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All of this, together with that fuzzy display and a single speaker, means that the Moto G9 Power really isn’t well suited to gaming. It’ll run PUBG no higher than Balanced/Medium frame rate, which is just one notch off the lowest rung. It doesn’t look good. One area in which the Moto G9 Power’s camera is notably inferior to the Moto G8 Power’s is with video capture. Thanks to the use of the Snapdragon 662, it can only manage 1080p/30fps video capture, whereas its predecessor could hit 4K/30fps and 1080p/60fps. Software – Typically clean Android experience from Motorola Motorola makes sparing, judicious tweaks here and there, many of which are accumulated in the classy Moto app. Here you can learn about Moto Gesture, which lets you do things like activate the torch with two chop motions, or twist twice to open the camera app. Its large size is also a big benefit for almost all games and apps. Can you do better for the same cost? Yes. Xiaomi sells several phones for similar money with higher resolution displays. The Xiaomi Redmi 9 and Redmi Note 9 have 1080p screens, as does the Realme 6.
The G9 Power lays on 128GB of internal storage, which is a strong provision, if hardly unique for the money. You can expand that amount via a microSD slot too. Attributes present here typical of phones at the price include that photos taken in indoor lighting look soft and desaturated, and right down at pixel level images tend to look either noisy or processed. However, given the price, the Moto G9 Play performs admirably enough. There’s also a 16MP selfie camera, as before, which turns out pretty sharp results as these things go. The first thing you’ll notice about the Moto G9 Plus is that it lives up to the ‘Plus’ part of its name. At 6.81in across the diagonal and with a depth of 9.7mm, you certainly know that all 223g of it is in your hand at any given time. Some will find that kind of heft reassuring – others, probably a bit much. Color is good, just not ultra-saturated even if you use the ‘saturated’ color profile. The Moto G9 Play does not support HDR video but -whisper it -HDR is a bit pointless in phones anyway.Low light photography is very hit and miss, despite the presence of a night mode in the camera settings. Noise creeps in and a lot of detail gets lost, but at the same time we were able to get photos that were just about usable at night – and considering this is one of the cheapest phones around at the moment, that's not bad going at all. If low light shots really matter to you, you're going to have to spend a bit more cash. The competition heats up if you look further afield, to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9. That offers comparable hardware in most respects, but has a Full HD+ screen rather than a 720p one. A PC Mark battery benchmark score of 25hr 44min is around double that of rivals like the Poco X3 NFC. It’s not far off three times better than the likes of the Realme 7.
Its two supplementary cameras are a 2MP macro and a 2MP depth aid for the Portrait mode. As usual, the low-res macro is barely worth using. And the depth aid is so basic it cannot handle challenging scenes, resulting in weird patterns of blurred and non-blurred areas if your subject is complicated or too far away. However, this blinkered focus on extending stamina has left the Moto G9 Power bigger and heavier than before, and with modest performance and a poor screen that doesn’t do media content any favours whatsoever. We recommend using Night Vision for any indoor shots of non-moving subjects, as it more or less fixes the dull and dingy appearance you’d otherwise get. The other cameras? Well, they’re all fairly standard and probably not of much use other than as a novelty when you first unbox the phone. Here’s the same picture of the church above, only this time taken with the ultra-wide lens. A huge amount of detail is lost in the effort to capture a wider scene. This is the same chipset used by the slightly cheaper Moto G9 Play, which we reviewed in September. If you’re craving some sort of indication with what to expect in terms of performance, then rest assured that it should be pretty good for the price, but don’t expect it to blow your mind.
Motorola Moto G9 Power: Everything you need to know
As for the cameras, the Moto G9 Play uses a triple-camera array on the rear. The primary snapper is a 48MP (f/1.7) affair, and this is complemented by a 2MP (f/2.4) macro and a 2MP (f/2.4) depth-sensing unit. Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that the depth sensor actually replaces the Moto G8’s wide-angle camera, which is a bit of a shame. In my view, the option to squeeze more stuff in the frame is more beneficial than any marginal gains achieved by a depth sensor.
In the Geekbench 5 single and multi-core CPU tests, the Moto G9 Power gains a small lead on its predecessor, the Moto G8 Power and outperforms the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 in multi-core processing, as well as the more expensive Galaxy M31. It isn’t quite as good as the Realme 6 in these tests, but the differences between the two won’t really be noticeable for the vast majority of Android users. We’re looking at rough parity between the two generations, with an average Geekbench 5 score of 309 single-core and 1379 multi-core. The Moto G8 Power scored 312 and 1361 respectively.
Android 10 comes as standard on the Moto G9 Power, and while phones are moving onto Android 11 by now, that’s not unusual in the budget sphere.
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