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Motorola Moto G55 5G Review
A budget smartphone that stands out in a sea of cheap alternatives
In This Article
Verdict
At £200, the Motorola Moto G55 offers great value for money. Despite its budget focus, it looks great, offers surprisingly solid performance and has enough battery power to last all day and then some. It’s not going to blow your socks off, but it’ll get the job done reliably.
Pros
Cons
Key Features
Introduction
Back with another entry in its double-digit phone line, the Motorola G55 sits somewhere between two other budget releases of this year: theMoto G85andMoto G04.
But with a difference of around £100 across the range, can this middle child stand out on its own, or are the cutbacks and improvements made in all the wrong places?
Design
Motorola is riding 2024 with a uniform design with its Moto handsets. At least in this price bracket. The Moto G55 retains the wide colour selection of the more expensive G85 and keeps the cool eco-friendly leather option that’s a joy to curl your palm around.
The colours may be different (Forest Grey, Smoky Green, Twilight Purple on the G55 and Olive Green, Cobalt Blue, Urban Grey, and Magenta of the pricier G85) but the point remains: there’s a bold pop of colour no matter the choice.
Interestingly, the G55 is the thicker, heavier option here. Turn back the clock a decade and that would have been the norm. Now, we’re back to seeing extra heft mean more power and value as opposed to slimmer devices feeling more premium and future-facing.
Design is where the Moto G55 really shines. You can get your hand around it. It feels substantial. Solid. It’s ready to face the day and you’ll never fret that it isn’t in your pocket. The rounded corners are comfortable, and there’s no curved screen attempting to offer a gimmick that’s sometimes simply irritating.
The added thickness also means there’s room for a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom. Again, a win for turning back time. Right beside that is the USB-C port, microphone, and three-piece speaker grill.
The rear of our device looked to be the Smoky Green leather option. There’s the staple silver Motorola icon slapped right into the middle to break things up, with the same dual-sensor camera array with a dedicated flash in the top-right corner we’ve seen in other budget-focused Motorola phones of late.
The Moto G55 comes in a simple, clean, and thin cardboard box that includes a surprisingly rigid rubber case, cable, SIM tool, and the usual documentation. There’s no charger to go with that cable, but this one will make use of any fast chargers you have lying around. To an extent, anyway.
Screen
The screen is one of the bigger deviations between this and the more expensive G85. Coming in around 0.2 inches smaller, this is largely down the wider chin and lack ofcurvature, keeping the screen-to-body ratio closer to something from half a decade ago now.
Still, this 6.49-inch panel is just as capable. It’s 120Hz, 2400 x 1080, and protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 5. The main difference is the type of panel. It’s anIPS LCDrather than thepOLEDof the G85.
While that does affect things like colour reproduction and black levels, it’s great for viewing angles while still being terrific for anything but ultra-colourful animated flicks or HDR photography.
Though certainly a downgrade over its more expensive brother, the display of the G55 is no slouch. It’s just nothing to get excited about.
While we’re talking visuals, we might as well cover audio, too. Backed up by the earpiece speaker, the single three-grill blaster by the USB-C gets loud.
That isn’t entirely surprising for a budget phone these days. What was surprising is how much character it can kick out.
There’s a level of crispness here that, while certainly not mindblowing, does feel a cut above others in this price bracket. It gets loud without distorting too heavily, and speech-heavy content comes through above any backing music.
There’s real room for improvement. This isn’t some new bar or anything. It’s just a competent speaker at this price range and a breath of fresh air.
If I had to take a guess, I’d give kudos to the slightly thicker and more rigid chassis. That could easily allow for its more full-bodied sound compared to the thinner Moto handsets of this year.
Camera
While you lose out on a killer display in this price bracket, you don’t sacrifice in the photography department.
The Moto G55 appears to use the same twin rear camera setup as the G85. Sporting a 50MP main sensor and an 8MP ultrawide snapper, they should cover most day-to-day amateur photography needs.
On the front, things are slightly downgraded, but the 16MP selfie shutter manages to capture some wonderfully clear shots with good background blurring on anyone but fuzzy animals.
You’ll find plenty of built-in beautifying effects, too. And with it being a wide lens, you won’t struggle to fit your friends into frame. There’s even HDR support to help shots pop.
The rear sensors retain the charm of the G85. Capturing energetic subjects is a struggle, but slow or stationary shots retain depth and detail. For example, a puppy craving attention is a hard subject to snap, whereas my more laid-back cat climbing along the garden fence was only slightly annoying.
So long as you’re steady, shots of grouped objects or wide autumn landscapes can look wonderful. This is especially true on the smaller screen.
Avoid the temptation to save at a higher solution. You won’t manage to capture much more detail, but the shots can quickly eat at your storage. Likewise, stick to the 2x zoom. Any higher and things start to look like mosaics or paintings.
The low-light situation is less impressive. It struggled to highlight a cat sleuthing around some overgrowth by a corner store, with the fencing and foliage looking hazy.
All in all, it’s a valiant effort from such a cheap device. Again, action photography isn’t going to cut the mustard. Grabbing memories on a long walk, though? Go for it. Just note that the image stabilization on video can result in an odd strobing effect if you shoot on the move.
Performance
Surprisingly, the Mediatek Dimensity 7025 powering the Moto G55 outperforms the Qualcomm chip in the £300 Moto G85. Our typical benchmark test highlighted single and multi-core performance at around 13% higher than the G85’s Snapdragon equivalent.
This could be down to thermal throttling on the thinner handset, but we can’t confirm.
Still, numbers aren’t everything. In general use, real-world performance feels largely the same between the two outside of time spent saving and processing photos.
On the home screen, you might think things are worse than they are. That’s because the 120Hz screen is set to clock lower depending on the situation. Nip that in the bud and you’ll notice the difference with super smooth scrolling between your app pages.
Competitive 5v5 arena game League of Legends: Wild Rift managed to hold a mighty impressive 120 frames per second, putting that 120Hz panel to great use.
Playing competitively on a £200 handset would have been a pipedream just a few years ago. Open-world titles like Genshin Impact are a no-go, however.
Apps also loaded relatively quickly, with scrolling on ad-heavy news sites through Chrome feeling smooth and responsive.
When grading battery drain with our typical one-hour Netflix test, we did notice some occasional stuttering with an episode of Better Call Saul.
This could suggest the chip struggles to handle high-definition HDR content, but it could also have been caused by the processor conserving what little battery remained. Either way, if smooth video is paramount, keep this in mind.
Software
The Moto G55 has a fair few apps you’ll likely want to remove on receipt. The second page has a top row dedicated to some basic games. You’ll even find Monopoly Go in the app drawer.
The Moto folder on the main screen hides first-party efforts like security hub Moto Secure, digital wellness with Moto Unplugged, and a couple more.
Outside of the unwanted clutter, there’s the usual suite of Google apps ready to go, and not a whole lot else.
Out of the box, it runs Android 14 with a July 2024 security package, with two software upgrades and an additional year of security updates promised by Motorola.
Battery Life
The 5000mAh battery in the Moto G55 matches the capacity of its more expensive counterpart. There’s no sign of wireless charging, and while no charger is included, it will accept up to 30 watts through its TurboPower effort over USB-C.
Hit this mark and you’ll see the Moto G55 fill up by around 30% from 0 in just 15 minutes. Things start to trail off as it closes in on a full cell, but the result is enough to suggest a quick juice-up while you’re in the shower is all you’ll need to see you through a good chunk of your day.
You’ll sacrifice around 7% of that charge by cramming in another one-hour episode of that show you’ve been trying to catch up on for months now, but that’s par for the course.
And if you like to risk starting your day off by risking your competitive ranking, a 30-minute round of League of Legends: Wild Rift can set you back around 5%. It’s a good result, but try both and you’ll have wished you kept it hooked up during breakfast, too.
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Should you buy it?
You want a cheap device with very few compromises
While the camera won’t kickstart your photography career, almost everything else about this £200 handset is shockingly great.
You’re sensitive to slight stuttering or need a quality rear shooter
A mid-range processor on a 120Hz display combined with 8GB of memory leads to occasional stuttering if you push it too far.
Final Thoughts
At £200, the Motorola Moto G55 represents another terrific value proposition. With it, Motorola has captured the budget handset market with impressive gusto, with theMoto G04and theMoto G85retailing for £100 difference in either direction.
To complicate matters, the Moto G85 is now old enough to be discounted to the same price. The G85 fares a little better in multitasking and has an arguably better display, but the G55 wins out on battery, speakers, and overall looks. It’s miles ahead of the competition if discounts aren’t taken into account, however.
For most, the Moto G55 is the better bargain. It’s one of thebest cheap phonesaround. It’s miles ahead of theTCL 40R 5G. If we’re to account for hot after-market deals, though, the value proposition of something likeNothing CMF Phone 1can be hard to ignore.
How we test
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry-standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Used as a main phone for around a week
Tested the camera in a variety of conditions and against other similar devices.
Tested and benchmarked using respected industry tests and real-world data
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FAQs
Yes, the thicker build means the Moto G55 features a 3.5mm jack for traditional headphones.
No, the Moto G55 uses an inflexible IPS panel rather than the flexible P=OLED screen you’ll find in the Moto G85.
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Josh studied Computer Programming and Repair during his college years. Now a freelance writer, he covers consumer tech and video games, with a particular expertise in gaming mice.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Why trust our journalism?
Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.
Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
