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Moto G7 Play battery
- 3,000mAh battery
- Excellent battery life
- Power optimization settings
The Moto G7’s battery capacity is ample given the 5.7-inch screen size combined with mid-range internals.
The phone easily made it through a day and a half or so or moderate use. Meanwhile, 90 minutes of full-brightness Full HD video playback drained it by 14%.
That’s impressive, and means the Moto G7 Play can comfortably double up as a portable media player for flights and weekends away.
Motorola also gives you a huge amount of control over how your battery gets used, with Power Saving modes available, as well as easy-to-access toggles for connectivity.
There’s none of Motorola’s proprietary Turbo Charging on here. In fact, it takes over 2hrs for the Moto G7 Play to juice up from 0-100% using the supplied charger, so it’s definitely one for overnight plug-ins when possible.
If you’re in a hurry, you can, however, invest in a fast charger which should shave a bit of time off.
Moto G7 Play camera
- 13MP single camera
- Excellent range of shooting modes
- 8MP selfie camera
Motorola's G7 Play camera features a 13-megapixel sensor paired with a f/2 lens. While there aren’t any fancy hardware features like OIS or dual-cameras, the software goes some way to make up for it.
Dip into the settings to reveal a manual mode - and we mean full manual mode, not the semi-automatic modes on entry level Nokia phones.
There are also a range of fun shooting modes like Spot Color, which grabbed our attention, as too did the inclusion of 4K video - a really interesting choice that’s been omitted from the G7 Play, though we’re not sure why.
As for image quality, it’s the age-old story of entry-level phones with big pixel counts when it comes to pictures taken on this phone - good in great light, bad in bad light. Having said that, the Play is more nuanced than most.
Specifically, the touch to focus also meters the shot based on the focus point, and it’s aggressive. Tap on a dark area - everything gets very bright and vice versa. Black cats for example totally throw the G7’s camera off - there's an example in the gallery below, skip to the fourth and fifth picture:
Fortunately, the saving grace comes in the form of an exposure slider on the right side of the viewfinder. Here you can compensate and make everything look much, much better.
Dynamic range is mediocre, though you can fire up HDR for bright scenes which works to great effect in good lighting, retaining a good amount of detail tonally and from a clarity point of view. That said, even in good light, blacks can pull up a little noise, which gets progressively worse the lower the lights get - but irrespective of its shortcomings, it’s a good shooter for the price.
This is especially true when you dive into manual mode or play about with Spot Color - which works well about 70% of the time.
The selfie camera is a little on the soft side, but is helped along by a front flash, beauty mode, and it also supports a few manual controls and Spot Color as well.
When shooting video, there’s electric image stabilization to compensate for the lack of OIS, and it does a good job, despite applying a heavy crop factor. What’s excellent about the G7 range is the fact Motorola lets you turn stabilization off when shooting Full HD, getting rid of the crop - perfect for tripod shooting when you want the full view in frame.
It also shoots 4K, which is frankly unheard of for a phone of this price, and results are fair, especially in good lighting and when the phone's in a steady hand.
