringing it ever closer to Motorola’s more premium Edge series of phones. As always, there’s not much of a reason to upgrade if you’re an existing Motorola Moto G84 user, especially given that there’s no shift in Motorola’s long-term OS support to be found here.

However, in the $350-$450 price space, the Motorola Moto G85 5G still does stand out as a very good value handset. It’s got the typical camera issues of a phone at that price space – but no better or worse than most, really – but the inclusion of 12GB of RAM, flexibility around microSD expansion and light launcher on top of basic Android, along with solid battery life make this a worthy purchase option.