Motorola moto g05: entry-level phone that will get you where you want to go

Not everyone wants or needs a flagship smartphone. Some folks just want a cheap phone that works. This is where the moto g05 fits—a cheap phone that does the basics well enough.

Motorola has announced the moto g05 in four colours with a vegan leather backing (which I quite like) – Plum Red, Forest Green, Misty Blue and Fresh Lavendar.  I received the Fresh Lavendar variant to check out and after using it for a week I have quite a few thoughts on it.

Before heading into the meat of the review, it is important to note and remember that the moto g05 is just $179 so temper your expectations on what it can and cannot do and how fast it does this.  Remember, flagship devices with flagship performance will cost you more than 10 times this phone will!

The phone is no slouch, though, even at that price. It has a big 6.7-inch HD+ display, a 50MP camera on the back, and a decent 5,200mAh battery. Powered by the MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme (12nm) coupled with 4GB of RAM, it chugs along reliably.

Hardware and Design

The Fresh Lavender moto g05 that I received is a stunning-looking phone with what appears to be a lavender–coloured aluminium frame and a beautifully covered rear in vegan leather (also lavender).

The vegan leather feels great in the hand. It is nice to finally have a phone that doesn’t feel like it is going to slip out of my hands at a moment’s notice. Motorola includes a clear TPU case already installed on the phone, so if you use that, the vegan leather back will mean nothing.

The phone weighs just 188 grams and is IP54 dust—and water-resistant, so it is not only light in the hand but also protected from basic water and dust ingress.

The power button on the right-hand side doubles as the fingerprint sensor, just below the volume buttons. The sim tray is on the left-hand side of the phone. The fingerprint sensor is okay. It’s not super consistent, and I often have to adjust my thumb’s location on it before it unlocks the phone. The solution was to add my thumb twice, improving the consistency to an acceptable level.

The bottom of the phone houses a single speaker and the USB-C charging port – but don’t expect usual USB-C charging speeds.  Motorola states that the moto g05 will charge at up to 18W speeds but it certainly seemed a lot slower than that on my chargers.  It is definitely a charge-overnight phone.

Luckily, the 5,200mAh battery will undoubtedly get you through the day – assuming you bought the phone because that is all you need. Power users will likely buy a better phone and use more power and battery life throughout the day.  

A nice addition is the rare-seen headphone jack. I’m not sure who has wired headphones these days, but there must be someone, right? There are certainly none included in the box.

Display

The display is nothing special, but the 6.7-inch IPS display with a 90Hz refresh rate is still decent, especially for a phone under $180. The 90Hz refresh rate is good, adding a bit of smoothness to an otherwise sluggish OS. But the kicker is the resolution. At just 720p, it is not great, with text looking a tad blurry—but remember, this phone is not designed for young folks with 20/20 vision.

The display produces decent colours at an accurate level but is still far from the AMOLED colours we love.  It is also protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3 so light scrapes should not affect the display.

Performance

The chipset driving the moto g05 is the MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme, which is old, as you should have expected, because it is manufactured using the 12nm process.  The more recent chipsets are down to a 3nm process, resulting in a much faster and battery-efficient phone.

The 4GB of RAM is not great. It is okay to run just one or two apps, but if you have any more running in the background, you will notice an increase in sluggishness. This can be offset to a small degree using RAM Boost, which uses some of the built-in storage as swap memory to run apps. If you want to get the most out of this phone, I’d recommend turning that on and having the system AI monitor it.

There is only 64GB of storage, which is extremely underwhelming – something we were seemingly past ten years ago, but here we are.  You can extend the storage with a microSD card though, so there is that.

Camera

The moto g05 sports a single 50MP camera on the rear with Quad-Pixel technology and the results are decent.  Once again with the tempering expectations line, the photos are not national gallery quality but are good enough.

In daylight, you can get decent images with some sharpness. The quality is actually pretty good, considering the single camera onboard. Colours and shadows are fairly well represented. Overall, the daytime photos are acceptable.

Many entry-level phones struggle with low-light photography, and this is no exception. The photos are decent, but they lack sharpness and detail. At $179, though, they are pretty good.

Battery and charging

The battery in the moto g05 is a decent 5,200mAh which results in a battery life of close to a day – Motorola states it should give “up to 40 hours of battery life.”  The phone is slow and the specs aren’t going to be pushing any speed envelopes any time soon thus not overly taxing the battery, so anyone who buys this should have no problems getting a full day of use out of it. 

As mentioned above, the moto g05 will charge at 18W with a compatible charger so we’ve all seen worse than that.  Unfortunately, there is no charger included in the box.

Software

The moto g05 launches with Android 15 onboard and a security patch on January 1, 2025. However, the Moto G15 will NOT receive any OS updates. Instead, it will receive two years of System Maintenance Releases (SMR), which are security updates until December 2026. By law, all smartphones in Australia are required to have a two-year warranty.

This is not ideal but the phones are cheap and maintenance like this costs companies a lot of money so it is not surprising that something has to give.

The Motorola skin on top of Android is one of my favourite skins with it looking very minimalistic but still including some useful added functionality.  The version on the moto g05 is slimmed down and lacks some of the features of the higher-end moto smartphones.

The dual karate chop with the phone to turn the torch on is still present, but the twist to open the camera (which I use a lot on Moto phones when I have one in my pocket) is missing.

The operating system’s speed sometimes suffers, with app opening speeds sluggish at best, but it gets where it is going; just be patient. Considering this phone’s underwhelming specs, though, Motorola has done a great job of squeezing as much performance out of the phone as they have. That is the beauty of Motorola’s simple, stylish Android skin: It won’t bog down your phone.

Moto has also included some bloatware, including LinkedIn, Booking.com, and TikTok, which can be uninstalled. Considering that many people buying this phone will not be totally on board with new technologies, I think that’s a bit sneaky. Unless you use these apps specifically, uninstall them; there is nothing to be gained by leaving them on your new moto g05 phone.

At the same time, do not get sucked into their ‘App Recommendations’ when setting up the phone.  Install only apps you use – there simply isn’t enough space on this phone for apps you do not use.

Final Thoughts

The Motorola moto g05 is extremely cheap and as such you should expect it to perform less than you would a flagship. There is no doubt that it does but it certainly performs better than the $179 you will be paying for it. For basic email, texting, surfing the internet and using Google Maps it is just fine.

Some may think this is a perfect first phone for a child and I can’t argue with that. I can see it more for older parents and grandparents who do not need the bee’s knees when it comes to smartphones and do not need them to be fast and snappy but just need them to work. This is the moto g05. It just works. It might be slow but it gets where you need it to with a minimum of fuss.

The Motorola moto g05 is available now for the ridiculous price of just $179. It is available in vegan leather in Plum Red, Forest Green and Misty Blue at JB Hi Fi, The Good Guys, Officeworks, Big W, Harvey Norman, Bing Lee, Amazon, Mobile Citi, and motorola.com.au. Fresh Lavender is also available exclusively to Big W.