Motorola Moto G22

Well built, great battery life and ships with Android 12 - but forget about 5G or cutting-edge speed

- DAVID NIELD

Motorola has form when it comes to building great smartphones at low prices. TheMoto G22 certainly ticks the latter box, costing only £140 for a fully-featured Android 12 phone, even it’s hard to get excited about a phone with so much evident cost-cutting.

Not that this is obvious at first glance. Though fairly chunky at 8.5mm, the G22’s casing is nicely curved and feels well put together. Unsurprisingly it’s all plastic, but it doesn’t feel flimsy, and both the Cosmic Black and Iceberg Blue finishes have a shimmer effect on the back that adds a touch of class.

Traditionalists will be pleased to see a 3.5mmheadphone socket at the top of the case, with power and volume buttons on the right-hand side and a USB-C port at the bottom. A fingerprint sensor is built into the power button; while we prefer the under-display approach, it functions perfectly well. The case has no IP rating, but Motorola says it’s “water-repellent”.

The screen, however, has obviously been specified to a budget. It’s a 6.5in IPS LCD panel, and while the 720 x 1,600 resolution is reasonably sharp, it’s not especially bright or vibrant; even when you ramp the brightness up to maximum, it can be difficult to read in bright daylight, and videos and photos look drab. On the plus side, it has a refresh rate of 90Hz rather than the old standard of 60Hz.

The camera is a mixed bag, too. You wouldn’t expect a phone at this price to compete with the iPhone 13 Pro, but on paper the hardware looks good: it brings together a quad-lens 50MPwide camera, an 8MP ultrawide lens, a 2MP macro camera, a 2MP depth module and a single-lens 16MP wide selfie camera. Given decent lighting conditions, the Moto G22 produces photos