Solid phone that’s short on… power

A $300 phone that looks like it costs way more, comes packed with flagship-level conveniences, and still nails the basics of an affordable phone — that’s the Moto G Power 2025 in a nutshell. It’s the premium pick in Motorola’s G series lineup this year, and I have to admit, it surprised me with just how much it delivers for the price. But, as with most budget phones, it still carries some familiar compromises that remind you of its place in the smartphone hierarchy.

The first time I pulled the Moto G Power (2025) out of the box, I had to double-check the price tag. Seriously, when did budget phone build quality get so good? The vegan leather back plate may technically be plastic, but it doesn’t feel anything like it.

I’ve seen faux leather backs on budget phones previously, but Motorola’s implementation feels way more premium and is also surprisingly grippy. I never once felt like it was going to slip out of my hands or slide off a table. Bonus points for the smudge and fingerprint resistance too, which keeps it looking clean with minimal effort.

The camera bump, wrapped in the same faux leather, blends seamlessly into the design, giving the phone a polished look. My review unit came in Slate Gray, which is sleek and understated, but if I were buying this for myself, I’d go for the more fun Leaf Green variant.

Another huge win for the 2025 Moto G Power is its dual IP68/69 rating. If IP68 sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the gold standard for water and dust resistance in flagship Android phones, and serves as an assurance that the phone can survive a dunk underwater. But IP69 takes it a step further, meaning the Moto G Power can handle high-pressure water jets, too. We’ve started to see some of 2025’s top premium phones pull off this same trick, such as the OnePlus 13 (and notably not the Galaxy S25 Ultra) — even going so far as to throw it into a dishwasher to prove its durability. I’m not sure why you’d want to wash your phone like dirty dishes, but the takeaway here is that the Moto G Power (2025) is one of the most well-protected budget devices against the elements, which is a massive upgrade over the Moto G Power (2024) which had no IP rating at all.

Motorola has also slapped on a MIL-STD-810 certification, which, in theory, means it’s built to withstand accidental drops and harsh conditions. However, even the cheapest screen protectors and budget cases boast that certification nowadays, so I’d say the certification is about as meaningful as a “weatherproof” jacket from a discount store. It’s nice on paper, but I’m not testing it unless absolutely needed.

What’s actually useful is the Gorilla Glass 5 protection on the front, which is better than most other options at this price and should help keep your screen intact. The frame around the vegan leather back is also plastic, but thankfully, it has a matte finish that doesn’t feel cheap and doesn’t smudge easily.

On the right edge, you’ll find the volume rocker and a capacitive fingerprint scanner that also serves as the power button. The fingerprint reader itself is fast and reliable, but the button placement is a bit too high, making it awkward to reach for anyone with smaller hands. I think that’s partly because this is a pretty big phone.

The flat edges of the frame don’t help much, either. While flat-edge designs are all the rage right now, I miss the days of ergonomic curves. Remember when phones used to fit naturally in your palm instead of digging into it? At almost 210 grams, the Moto G Power isn’t the lightest phone either, which makes the boxy design even more noticeable in everyday use.

Elsewhere, the Moto G Power 2025 supports eSIM in addition to a physical nano-SIM, giving you more flexibility when setting up your carrier. It also comes with NFC, so you can use Google Pay and other contactless payment services — this is not always a given with Moto G phones, so I’m happy to see it here. The SIM tray also supports microSD cards for storage expansion up to 1TB, which is great if you are a media hoarder like me.

And yes, there’s still a 3.5mm headphone jack here. This is worth mentioning because even entry-tier budget phones are starting to ditch it (looking at you, Samsung Galaxy A16 5G).

The Moto G Power 2025 supports wireless charging, and not just a token 5W or 7.5W implementation like some phones do just to tick a box. Motorola has gone all in with 15W wireless charging, which is the same speed you’ll find on the most expensive Samsung flagships of 2025.

That said, I’m still a wired-charging kind of person; it’s just faster and more convenient for my use case. Thankfully, the Moto G Power doesn’t disappoint here either, with support for 30W of wired charging. With Motorola’s TurboPower charger, the Moto G Power can go from 1% to 50% in just about 30 minutes, and after an hour, you’ll be sitting at around 85%. The last 10-15% takes a bit longer, but a full charge from zero to 100% takes about one hour and 25 minutes, which is not too bad. It’s worth noting that Motorola doesn’t include a charger in the box for unlocked models, though some carrier versions do bundle one. Anything over 30W with USB Power Delivery support will do the trick — check out our recommendations if you need one.

A 5,000mAh battery has become the standard for budget phones, and the Moto G Power 2025 delivers exactly as expected. You can easily get a day and a half of moderate to heavy use, if not more. With my usual mix of social media scrolling, camera use, and video watching, I consistently ended my days with plenty of battery left. If you’re a lighter user, you could probably stretch this phone to two full days without much effort.

So, that’s where the “exceeds expectations” part of this phone mostly ends. Now, let’s move on to the things the Moto G Power does… well, let’s just say “okay.” And that brings us to the display.

At 6.8 inches, the Moto G Power (2025)’s display is as big as they come. Whether you’re doomscrolling X, watching Netflix, or playing a game, there’s plenty of real estate to work with. The 1080p resolution ensures that text looks sharp and videos hold up well.

However, the phone uses an IPS LCD panel instead of an AMOLED, so you have to live with some usual LCD trade-offs. The colors and contrast are fine, but they lack the punchiness of an AMOLED panel like those on Samsung’s A series phones. The same goes for the viewing angles, which are mostly adequate, but if you tilt the screen a bit too much, it starts to look much dimmer than it actually is.

The good news is that the screen brightness is actually solid. The phone’s screen can hit 1,000 nits of peak brightness in High Brightness Mode, and I had no trouble using it outdoors in bright sunlight. However, the screen glass itself is quite reflective, which slightly dampens that advantage.

Indoors, though, the display holds its own. I watched a few episodes of Squid Game on Netflix and spent way too much time on YouTube, and the experience was perfectly enjoyable. It’s not going to wow you, but it gets the job done.

Adding to the entertainment factor is the stereo speaker setup. The earpiece doubles as a secondary speaker, and the phone’s speakers sound loud and clear. Of course, you can always choose to plug in wired headphones, and the phone also offers Dolby Atmos tuning for sound, with presets for music, movies, etc.

It’s got the power, but only kind of

You get 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage on the Moto G Power, which is plenty for most users. If you ever need a little extra memory, Motorola’s RAM Boost feature lets you allocate some storage as virtual RAM.
The phone runs on the same Dimensity 6300 chipset as its cheaper sibling, the $200 Moto G 2025, which is a bummer.

For a $300 phone, this chipset feels barely powerful enough. In fact, if you compare its benchmarks to the Moto G Power 2024 with the Dimensity 7020, the CPU performance has actually taken a slight hit.

Numbers aside, how does it actually feel to use? Well, it’s good enough for daily tasks, thanks to the 120Hz refresh rate screen and Motorola’s lightweight UI. The phone doesn’t feel painfully slow, and apps open fairly quickly. Multitasking is fine, but every now and then, you’ll notice a micro stutter or a bit of jank when scrolling or opening a webpage in Chrome.

It’s not a dealbreaker, but when you consider alternatives like the Samsung Galaxy A35 5G, Nothing Phone 2a Plus, or even the Pixel 8a when on sale — all of which offer a lot more power for just a bit more money — it’s hard not to feel like you’re missing out.

Despite the mediocre chipset, the Moto G Power 2025 holds up surprisingly well in gaming. I played multiple rounds of PUBG Mobile, and the phone handled the game at ‘Balanced’ graphics and 40fps pretty consistently. PUBG New State even supports 90fps gameplay, and while the phone couldn’t quite maintain that, it hovered around 70-75fps, which is still quite good for a budget device.

The phone also didn’t show any signs of overheating. Even after 30-plus minutes of gameplay, the back stayed cool, and there was no noticeable thermal throttling.

On the software front, Motorola’s approach is about as close as you can get to stock Android on a non-Pixel phone. The phone runs on Android 15, and the interface is clean and intuitive, with a few helpful extras sprinkled in. The well-known Moto gestures make a return, letting you do things like chop twice to turn on the flashlight or twist the phone to open the camera, and there are a few extra customization options to tweak the UI to your liking.

Where things differ from flagship phones is in the AI department, or rather, the complete lack of it. Motorola hasn’t thrown in any AI-powered tricks here, which isn’t surprising at this price. However, you still get access to Google Gemini, so if you want to use voice commands for cross-app actions — like searching for an event and instantly adding it to your calendar — you can.

Motorola has received a fair amount of criticism over the last few years for loading its budget phones with unnecessary bloatware. The Moto G Power 2025 still comes with a handful of pre-installed games like Solitaire, Block Blast, and Monopoly Go, but you can uninstall all of them immediately. Other than that, I didn’t run into any obtrusive ads or unwanted recommendations. The model you get may vary, however, especially if bought from a carrier.

For support, the Moto G Power 2025 will only receive two major OS upgrades and three years of bimonthly security patches. That’s a welcome improvement over the single-year promise of its predecessor, but still notably worse than what Samsung offers on its budget lineup — even the $200 Galaxy A16 5G is guaranteed six years of security updates. Now, whether you’d actually want to use a phone that’s barely powerful enough in 2025 all the way up to 2030 is debatable. Given how quickly technology advances, I’d say two years of good performance is about all you can realistically expect from such phones anyway, but longer software support would still be nice for peace of mind.

The Moto G Power 2025 supports most sub-6GHz 5G bands, but like many budget phones, it doesn’t support mmWave 5G. That means you won’t get access to the ultra-fast 5G speeds that flagship phones can take advantage of. The bigger omission here is Wi-Fi 6 support. Motorola stuck with Wi-Fi 5 for this phone, which means your Wi-Fi speeds may be noticeably slower compared to a more expensive device on the same network.

To put that into perspective, the Moto G Power was giving me download and upload speeds of around 50Mbps in my home office, while the Wi-Fi 6-enabled Galaxy Z Fold 5 was pulling 200Mbps in the exact same spot.

On the bright side, call quality and network reception were solid. The phone handled T-Mobile’s spotty coverage in the Bay Area about as well as you could expect, and I didn’t run into any dropped calls or unexpected connection issues.

Camera performance is often where the gap between budget and premium phones becomes the most obvious, and that holds true for the Moto G Power 2025. Motorola has put together a respectable camera setup, but don’t expect miracles from it.

The 50MP primary camera, complete with OIS, delivers decent shots in good lighting. The colors are natural, and the dynamic range is handled well, though you’ll notice a lack of finer details and some noise in darker areas if you zoom in too far. But if you’re not pixel-peeping, these photos will look perfectly shareable on social media.

Once the sun goes down, things take a hit. While the built-in Night Sight mode helps reduce noise, it doesn’t really pull in more light or dramatically improve the overall image. The result is that darker shots still look murky and lacking in detail, even when using a longer exposure.

The 8MP ultrawide camera is useful in daylight, but as soon as the lighting gets tricky, you’ll see blurry textures and a loss of clarity.

On the plus side, the phone does well with portrait shots. Skin tones look fairly accurate, and both the rear and front cameras capture decent details when photographing people. Edge detection in portrait mode is solid for the most part, though it struggles with complex backgrounds and objects.

The phone doesn’t have a dedicated macro camera, relying instead on the ultrawide lens for close-up shots. As you might guess, these are only worth taking in great lighting. Video recording is average too, maxing out at 1080p from all cameras and limited to a very basic 30fps. The audio zoom feature is a neat addition — it focuses on the sound coming from the area you’re zooming into, which can be handy in noisy environments.

At the end of the day, the Moto G Power 2025’s camera performance is exactly what you’d expect from a $300 phone. It’s good enough for casual use, but if you’re serious about photography, you can get better phone cameras by spending just a little more.

You can check out more, full-resolution camera samples from the Moto G Power 2025 here.

The Moto G Power nails so many things you’d want in a $300 phone: premium build quality with its soft-touch vegan leather back, a bright 120Hz display, reliable battery life with fast charging. It even surpasses expectations in some areas, such as the luxury of 15W wireless charging and a top-tier IP rating that even the Galaxy S25 Ultra doesn’t have. It’s a phone that can sometimes feel like it’s punching above its weight, offering features you’d typically find in devices twice its price.

But, for a phone with “Power” in its name, it doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of performance. The Dimensity 6300 chipset is adequate for today’s needs, but it leaves me wondering how well this phone will hold up in a year or two. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it is a notable compromise, especially when you start considering superior phones in the $400-$500 range that often get discounted to the Moto G Power’s price bracket.

Motorola made some tough choices here, prioritizing convenience features like waterproofing and wireless charging over raw power. And for some users, that trade-off might be worth it. If you’re someone who wants a well-built, everyday phone that can take a beating and keep going, appreciates the convenience of wireless charging, or just loves the sleek look of that vegan leather back, the Moto G Power is a solid pick. Plus, if you’re the type to upgrade every year or two, the performance limitations (and the matching software update policy restrictions) might not even register on your radar.

If you’re shopping in this price range, the Galaxy A series is worth a look. The Galaxy A35 5G ($299.99 at Amazon) often hits the same price in sales and offers an AMOLED display (hello, punchy colors and deep blacks), a better processor, and Samsung’s industry-leading update commitment. Meanwhile, the Google Pixel 8a ($499 at Amazon) is another phone often discounted to ~$300 and takes things a step beyond for camera performance, has Google’s clean UI and Tensor-powered AI features, and is supported for up to seven years.

On the other hand, if price is your biggest concern, the Galaxy A16 5G ($199.99 at Samsung) could be worth a look. It offers all-day battery life and an AMOLED panel, though it lacks the premium feel, waterproof rating, and wireless charging that makes the Moto G Power stand out.

Overall, the Moto G Power 2025 is a worthy contender in the $300 segment, unless power itself is high on your priority list.