Moto G85 review in 5 points: Premium features in budget
The Moto G85 5G offers a lot at an affordable price. It’s not like your average G-series device, with some premium specs often seen on a flagship smartphone. Can it become your next daily driver? Here’s our 5-point review.
The Moto G85 5G is a budget-friendly device, launched at a starting price of Rs 17,999. While we expected average performance from the device, we found that it offers a much more premium experience. The Moto G85 5G has a slim design, curved-poled display, impressive camera specs, and long battery life. All these features are very rare to find in a phone under Rs 20,000, especially all of them together in one phone. It seems like Motorola has taken some of the best features from its flagship Moto Edge series and packed them into the Moto G85 5G. Overall, the smartphone exceeds expectations. You can read our detailed review of the Moto G85 5G here. And if you want a quick recap, here’s the Moto G85 5G review in 5 points.
Moto G85 review in 5 points
Design and performance: The Moto G85 5G is surprisingly lightweight and has a slim design. The device has a vegan leather back panel, which offers a good grip and texture. It comes in three-colour options: Olive Green, Urban Grey, and Cobalt Blue. I got the Olive Green variant, and it is stunning.
The rear panel houses the dual-camera setup along with a small flashlight. The only drawback about this design is that the leather back gets dirty quickly, especially around the edges. But this can also be avoided by using the transparent case bundled in the retail box.
The Moto G85 5G features a 6.7-inch pOLED curved-display with a 120Hz refresh rate. It also has a peak brightness of 1600nits and is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 5. The most striking feature of the device is its curved display, similar to the high-end Moto Edge series. The display is so vibrant and bright that it can be used even in direct sunlight.
Display: The Moto G85 is powered by the Snapdragon 6 Gen3 chipset, paired with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. To push its limits, we ran a number of benchmark tests on the device. The test results are in our detailed review, but to summarize, the phone performs well in general.
The device comes with some advanced features of the premium Moto Edge series, including Smart Connect which helps you mirror your phone to another device like a laptop or desktop. The Moto G85 also comes with some utility features like Family Space and Moto Unplugged.
Battery: The smartphone packs a 5,000mAh battery with 33W fast charging support. On a single charge, the Moto G85 can last a full day. The battery capacity is good, but a better charging speed would have been nice. It took me 80 minutes to charge the phone from 0 percent to 100 percent.
Camera: The Moto G85 is the first device in the Moto G-series to feature a Sony LYT-600 sensor with optical image stabilization (OIS). It features a rear dual-camera system with a 50-megapixel camera and an 8-megapixel ultra-wide lens. Photos taken in daylight and nightlight are both bright and vivid. Although the camera produces slightly oversaturated photos, overall the results look good and are Instagram-ready in most cases. But I faced one issue while using the Moto G85: its shutter speed is slow.
The front camera is 32-megapixels, which promises high-quality self-portraits and video calls. You can check out camera samples in our detailed review of the Moto G85 5G.
Decision: Being a smartphone under Rs 20,000, the Moto G85 offers great features and great performance. The smartphone has a beautiful, curved display, which is extremely rare in this price segment. If you are looking for a budget-friendly device that offers a premium look and feel, then the Moto G85 is the right choice for you.
