Motorola G31 4/64GB - Mineral Grey

Product Information

It would be nice here as the faster refresh makes using the phone smoother, especially when scrolling and gaming, but it seems Motorola has focused on photography instead. The main rival around this price with a 90Hz screen is the Xiaomi Redmi 10. Predictably, the main camera is its strongest. For the most part, photos taken in daylight offer natural colors and reasonable dynamic range. At times, the HDR makes things look a little too vibrant, but it's certainly eye-catching. Fellow Motorola phone, the Moto G9 Power, comes in about the same at 311 and 1,371, but it's also older. The phone impresses in terms of battery life, meanwhile. We streamed a video for an hour, with the volume set low and the display at maximum brightness, and the battery level dropped from 100 percent to just 94 percent – that suggests you'll get 16-17 hours in total, which is way above average. In general use the handset held its charge well too, and we think the 5,000mAh battery will get you up to two days of use if you're careful with it. The (wired-only) charging is disappointingly slow though, at only 10W.

Video is limited to 1080p and there’s no stabilisation so don’t buy this phone if you want super smooth clips of your kids running around the garden or such like. Battery Life & Charging Performance is about what I expected. That is to say it’s fine a lot of the time, but there are plenty of instances of the phone lagging – whether it’s loading an app, or something just simply navigating around the homescreens. A few years ago 6.4in would be one of the biggest phones around but is very much the norm now – of course better screen-to-body ratios have helped a lot here, stopping phone chassis also getting too big. Elsewhere, selfies come out fairly well here at least, ensuring this is a camera that's fine if nothing special. Elsewhere, there are a few downgrades. The 2MP depth sensor has been dropped, and we’re left with a triple-camera array consisting of a 50MP main camera (down from 64MP), an 8MP wide sensor and a 2MP macro lens.You don't get the very latest Android 12 with this handset, but the one before it, Android 11 – and there's no indication from Motorola as to when an upgrade might appear. Thankfully there's very little in the way of bloatware and other pre-installed apps (Motorola is usually pretty good in this regard), so when you start up the phone for the first time you're not overwhelmed with a pile of apps you don't need.

Our colorimeter confirms the huge improvement, measuring 92.6% of the sRGB gamut covered with a volume of 93.5% and an average Delta E (colour variance) score of 1.46. That means you’re getting a tonally accurate screen for the price, and as it’s OLED you’re also getting infinite contrast, which IPS can’t beat. It’s also over 100cd/m² brighter, at 440cd/m² – which isn’t always what you’d expect from a switch to OLED. Display quality is too good and colour combination is too much better than other mobile in this price segment @-****🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩 Other specs are reasonable across the board if you don’t need things like 5G. You get dual-band Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, GPS and the aforementioned fingerprint scanner. There’s also Dual-SIM if you need it but one will take up the microSD card slot. Cameras We noticed that the device did get slightly warm in the underbelly while playing games though it must be said that only extensive use would tell us if this was just a blip or is part of its performance. The utlra-wide should come in useful but there’s a natural drop in detail. The biggest surprise is that the macro camera is actually very good a lot of time. As mentioned, these are typically slapped on to up the sensor count and the vast majority of the time are trash.In low light and at night, the Moto G31 tries its best, but it's here that the shortcomings of the rear camera really start to appear. It is possible to get okay-looking photos in dim light – actually quite an achievement at the budget end of the smartphone market – but they're blurred and fuzzy a lot of the time. As you can see from the Pixel 6 Pro comparison shot in the gallery above, if phone photography is important to you (especially in low light) then you might want to consider getting a more expensive handset. The Moto G31 has a battery of 5,000mAh, which means it lasts a good couple of days without too much trouble, unless you're using it a lot. When weighing up the best phones or the best Android phones, price is the key factor that everything else is judged by. Sure, the iPhone 13 beats the Moto G31 in just about every area, but this Motorola model is also a fraction of the price of Apple's flagship device.