Motorola Moto G84 smartphone review

Mid-budget devices have always been Motorola’s strong suit, including the Moto G series, which includes our guest today, the Motorola Moto G84.

Motorola Moto G84 specifications

Scope of delivery

By today’s standards, the Motorola Moto G84 comes with a very good package: in the box with the smartphone you can also find a USB-C/USB-C cable, a charger, and a transparent plastic cover.

Design, ergonomics

Motorola Moto G84 can be considered a little larger than the modern medium format – 160 mm in height. The body is relatively thin – 7.6 mm, and quite light – only 167 g. According to the specifications, it has a degree of protection IP54, which means protection against dust and water splashes.

The smartphone is available in three color variants: white with a slight hint of blue (Marshmallow Blue), red (Viva Magenta), and navy (Midnight Blue); we received the latter variant for review.

In the first two versions, the back panel is made of so-called “vegan leather” – basically, it’s plastic that has the texture and feel of leather. In Midnight Blue, the back panel is made of traditional matte plastic – but it imitates glass very well, practically does not press through and does not look cheap.

The same goes for the side frame: it’s also plastic, but it looks and feels almost like metal, except that there’s no “metal coldness” to the touch.

The rear camera unit is not part of the body – it’s a separate module with a slightly different surface and an almost invisible additional frame around it.

On the top edge there is a noise-canceling microphone and an earpiece speaker, on the left is a SIM card tray for two nano SIMs (you can install a microSD card instead of one), on the right is the volume control and power button. Below you can see the earpiece microphone, multimedia speaker, USB-C connector and, a bit unexpectedly, a mini-jack for connecting a wired headset.

The side edges and back cover are straight, without any rounding – “like an iPhone”; the smartphone fits well in the palm of your hand, the power button is located just under the thumb. The back panel seems a bit slippery – if you are afraid of dropping the smartphone, you can use the bundled case. It’s quite thin and doesn’t increase the thickness and overall dimensions too much, and it also repeats the style of the side frame of the case quite well.

Display

The Motorola Moto G84 has a 10-bit 6.5-inch POLED display with a resolution of 1080×2400 pixels (pixel density – 405 PPI). The maximum refresh rate is 120 Hz, which is very good for a smartphone in this price range.

The maximum brightness in manual mode is 510 cd/m², while in automatic mode, according to the specifications, the peak brightness can increase to 1300 cd/m². This value will be quite enough for the smartphone to be used comfortably even in direct sunlight. The minimum brightness is 2.9 cd/m², which is a fairly standard result.

In the settings, there is a Flicker prevention option that is supposed to reduce screen flicker in dark environments – but even without it, the Moto G84 screen has virtually no flicker even at the lowest brightness, unlike most other models with OLED displays.

In the settings, you can choose one of two video modes: “Natural and Saturated. In the first case, the screen has a color limitation to the size of the sRGB space and very high-quality settings of the main parameters: the color temperature perfectly matches the standard 6500K, the gamma value is also almost the reference value: 2.2 across the entire brightness range.

Vivid mode demonstrates extended color gamut: bright, saturated colors that you expect from an OLED display. The gamma value is slightly increased, but not significantly, but the color temperature is slightly overestimated – up to 7100K. This gives the image a slightly cool tint – if the owner doesn’t like it, you can manually adjust this parameter using the corresponding slider.

Platform and performance

The Motorola Moto G84 uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G, a mid-range chipset manufactured on a 6 nm process. It includes an 8-core CPU: 2 high-performance cores (Cortex-A78) operating at frequencies up to 2.2 GHz and 6 energy-efficient cores (Cortex-A55) with frequencies up to 1.8 GHz, and an Adreno 619 video module.

The Snapdragon 695 was announced at the end of 2021 and was a fairly popular chipset for mid-range smartphones, but now there are more interesting options.

As for memory configurations, Moto G84 has only one option, 12/256 GB. If you want to increase the size of the built-in memory, you can use a microSD card, but you will have to give up the second SIM card.

The performance of the Snapdragon 695 is quite expected – it will be enough for typical everyday tasks, but competitors with more modern chipsets of the same class show better results in synthetic benchmarks. This is especially true for the performance of the Adreno 619 GPU in 3D tests, so if you need a smartphone for gaming, it’s better to look for another option with a more modern chipset.

On the other hand, thanks to its good energy efficiency, the Moto G84 heats up very little even under prolonged heavy load and hardly throttles in long stress tests: at the end of the 15-minute CPU Throttling Test, performance dropped to only 93% of the maximum, while the case was barely warm. In the 3DMark Wild Life stress test, which runs for 20 minutes, the result was even better: the benchmark did not actually record any trotting, with a stability rating of 99.5%.

Moto G84 uses the earpiece speaker as a second multimedia speaker to create stereo sound. The sound is loud, which is good for ringtones, but there are no surprises in terms of quality: almost no bass and some lack of midrange.

The fingerprint scanner is optical, under the screen. As for this type of sensor, it works quickly and confidently, but it is located quite low, which may not be very convenient, especially for users who are used to scanners closer to the center of the screen on other smartphones.

The smartphone runs on Android 13 – the interface has almost the “default” appearance of a standard system, except for additional functionality from the manufacturer – advanced personalization and security features, gesture support, etc.

Cameras

The rear camera of Motorola Moto G84 includes two modules. The main one is a wide-angle Samsung ISOCELL S5KGN9 sensor with phase detection and optical stabilization (50 MP, 1/1.5″ size, f/1.9 aperture). An additional ultra-wide-angle Samsung ISOCELL S5K4H7AF (8 MP, 1/4″ size, f/2.2 aperture), equipped with autofocus.

Finally, the front selfie camera is a 16-megapixel OmniVision OV16A1Q sensor.

Moto G84’s camera application is in-house developed, with a fairly standard interface. Swiping left and right on the viewfinder switches modes (slow motion, video, photo, portrait, pro mode, “more”), swiping down opens the settings of the current mode, swiping up does nothing. The “More” item contains additional modes, such as “panorama”, “dual-camera”, “night photo”, and a picture in a maximum resolution of 50 MP (the camera takes pictures in 12.5 MP by default). The camera’s proprietary application also provides access to Google Lens, which is launched by an icon in the lower left corner of the viewfinder in Photo mode.

On a sunny day, the rear camera takes very good pictures with high contrast and detail. Dynamic range is decent, but shadows can be too dark in high-contrast photos. In cloudy weather, when using the automatic HDR mode, photos can look a bit “unnatural” due to the overly strong HDR effect.

The camera app doesn’t have a digital zoom – the mode switch offers only 1x, macro, and 0.5x, the latter two being an ultra-wide-angle sensor. It takes very decent and detailed pictures for this type of sensor, the colors are slightly different from what the main module takes. And thanks to the autofocus, it takes good macro shots (if someone uses this mode).

Indoors, with adequate lighting, the pictures are of high quality, with minimal noise, detail is slightly reduced, and color reproduction is also not much different from photos taken in ideal conditions. The dynamic range becomes narrower, which is noticeable primarily in photos with moderate or low light and sharp brightness changes – shadows become too deep and lose detail.

Night mode can be activated automatically – the corresponding option is enabled in the quick settings. In this case, the Moto G84 takes quite high-quality pictures, provided there is more or less decent lighting in the scene, but the shutter speed becomes quite long, so there is a risk of getting blurry shots.

Selfies with the front camera are very good, with a natural skin tone and enough detail.

The maximum video size that a smartphone can shoot is 1080p@60; unfortunately, the Snapdragon 695 chipset does not support 4K video.

Battery life

The Motorola Moto G84 has a 5000 mAh battery, which is a very good option, and thanks to the energy-efficient processor, the smartphone demonstrates excellent battery life. Thus, in the PCMark battery test with a brightness of 200 cd/m² and a screen refresh rate of 60 Hz, the smartphone lasted almost 15 hours!

Manually increasing the frequency to a constant 120 Hz significantly reduced this result to 11.5 hours. Therefore, it is better to use the “Auto” mode, in which the system dynamically changes the frequency: depending on the situation, it can be 60, 90 or 120 Hz. In this case, the smartphone worked for 13 hours. In real-world conditions, the battery should last for two days of use under moderate load.

Moto G84 supports fast wired charging (30 W) – in 30 minutes the smartphone will charge a little more than half, a full charge from zero to 100% will take 1 hour and 15 minutes.