Motorola Moto G8 Power (almost) does everything right. Review after a month

It costs less than PLN 1000 and has only one disadvantage, which may discourage you from buying. Motorola Moto G8 Power could be sure.

I have already spent several weeks with the new Motorola Moto G8 Power and although I would love to pick on it, I simply have nothing to do. This is a great phone call. For 999 PLN it is difficult to find anything better, even if we look at the offer of Honor or Xiaomi.

Motorola Moto G8 Power (almost) does everything right.

Let's start with the housing. This, despite the right size and weight (157, 95 x 75.48 x 9.63 mm and 195 g) is fantastic in the hand. In the set with the phone we will also find a silicone case, which makes it easier to accidentally slip the phone out of the holder.

The whole, as befits Motorola, is perfectly folded and very solid. The fingerprint reader on the back is perfectly placed under the index finger and works quickly.

The front of the device looks surprisingly nice too. The frames of the 6.4-inch screen are not excessively thick, and the display itself only disperses the small eye of the front camera - this is no longer the big eye of Sauron, as in the Motorola One Vision / Action / Macro, but a tiny hole that does not disturb anything.

The screen itself is simply correct. The IPS panel has a resolution of 2300 x 1080 px and it is hard to fault anything here. Maybe the brightness is a bit too low and maybe the colors are a bit too pale, but it does not stand out in any way from other displays on this price shelf.

What stands out from the rest of the price on this price shelf are the speakers above and below the screen. Yes, Motorola Moto G8 Power is equipped with stereo speakers, probably the only phone below 1000 PLN.

I can't say that they sound great, but even the weakest stereo speakers are better than most mono speakers. These in Motorola Moto G8 Power play loud, do not overdrive and make at least so much that it is much nicer to watch movies and play games on this phone when the sound flows evenly from both sides of the display.

Strangely enough, I can say the same about the headphone connector. Most manufacturers keep the 3.5mm jack just to make it happen. The quality of the signal emitted by it is already debatable. Motorola Moto G8 Power, in turn, has one of the best-playing headphone connectors, supported by the clever Smart Audio application, developed in cooperation with Dolby.

The application can automatically select sound parameters (for both headphones and speakers), adapting them to the content being played. We can also change the parameters ourselves. A small thing, but it changes the headphone connector on Moto G8 Power from one that only exists to one that is nice to use.

It's also nice to use Motorola software.

Motorola invariably impresses with its implementation of Android. It's the perfect combination of simplicity and transparency of the clean version of the Green Robot - here in version 10 - with very useful Moto additions.

Whenever I test another phone, I miss twisting my wrist twice to launch the camera. I miss the double swipe gesture to turn on the flashlight. What I miss the most is the brilliant implementation of the Always-on display mode, which is unmatched in Motorola.

Each notification can be previewed by touching the appropriate "speech bubble" on the screen off, and in many cases we can also respond to it or react without having to unlock the screen. A small thing, but it noticeably affects how often we reach for the phone.

Combined with the great specification for the price - Snapdragon 665, 4 GB RAM and 64 GB of data space - the system works with exemplary fluidity. I have not found a single case where the Moto G8 Power specification would be insufficient. Maybe you would like a bit higher graphics performance in games, but at this price it's hard to expect a better graphics layout than Adreno 610. It's sufficient.

The battery is more than enough.

The cells used in Moto G8 Power have up to 5000 mAh capacity and are charged with a fast Turbo Power charger. However, we will not reach for the charger too often, because in normal use this phone will easily withstand two days of continuous use, with at least 6-7 hours of screen turned on.

A nice surprise is also the fact that Moto G8 Power does not lose too much energy in standby mode, as does Samsung. Overnight, Motorola lost at most 5-7 percent, which is a survival value and does not worsen active working time.

There are two disappointments at Motorola Moto G8 Power.

The first is the camera. Certainly, it cannot be denied universality, because we have four modules here:

• 16 Mpix with wide angle lens with f / 1.7 brightness
• 8 megapixels with f / 2.4 ultrawide lens
• 8 megapixels with telephoto lens with f / 2.2 brightness
• 2 megapixels with macro lens with f / 2.2 brightness

In the front we have a 16 Mpix camera.

Everything is beautiful, but in practice the Moto G8 Power camera is at the bottom of the definition of the word "average". Sometimes it does not even fall into this definition, presenting results simply miserable.

The colors are muted and the image is unnaturally sharpened, making the details look a bit caricatured at times. The thing is strange, because the camera in Moto G8 Power performs noticeably worse than the one in Motorola One Vision, which now costs the same.

Image quality is one thing, but there is also the issue of camera operation. It's easy to see obvious problems with autofocus, especially in poor lighting conditions. Focus is set very slowly in the case of photos and extremely chaotic in the case of video, which in my opinion removes this phone from attempts at any movie recording.

However, these are issues that can be corrected with the appropriate update and I hope Motorola will do it soon.

It will be difficult to improve the quality of photos after dark, which ... well, let's put it so that after sunset it's a shame to even take the phone out of your pocket.

The front camera for this neither knocks or scare away. It performs as we would expect from a selfie webcam in this price range.

The second disappointment, a bit harder to swallow, is the lack of NFC.

A weak camera phone up to PLN 1,000 can be overcome. When buying a phone from this segment, nobody expects the quality of the top iPhone. No NFC is another matter.

The odd thing is that most Motorola smartphones, even cheaper ones, have NFC. Meanwhile, in Moto G8 Power, the manufacturer decided to castrate the wireless communication module, which, among others we will not pay in the store, which in the era of great popularity Google Pay is a very significant disadvantage.

Representatives of the Polish branch of Motorola during the premiere explained that the company did a survey and according to her recipients value stereo speakers much more than NFC. I do not understand, however, why it was impossible to implement both technologies, even if it would increase the price by PLN 100?

I understand the logic of the creators of this phone, but in Poland, which is one of the most developed countries in the world in terms of digital payments, the lack of NFC on the phone is simply a slap in the face.

And I fully understand that for many buyers this will be an insurmountable minus.

If you can live without NFC - it's hard to find a better phone.

The only device for 1000 PLN that offers a similar level of quality to Motorola Moto G8 Power is Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro. And unfortunately, it wins with Motorola in several respects - even cameras, specifications or having NFC.

Motorola, however, offers stereo speakers, a great-sounding headphone jack and software that is really much nicer to use than any other manufacturer's overlay in this class. Thanks to the powerful battery and great hardware optimization, it also wins in terms of working time on one charge.

The choice, as always, belongs to consumers. If someone does not need NFC to be happy, and after a camera from a phone for 1000 PLN does not expect miracles - it's hard not to be satisfied with Moto G8 Power.

Motorola Moto G8 Power (almost) does everything right. Review after a month