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Interface and reliability
Moto G8 Plus is upgradable to Android 10 and the company is working hard at customizing Google’s latest OS for their phones. Moreover, Moto promises two years of Android updates to users of the G8 Plus.
This is the stock Android too, not a third-party user interface lain over Android, so it's simple yet efficient and easy to use for all customers.
The company has provided a set of Moto Actions features that lets users control the phone with certain gestures and actions. This includes twist to open the camera, chop-chop for flashlight, lift to unlock, to name a few. These added customizations will help users make the most of the phone and are something previous Moto users would be familiar with.
If you're not a Moto phone regular, these gestures may take some getting used to, but there are a select few that are genuinely very useful, like the flashlight shortcut.
On the back of the handset, the rear-mounted fingerprint sensor is just as snappy as you'd hope, which is often the case with physical sensors. The optional face unlocking isn't very quick though, so we'd recommend sticking to the fingerprint unlock for most users.
Movies, music and gaming
In our daily use, the phone was able to handle multitasking and general actions with ease. However, if you’re expecting a great gaming performance from the phone, you’re bound to be disappointed.
The G8 Plus runs PUBG Mobile at low settings by default as anything higher resulted in frame drops and apparent lags. So, if you play games on your phone casually, this might not be a big issue for you, but if you’re thinking of getting a phone for gaming, we’ll strictly advise going a handset that may be able to handle games better.
It would have been great if Moto G8 Plus had a higher RAM version to better manage games and provide a balanced user experience in the long run, sadly the phone just has 4GB of RAM with no option for power users.
Watching content is a little better, and while we would prefer a screen with better colors and brightness, you're not going to be too disappointed with the visuals either.
There's a feature that enhances your gaming and viewing experience though, and that's the dual-speaker setup: it's just great for a phone in this price range. The Dolby Audio speakers make watching videos on the phone truly delightful if you’re coming from any other phone with a single loudspeaker.
The phone has a bigger audio chamber with a smart Power Amplifier which gives that much-needed boost to the audio experience. It also makes listening to music straight through the speakers a viable alternative to using headphones if you can, which is rather rare in a phone at any price point.
Performance and benchmarks
The Moto G8 Plus is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 665 chipset which we’ve seen on a few other mid-range phones. This is paired with an octa-core CPU clocked at up to 2.0GHz and Adreno 610 as the GPU.
The chip also brings in third-generation AI Engine for related tasks and supports Vulkan graphics library which efficiently consumes 20% less power than the previous generation.
The phone has 4GB DDR4 RAM and 64GB storage with an option to expand the storage by upto 512GB via microSD card. It runs on stock Android 9.0 Pie with additional Moto customizations such as Moto Actions and Display.
As we've previously said, we'd like more RAM for a variety of features, but at this price tag 4GB RAM is what we'd expect.
