Moto G72 review: welcome back, Motorola

The Motorola company is resuming active work in Ukraine, gradually expanding its line of smartphones, one of the latest additions of which was the Moto G72. The model offers a lot of interesting things for a relatively affordable price tag, so let’s see if it can renew the interest of buyers in the once-legendary series of smartphones.

Moto G72 specifications

Package contents

Despite the tendency of smartphone manufacturers to economize, Motorola offers not only a 33 W charger and a USB-C cable but also a silicone case as part of the smartphone. However, there is no protective film on the smartphone screen.

Design and usability

Moto G72 is a 6.6-inch smartphone with a cutout for the front camera in the center of the screen, made in a thin plastic case.

The back cover of the device is slightly rounded at the edges, and the edges are almost flat, which, together with the matte surface, ensures comfortable use, also due to the relatively small weight of the smartphone, which is only 166 grams.

In general, there is nothing special in the design of the model, you can only highlight a neat, almost square block of cameras that barely protrudes from the body.

Despite the use of plastic, the Moto G72 is very well assembled, the body feels monolithic, and it does not creak or squeeze.

Interestingly, the device even has IP52 certification, meaning it has basic protection against dust and water drops.

Display

The 6.6-inch Moto G72 screen received a P-OLED matrix with a resolution of 2400×1080 pixels, an aspect ratio of 20:9, and a refresh rate of 120 Hz.

For its price category, this is a good set of characteristics, the display itself offers a bright color rendering, which is typical for OLED, however, by default, there is a noticeable deviation towards blue color, so the picture looks quite “cold”. This can be partly corrected in the settings by using the option to adjust the color temperature.

In general, in the screen settings, you can choose from two color rendering options: natural and bright. The first corresponds to the sRGB color space and the second to DCI-P3.

When adjusting the brightness manually, its maximum level reaches a little over 500 nits, while in automatic mode it can go up to 1000 nits. This allows you to comfortably read the display outdoors in bright light. In addition, in the settings, you can enable the option to prevent the screen from flickering at a low brightness level.

Fingerprint scanner

The smartphone is equipped with an optical fingerprint scanner located at the bottom of the display. It’s not too fast, but it’s pretty accurate as long as the user doesn’t try to use it with wet hands. After all, even small drops of water refract light, which is necessary for the sensor to read the papillary lines from the finger. But this is a feature of the technology, not a drawback of the device itself.

Platform and performance

Moto G72 has a 6-nanometer processor Mediatek Helio G99 which has 6 efficiency Cortex-A55 cores with a frequency of 2 GHz and 2 more performance Cortex-A76 cores with a frequency of 2.2 GHz. The Mali-G57 MC2 chip is used for graphics acceleration.

The volume of the smartphone’s RAM is 8 GB, and the built-in data storage reaches 128 GB. The latter can be expanded with microSD memory cards but will have to occupy a second SIM card slot. It is interesting that the RAM can also be increased by 2 GB by allocating this volume from the built-in one.

The Helio G99 processor is slightly faster than the Snapdragon 480, but slower than the 695.

The user can count on comfortable work with the interface and applications of the Android operating system and even games. Including Asphalt 9 on medium graphics settings and Diablo Immortal, as well as less demanding ones like Dead Cells and Goat Simulator.

Given the economical platform, the Moto G72 body practically does not heat up even under high load.

When working in the network of Vodafone operator, the smartphone kept a stable connection, the speaker turned out to be quite loud, and the interlocutors had no problems hearing me during the call. To connect to your home network, the Moto G72 uses Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, there’s also Bluetooth 5.0 for wireless headphones and NFC to make payments through Google Play.

Software

For incomprehensible reasons, the manufacturer decided to leave the Android 12 operating system in the Moto G72 for now, while it continues to receive security patches, although not the most up-to-date ones. At the time of writing the review, the smartphone had the security update for April 1. Motorola plans to update the device to Android 13 but has yet to say when that will happen.

From a user point of view, the difference between the two latest versions of Android is not too big, and in the case of the Moto G72, the stock interface is used only supplemented with a small set of options from the manufacturer itself. All of them are available both through the standard settings menu and in the separate Moto application. In it, the user can change the theme, wallpaper, icons, and fonts of the interface, and activate additional gestures and display options. For example, so that it does not turn off when the user looks at it.

In everything else, you get the standard Android interface with familiar desktops, widgets, a notification bar, and main menu.

Motorola also doesn’t use its own browser, mail client, or gallery. So the user gets Chrome, Gmail, and Google Photos “out of the box” and can download the programs they need in the future.

Moto G72 cameras

The smartphone received three main cameras, including a 108-megapixel wide-angle, 8-megapixel ultra-wide-angle, and 2-megapixel macro. At first glance, a pretty good set for a below-average model. However, as often happens, the number of megapixels does not always correspond to the quality.

The main 108-megapixel Samsung HM6 module with a 1/1.67-inch matrix and f/1.7 aperture combines 9 0.64 µm pixels into one large 1.92 µm pixel, so by default the camera does 12-megapixel pictures. This technology generally allows the sensor to capture more light, but in the case of the Moto G72, the module does not have optical stabilization. Therefore, if during the day you can still get a photo of relatively good quality, then at night there is more noise in the pictures due to the attempt of the electronics to compensate for the shaking of the hands, and the detail is reduced.

The 8-megapixel ultra-wide-angle module is also manufactured by Samsung, offering a 1/4-inch matrix, an f/2.2 aperture, and a 118-degree field of view. During the day, it takes photos with average detail, resolution and a small matrix are noticeable, which only worsens at night due to the lack of light.

2 megapixel OmniVision OV02B10 macro camera with a fixed focus and an aperture of f/2.4 can come in handy if you need to see something small, or if you’re just into macro photography. However, in general, there are not many scenarios for its use.

The Moto G72’s 16-megapixel front camera from SK Hynix with Quad Bayer filter, f/2.5 aperture, and fixed focus is suitable for video calls and tries to take good selfies by immediately applying a skin-smoothing filter.

In general, the smartphone cannot boast of outstanding photo capabilities, but they will be enough for undemanding users.

Sound and vibration

Moto G72 is equipped with fairly loud stereo speakers with support for Dolby Atmos software, which adjusts the sound to a certain type of media, such as music or movies. In addition, the smartphone has a 3.5 mm jack for connecting wired headphones and even an FM radio.

As expected for its price category, the device is equipped with a regular vibration motor, which has a fixed range of action, so it works equally well both during an incoming call and when typing on the keyboard. And if when making a call it is logical for the vibration to work as hard as possible, then when typing, you want a softer response.

Moto G72 battery life

Despite the thin body of 7.9 mm, the smartphone received a 5000 mAh battery and, thanks to a not-too-demanding platform, provides a good level of battery life. In the PCMark test under artificial load, the Moto G72 lasted almost 14 hours.

With everyday use, you can count on a reliable 1.5 days of work.

But if necessary, the smartphone can be quickly recharged, Moto G72 is charged from 0 to 50% in 30 minutes with the provided 33 W power supply unit. And a full charge takes a little over an hour.