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Battery life
- Features a 3000mAh cell inside with fast charging
- No wireless charging despite glass back on phone
Moto G-series were never battery-focused phones, but it always delivered decent juice for day long use. In fact, Moto has introduced a bigger 4000mAh cell on the G6 Play for those who prefer a high capacity battery.
That said, it still offers a full day of usage from single charge with mild usage. When I put it though aggressive usage, it lasted for around 7 hours without needing a charge. So even with basic usage, you will need to charge it overnight.
I ran a video battery test on the phone where I played a video at maximum brightness for 90 minutes and it came out the other side with 79% of its battery leftover. That's not as good as the Moto G5S that lost 16% of its battery, but it is better than the Moto G5 that lost 22%.
Charging is simple through the USB-C cable at the bottom of the phone and there’s also Motorola’s Turbo Charging feature too. That means if you use the bundled charging brick you’ll get 2-3 hours of backup with only half an hour’s charge.
Moto has done a great job of bundling the Turbo charger in the box, which is quite rare for phones of this range.
Camera
- Dual sensor camera with 12MP and 5MP on the rear
- 5MP shooter is used for depth sensing for Portait mode
- Front facing 8MP shooter
Although, it can hold up pretty well against similarly priced handsets. The camera on Moto G6 isn't the best I've seen in this price segment.
It has a dual camera setup with a 12MP sensor working with a 5MP secondary sensor.
Photos clicked using auto mode look good for social media platforms. But I noticed it getting a little slow while taking a photo. Otherwise, it does a good job at shooting static objects with a calm pair of hands.
The 12MP sensor has an aperture of f/1.8, while the 5MP secondary sensor is f/2.2. The second sensor only becomes useful when you’re using the phone’s Portrait mode.
It would be unfair to expect this to be as impressive as the portrait modes on the iPhone X or the Pixel 2, but as an extra camera feature to play with it’s a commendable addition.
As many of you must know, the portrait mode allows you to focus on foreground and blur the background. It allows selective blur, which means you can select the impact of the effect.
You need to take the photo first, then edit it later with a tool called depth editor.
I faced one issue with the portrait mode at times. It did not focus where I wanted it to, and went on to intelligently focus on subjects it thinks you're trying to shoot. So you end up tapping the main subject until it understands what you want shoot.
The portraits weren't of the best quality in most cases. Don't expect much here, but you can still play around to get some good looking shots at times. In short, this isn't the feature you should buy this phone for.
It has a Blippar-like object recognition feature, that allows you to take photos of objects or places and get information about them. It's Moto's version of Bixby, but it's not as efficient in this case. It does work, but I feel Moto still has a lot of work to do here.
Our UK team tried it with this Pikachu balloon you can see below and it got it spot on recognising it was a Pokemon character called Pikachu and also a balloon version of the character.
On the front of the Moto G6 is a 8MP selfie camera, which I’ve found to be fine for taking shots of faces, but again there’s nothing here that's going to blow you away. There is a filters mode, which overlays Snapchat-like filters such as cat features or bunny ears on your mug, but this is a temperamental feature at the moment, and it takes a long time to process images.
There isn’t a wide-angle lens on the front of the Moto G6, but if you want to fit a group of friends into a selfie there is a way here. It’s called Group Selfie, and works in a similar way to the panorama mode on most phones.
You can record up to 1080p video on the rear camera, and the footage looks just about average.
One feature I did enjoy is the ability to capture slow-motion footage. It’s a basic version of the slow-mo feature I’ve seen on other phones, such as the Xperia XZ2, which can record at 120fps, but while the frame rate is only 60fps here the footage looks good.
Camera samples
