Motorola’s $179 Moto G04 reviewed

Phones are coming down in price, and the $170 Moto G04 is proof of that. Armed with a big screen, big battery, and NFC, it could be some of the best value around. Is it a budget winner?

There’s certainly no shortage of phones packing in quality features in the high-end, and the same is true of the mid-range, but what happens if you want to spend less? Not just a little less, but far less.

What about if you’re looking to spend less than $200 on a phone? That sort of thing is possible more than ever these days, and you may be surprised with what you find, as seen with Motorola’s latest cut-price phone, the Moto G04.

Design

A simple inoffensive design starts the G04 off, with a plastic body in a softened rectangular design, complete with a mostly flat camera bump on the back.

The look isn’t premium, but it’s definitely minimalist, as Motorola offers simplicity to start, ideal for folks looking for a phone that looks nice and won’t cost the proverbial arm or leg.

Features

Inside that minimalist design, the specs are equally minimalist, but given the budget price tag, that’s the way it probably should be.

A Unisoc T606 processor sits at the heart of this phone, paired with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage, some of which you can use for supporting the memory if you want. There’s also a microSD storage slot to expand that if need be, and Android 14 on the phone out of the box.

The back sees a 16 megapixel rear camera set to F2.2 accompanied by a flash, while the front gets a 5 megapixel F2.2 selfie camera, with that limited number of cameras joined by a modest amount of connections, covering WiFi 5 (802.11ac), Bluetooth 5, Near-Field Communication (NFC), GPS, and 4G, while wired is handled by a Type C USB port and a 3.5mm headset jack. There’s also a single speaker with support for virtualised Dolby Atmos.

Aside for the front-facing camera, all of this sits underneath a 6.6 inch 1612×720 HD+ LCD screen running at 90Hz, encased in a plastic body with volume buttons and a fingerprint sensor-equipped power button on the right edge.

The Moto G04 comes equipped with a 5000mAh battery that can only be charged using a cable. There’s no wireless charging here, folks.

In-use

Switch the phone on with the power button on the side, and bring it back from standby with a fingerprint sensor underneath that power button, and you more or less have the “how” when it comes to using this phone.

Android can be on-screen buttons or gestures — we chose the latter — and everything is largely how you can imagine using a modern smartphone to be.

We didn’t find Motorola’s extras in there, and couldn’t shake the phone to launch the camera, but otherwise it’s pretty much standard Android, save for the lag.

You will find slowdowns and lag, often when you’re trying to load several apps, or even just bring up the keyboard. It’s not an all the time thing, but it happened more than we would have liked, and meant the immediacy of modern phones wasn’t quite here.

Performance

Performance doesn’t help the usability of this phone, largely because the combination of parts can be sluggish. It can also totally be fine at times, but lag and slowdowns are commonplace.

The benchmarks give that away, with some of the lowest scores for a phone in a while. Between Unisoc’s chip and the 4GB RAM (which can be “boosted” using storage), the system isn’t exactly fast. Lag is common, typically across multiple apps.

This is a phone you need to be patient with, that’s for sure.

Outside of the system, the 4G handles acceptably, with speeds as high as 133Mbps in our tests on the Telstra network by way of Mate in Sydney, Australia.

Overall, the performance is what we expect from a sub-$200 phone. So what’s the camera like?

Camera

A single 16 megapixel camera is never going to be amazing fare, but it’s one of the sacrifices with a budget phone. At least it’s more than 5 or 8 megapixels, so that’s something.

As noted by the label on the back of the G04, your single camera is “AI-assisted” in the G04, but that’s basically just the portrait mode doing what Google’s camera does best and finding ways to blur the background.

There’s not a lot of AI support from what we could see, with the performance getting in the way with the camera at times, too.

Remember that comment we’ve made about being patient for the performance? You’ll need it for the camera, too.

We found that while the G04 can fire a shot easily, often it doesn’t. Quite a lot of the time, the camera will fire a half second after you’ve pressed the button, whether you’ve pressed the on-screen shutter or triggered it using the volume keys on the camera. As a result, sometimes our shots were blurry, or other times, the results were delayed.

Lag isn’t present for everything — sometimes, the camera just works! — but it’s a regular occurrence, and indicative of a low-end phone.

In terms of image quality, the result is acceptable, but also not stunningly amazing. We’re not going to get in a megapixel argument — 16 megapixels is totally fine — but the sensor isn’t amazeballs, either.

You’ll find some fine colour shots in daylight provided you’re patient and don’t move the camera too quickly. They’re not typically the sharpest shots, but they’ll be fine for social and sharing, and maybe the odd print-out.

There’s also support for background de-focused portraits — again, be patient — while low-light shots are the weakest part of the package, grainy and blurry pretty much every time.

The 5 megapixel camera up front isn’t much better, but at least there’s something to let you capture selfies, provided you don’t move the camera too much in the process.

Battery

Even the battery feels a little under where it should be, with the 5000mAh inside not quite hitting the two days we expected, and instead tapping out around the 1.5 day mark.

Watching the battery drop, we suspect this has to do with the Unisoc processor inside just not having the power optimisations other chipmakers have worked on for some time. Overnight, a drop of around 10 percent while doing absolutely nothing and having the screen off seems largely out of kilter for phones, especially models we’ve reviewed recently, and yet this phone did it.

In our tests, we found the Moto G04 could last around three hours of screen time or 1.5 days of battery usage, whichever came first. That’s not exactly admirable, but suitable given the price tag.

Value

The one part that helps lessen the blow of a meh battery, meh camera, and equally meh performance is the value: the Moto G04 has a stunning price for an Android phone with NFC.

Priced at $179 in Australia for an outright phone — or $149 for a Telstra-locked prepaid phone — the G04 is a crazy price for a big phone with support for mobile payments. We’ve not seen that before.

We see plenty of budget phones without NFC, the tech needed for smart wallets using Google Pay (and pretty much every other payment technology these days), but never any with it for this price.

That’s a win, and will be for folks looking for something big and capable for today’s world.

What needs work?

Before we get stuck into what needs work, it’s worth remembering that the Moto G04 is a budget phone. It’s not even in the mid-range.

This is one of those phones that is meant to be inexpensive. It is the very definition of cheap and cheerful, and that’s ok. It is totally fine for any manufacturer to lose the bells and whistles to produce something that comes in at a bargain basement price.

At $179, the G04 is pretty much nailing that bargain basement price, though it does arrive with some obvious compromises. We’ll recap:

• Performance: The performance is a little slow and could be faster. You need to be patient with this phone.
• Camera: The camera is slow to fire, there’s only one, and the results aren’t spectacular. They’ll definitely work, but it’s not an amazeballs camera set, to say the least.
• Screen: A big 6.6 inch 90Hz screen is nice, but the resolution is HD+ only, so you’ll see pixels if you look.
• Battery: The battery could also be better, too. We’ve seen budget phones hit two days of life, while this one will most likely fall short of that, achieving 1.5 days of life or three hours of screen time, whichever comes first.

There’s one other compromise, which we’ve not seen a company be so public about in the past: the Moto G04 is locked to Android 14, and will never see an update to any Android version ever again.

That’s something Motorola talked about when it released the G04, which came as a bit of a surprise, largely because companies so far haven’t said the quiet part out loud.

Outside of Apple and Google, phone updates aren’t typically an on-time thing, and may take a few months to a year, though some never see updates. Depending on the price, some budget and mid-range Android models just stay locked, either because the manufacturer is still working on the release, or just doesn’t have plans for an update and isn’t talking about it.

Motorola is being a little more direct with the G04 by saying it will receive no further Android updates, which means the AI features coming to Android 15 will never come to the Moto G04. You’ll still get security updates, just not big feature updates.

For many, this won’t be an issue. Again, this is the quiet part out loud. But it’s still worth being aware of that for Motorola, this phone will be locked in time. Android 14 is a great OS to be locked in time with, but it’s still a negative as owners aren’t likely to get any new features over time, something the smartphone world has opened up.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

It’s worth keeping in mind that the Moto G04 is a sub-$200 phone, and they typically have compromises. You sacrifice something for the price, and in this case, it’s the performance, camera, display quality, and a little on the battery life, too.

The upside, however, is you get a feature almost every budget phone misses out on: NFC.

You can use Google Pay on the Moto G04, and we’ve not seen that on a budget phone before. It’s high time this happened, and this useful technology for a cash-free world trickled down to a lower price point. You’ll find it here on the G04, and we used it several times just to prove it worked. We wished NFC was on so many others budget phones.

Of course, that great feature seems to come with the caveat of performance hiccups and no phone updates, but for some, neither will matter terribly. If you can be patient, the Moto G04 is a totally acceptable phone, especially if you’re looking to spend less.