Motorola Moto G6

Moto G6 is a budget handset that has the Moto badge attached to it. Priced at Rs. 8,596, Moto G6 comes with some efficient budget settings but fails to match up with the competition it comes in.

The Moto G6 has a good battery and design, but it falters in its cameras and processing speed. While it does have the trusty Moto logo to it, the phone is a difficult recommendation to make since there are much better competitors present in the market.

The Moto G6 comes with a metal and glass body. It’s quite sleek and has a polished metal mid-frame. The phone is not quite slim though at 8.3mm, but it is quite lightweight at 167g. Overall, it is quite robust.  The phone is easy to hold due to its rounded edges. Even dropping the phone does not dent it much. However, it does get some scratches. The phone has opted for Gorilla Glass 3 and not the latest 4 or 5, but it protects the phone well. However, it is slippery and tends to get fingerprint scratches easily. The phone has a snappy pill-shaped fingerprint sensor which is small but is quite ergonomic. The sensor is quite accurate too. The right side of the phone has a volume rocker and power button. On the bottom, it, fortunately, comes with a USB Type-C port along with a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

Moto G6 arrives with an attractive but slowly getting-dated 18:9 display. It is a 5.7-inch HD+ IPS panel with an 18:9 aspect ratio. The colours are quite accurate and popping, but the sunlight legibility is not very good. It is mostly mediocre even at high brightness, and harsh sunlight makes it worse. There is an on-display feature which keeps the phone on all the time. It also carries a blue light filter to tamp down on the blue emissions.

The Moto G6 arrives with a Snapdragon 450 processor, which is quite low-tier but similar to what can be found in Honor 7C and Redmi 5. It is paired with 3GB or 4GB RAM. The phone does stutter at times, and there are a few lags present, but that happens when we are playing games like Asphalt 8. However, the overall gameplay is smooth.  Intensive tasks can make the phone heat a little and make it enter the slow-down mode. It gets 3282 points on Geekbench, which is okay for a budget offering. The Moto G6 has inaccurate facial recognition as it can falter in unfavourable lighting.

The Moto G6 comes with a dual-camera set-up with a 12MP primary camera and 5MP secondary camera. For selfies, it comes with a 16 MP camera. The camera app has a Text scanner tool to convert the image of a text to actual text and Spot Color feature that lets users retain the colour of one object while the rest becomes monochrome. These are nifty features, but the Spot Color is a bit buggy. In daylight, the photos do not preserve outstanding details, and the dynamic range is mediocre. Portrait mode is weak in detecting the edges around the objects. The blur effect is not maintained correctly. Nighttime shots tend to be muddy and very poor. Sometimes, the camera over-processes the images to control the noise.  In the front, the selfies are quite good in daylight but struggle again with inadequate light conditions. The phone can capture about 1080 p videos, and the EIS makes it easy to hold and keep it stable. However, the details are not well-rounded.

The Moto G6 comes with a non-removable 3,000mAh battery which tends to support quick-charging. However, the battery is not very good as it was able to get only 8 hours and 40 minutes while running an HD video on loop. However, it can last for a whole day with light to moderate use. Plus, fast charging helps it go from 0-100% within one and a half hours. During charging the phone gets very hot and can be quite challenging to hold as well.

The Moto G6 has a great design and has a decent performance. But it is not a well-rounded phone. While the display can impress you, it is not well-suited for bright conditions. The cameras are quite average, and face recognition is inaccurate. The Moto G6 competes with Redmi Note 5 Pro and Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1, but both pack more power than G6 and makes it more value-for-money. A Moto Fan will be slightly disappointed with the G6, but in terms of basic functionality, it still does a decent job.