The 2023 Moto G looks great and retails for $250

Motorola is launching a new line of phones today. Most interesting is the new mid-range Moto G, and it also sounds like the flagship Motorola Edge 40 Pro will be repackaged for the US as the Motorola Edge+.

First the mid ranger. The Moto G hits a price sweet spot at $250 and will go on sale on May 25th. For $250, you get a 6.5-inch, 1600×720 pixel LCD with a surprising 120Hz refresh rate, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and a 5000mAh battery. The SoC is a Snapdragon 480+ – that’s two ARM Cortex A76 cores and six A55 cores, built on an 8nm process with an Adreno 619 GPU.

There’s a fingerprint reader somewhere, but Motorola’s spec sheet doesn’t say where. The phone has a 3.5mm headphone jack, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi 5 support and 15W charging. The case is plastic, a major downside is there’s no NFC, and while the “water-resistant” design can protect against “accidental spills,” it’s not submersible. For cameras, you get a 48MP main sensor and a visually pleasing 2MP “macro” lens. The front camera is 8 MP.

Unlike most Motorola phones, which look positively generic (see below), the square sides and beveled edges of the Moto G look pretty good! It’s one of the few distinctive phones in Motorola’s lineup.

Next is the 2023 Motorola Edge+, which goes on sale in the US on May 9 for $799. Motorola seems to have a habit of taking a core flagship phone design and slightly tweaking and renaming it for individual regions. So the company’s impenetrable flagship range includes the Euro-centric Motorola Edge 40 Pro, the Asian Motorola Moto X40 and this Motorola Edge+ for the US. If you break out the magnifying glass you will find some slight spec differences between the phones, but the designs are all identical. You might have also thought that the newly released Lenovo ThinkPhone would serve as Lenovo/Motorola’s US flagship, but this “business” device uses last year’s Qualcomm flagship chip, while the third-gen Edge+ uses a newer one Has Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. So in the last six months, Motorola/Lenovo have released four phones that could be classified as “flagships”. It’s very confusing, and that’s not even counting the foldable devices, which we’re likely to hear about soon.

This has a 6.7-inch 2400×1080 165Hz OLED, 8GB of RAM (less than the Edge 40 Pro), 512GB of storage (more than the Edge 40 Pro) and a 5100mAh battery (more than the Edge 40 Pro). There’s an impressive-sounding 68W fast charger, 15W wireless charging, NFC, IP68 dust and water resistance, and Wi-Fi 7 support. The cameras include a 60 MP front camera and then a 50 MP main sensor on the rear, a 50 MP wide-angle and a 12 MP 2x telephoto lens.

The core problem with all Motorola phones is the company’s update reputation, which is easily the worst in the industry. Motorola promises that the Edge+ will get the usual three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates, while the Moto G will get one major OS update and three years of security updates. Note Motorola not say If Each of these updates will arrive as the company is very, very slow on updates. For example, the Motorola Edge 2022 does not yet have Android 13, even though this update is 8 months old. So for flagships where there’s a lot of competition, Motorola is hard to recommend, but the $250 Moto G has very little competition in the US.