Moto G Power (2026) Review: Almost perfect for the price

Motorola unveiled its latest mid-range smartphone, the Moto G Power 5G, late last year. I got my hands on the phone and put it through its paces. After using it casually for a month, I took it to downtown Toronto to a Raptors game to really test it out in a busy, real-world environment, and honestly, I was thoroughly impressed with the G Power.

Sleek design

To kick things off, let’s talk about the design of the Moto G Power 5G. From the front, the phone looks pretty standard, though it is a bit more rectangular than other devices, which have taken on a more rounded shape. It also has a standard hole-punch camera and decently thin bezels. The screen is also a pretty nice size for my standards, sporting a 6.8″ FHD+ display

The right side of the frame has two separate volume rockers on the top, which I personally love, and a longer power button on the bottom, which also supports the fingerprint scanner. My only problem with that is that I way too often accidentally unlock the phone instead of quickly checking a notification. This is an extremely minor annoyance, but it is still an extra half-second I’d rather not spend locking the device. The left side, however, only sports the SIM card slot. This slot not only supports the SIM, but also a micro SD card slot that can expand storage up to 1TB, which is a huge plus I will definitely be taking advantage of.

Moving onto the back of the device, it has a textured design that honestly looks good in both the dark blue and the sandy-white colours the device comes in. The Moto G Power 5G also has the cameras and flashlight set up in a quad-camera formation in the upper-left-hand corner, which I honestly really like the look of.

Also, as a small note, there is a headphone jack which I have used a fair bit and really appreciate. Thanks, Motorola!

Not always the best performer

One downside I noticed is the device’s horsepower, which is honestly kind of lacking at times. I noticed it mainly when using picture-in-picture mode: the phone would stutter and slow down a fair bit, which became a nuisance.

Speaking of power, I ran a Geekbench 6 benchmark on the G Power. It managed a single-core score of 783 and a multi-core score of 2,093, which is surprisingly way lower than I expected. The day-to-day performance feels pretty good to me, aside from the occasional slowdown.

The Moto G Power sports the MediaTek Dimensity 6300 processor with a 2.4GHz octa-core CPU and an Arm Mali-G57 MC2 GPU. It also comes with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM, which is expandable up to 24GB with RAM boost, which I might consider down the road if I decide to expand the device’s storage.

One thing I do have to give this phone credit for, though, is that it never got hot once while I used it. Even when running video calls for hours with my partner at college, which usually will overheat my Pixel 9 if I’m not careful, the G Power stayed cool.

Picture perfect

To test the cameras, I took the phone to a Toronto Raptors and Philadelphia 76ers basketball game to really test the system out in real-world settings with constantly changing light and sound — and honestly, it performed better than I expected.

The early ‘point and shoot’ photos I took with the phone during the pregame came out way better than I thought. One thing about the device that I noticed from the start, which actually benefited in this scenario, was the automatic colour adjustment. My daily driver (Google Pixel 9) has a similar auto-adjust feature, but the Moto G Power 5G really takes it up a notch. When I first got the device back in December, I really struggled with this and ended up with a lot of oversaturated photos of my cat — although my apartment has a lot of tan in it, so that might have played into it.

After a while, I put my photography skills to the test and was really pleased with what I could achieve in both ‘Normal’ and ‘Pro’ camera settings. For starters, I got a very ‘ambient’ vibe from the photos I took, along with much more detail from the crowd than I expected.

I didn’t use the front camera much, but it was tolerable when I did. Obviously, there are ‘better’ selfie cameras on the market, but for the average user who doesn’t need ‘studio quality’ selfie shots, it’ll do perfectly fine.

The one place where I found the camera setup really struggled was the zoom. When I really tested the camera setup at the Raptors game, I found that the zoom lens was pretty much unusable for photos when I tried to zoom in on the players on the court to get a closer shot. And I wasn’t in the nosebleeds either; I was in the lower bowl, and I still had problems. If I were sitting any higher, it’d be more difficult getting a clear shot.

To show an example, I took a shot of 76ers centre Joel Embiid (above).

Battery life for the ages

My main praise for this phone is the battery life.

During the time I have spent with the Moto G Power 5G, I have mainly used it as my streaming device for work and video calls, as previously mentioned. During all of that usage, the phone’s battery has been absolutely stellar. One day, I was running YouTube for my entire 8-hour workday, and even kept it streaming while I got dinner ready; it never dropped below 70 per cent once.

The device sports a 5,200 mAh battery that I don’t think I have even completely depleted yet. It has been nothing short of great and has been a reliable backup while I have been busy or away from a charger for most of the day.

Worth your money?

I feel like, for $449.99, this is a great budget option for anyone who needs a device for modern-day use, such as scrolling through socials, browsing the internet, and streaming content, without having to stress about battery life.

I have definitely enjoyed my time with the Moto G Power 5G, and I look forward to turning to this device whenever I need a dependable, long-lasting phone.

Canadians can purchase the G Power direct from Motorola for $449.99. At the time of writing, no Canadian carriers had the 2026 G Power available. However, Freedom Mobile still sells the 2025 variant, so it may eventually pick up the 2026 version.