Battery life is certainly above average as the chart below shows, but as you might expect it’s not quite as impressive as the phenomenal stamina of the Moto G9 Power with its extra 1,000mAh of battery capacity and lower resolution screen. 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.

The Moto G9 Play has three rear cameras but this feels like a single-camera phone because you only get one field of view. There’s no zoom, no ultra-wide. The Moto G9 Play also has a water repellent ‘nano’ coating under its rear shell. This doesn’t mean you should start dunking the phone in water, but it does mean it is better prepared for the elements than a lot of cheap phones. DisplayFor the stat nerds out there, the Moto G9 Play’s bonus cameras use f/2.4 OmniVision OV02B sensors. And the main one is a 48MP f/1.7 Samsung GM1, used in a great many cheap phones including the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 and TCL 10L. 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. To put that in perspective, the Moto G9 Power lasted four and a half hours longer than the Moto G8 Power under the same conditions and I didn’t have any issues in squeezing out more than two days of use while testing. When I took the phone out and about to do my usual array of camera tests, the battery level indicator fell a mere 4%. Motorola Moto G9 Power review: Cameras There's really only one selling point when it comes to the screen on the Moto G9 Power, and that's the size of it – which is sort of negated by the low 720p resolution.

Flip it over, and it’s plastic all the way, though Motorola has gone for an extremely reflective metal look, which reminds me of the dazzling sheen of the HTC U11. In our case, this was a royal blue, but it’s also available in ‘blush gold’ if you like your phones on the shiny side. The glistening surface means that the Motorola ‘M’ logo is barely visible, but there’s no hiding the curved rectangle of the camera bump in the top left-hand corner, which houses four lenses and a flash. Like the Moto G8, camera performance is a bit of a mixed bag. The Moto G9 Play’s main camera takes 12-megapixel still images (via a process called pixel binning) and, as far as I could tell, there’s no option to take a full 48MP image. Provided you’re graced with plenty of light, still images look quite lovely for the price, with a decent amount of detail and clean, neutral-looking colours.

A repackaged Moto G9 for Europe, the Moto G9 Play is much the same as the G8, with a few changes and a slightly cheaper price

At 6000 mAh, this is Motorola’s biggest battery ever, and certainly the biggest I’ve ever seen in a phone. The Moto G8 Power, by contrast, weighed in with a relatively wimpy 5000 mAh cell.

Asphalt 9’s frame rate is inconsistent, which it is on most affordable phones, and it doesn’t look as pretty as it might on a higher-end mobile, but it’s still fun. This is the same chipset used by the slightly cheaper Moto G9 Play, which we reviewed in September 2020 and there are no surprises when it comes to final benchmarking figures. My conclusions are the same too: performance is rather good for the price but don’t expect it to blow your mind. Motorola’s ceaseless smartphone release schedule continues at pace. Undeterred by the global pandemic, Motorola’s factories are still churning out as many smartphones as the firm can possibly muster, and the third (and supposedly final) phone in the Moto G9 family has arrived before the year finally comes to a close. This phone is miles better than the Nokia 3.4 we reviewed recently, bringing up the performance to a level we’re happy with. And you get more for your cash here than from a Samsung Galaxy A21s. The front camera has an 8MP f/2.2 sensor that seems to smear fine detail in anything less than good lighting. But we think it’s a perfectly acceptable selfie camera at this level. The Moto G9 Play also has a Portrait mode for selfies, which is a lovely touch.In true night time conditions, however, Night Vision isn’t much cop. Sure, it brightens things up significantly, but everything looks blurry and indistinct, like the phone is unable to compensate for natural hand movements. Which, given that there’s no OIS, is probably the case. Even when you do manage to keep your hands nice and still, a huge amount of noise invades night time scenes. It scores 1,376 in Geekbench 5, far better than the ~900 you’d see from the Moto G8 Play. This phone uses the same processor as the step-up Moto G9 Power. The Moto G9 Play has an entry-level camera overall then, but with a little know-how you can tease some pleasant photos from it.