Motorola announced their moto g55 late last year, offering a large cinemar worthy display, 5G connectivity and 50MP camera system.
Priced at $299 RRP, the moto g55 comes in what’s fast becoming motorola’s signature texture, vegan leather in Smokey Green and Twilight Purple, as well as a matte plastic finish in Forest Grey with motorola sending over a Smokey Green model for us to check out.
While the recently announced moto g05 and moto g15 were aimed at the entry level phone users, the moto g55 (and it’s stablemate the moto g75) offer a more premium experience.
Powered by a MediaTek processor with 4GB RAM and 128GB of storage, there’s a big 6.5” display on the front with a 16MP selfie camera, and a 50MP main sensor with ultrawide sensor on the rear – with a big 5,000mAh battery powering the show.
Is this the best mid-ranger for your dollars? I used the moto g55 for a week and here’s how it went.
Hardware
Design
The moto g55 looks fantastic in the three colour options, and while I enjoy the soft-touch vegan leather finish it’s a little divisive. I love the Smokey Green colour and it still quite clearly visible through the included TPU case.
The TPU case provides some protection, with Motorola additionally adding a ‘‘water repellent design’ as additional protection on the moto g55.
To clarify what this means – Motorola hasn’t specified an IP rating – they’ve advised it’s to protect against ‘accidental spills, splashes, sweat or light rain’ and isn’t supposed to be submersed or exposed to high pressure liquids. It’s a frustrating state of affairs for anyone wanting a quantifiable IP rating, but does offer some protection.
It’s a thin and light device, weighing around 180grams and just over 8mm thin, so it feels light in the hand – and slips easily into a bag or pocket.
The phone has the usual motorola arrangement for button and port placement with the volume rocker and fingerprint sensor enabled power button on the right, and SIM tray, which supports dual Nano SIMs and a microSD card on the left.
I find the side mounted fingerprint sensors to be hit and miss, with the TPU case sometimes not giving your thumb easy access to the sensor. I’d prefer an ultrasonic sensor in the display – but we’re in the mid-range phone market here and it’s not likely until component pricing drops.
As with their lower end models, Motorola has also included a headphone jack on the moto g55. The jack is on the bottom of the phone alongside the USB-C (2.0 only) port and downward firing speaker on the bottom of the phone.
Like most of the Motorola range, the moto g55 supports Dolby Atmos audio with a fairly unobtrusive logo splashed across the top of the phone.
The large 6.5” LCD display dominates the front of the phone, broken up only by the punch hole notch in the centre at the top which houses a 16MP selfie camera. There’s fairly minimal bezels around the display – though it still has a fairly large one at the base which is common with LCD displays.
Display and Audio
The 6.5″ Full HD+ (2400 x 1080) resolution LCD display comes in a 20:9 Aspect Ratio and can support up to 120Hz refresh rate. The phone includes stereo sound tuned by Dolby Atmos for a pretty comprehensive media playback device.
The display is bright and easy to read whether you’re indoors or out, with the auto-brightness function working well enough that you won’t be manually adjusting it.
The LCD display isn’t the best for dark blacks, but it works quite well with excellent colour reproduction which of course you can tune in the settings. Choosing between Vivid or Natural – with a manual adjustment available as usual as part of the Android system settings.
The 120Hz refresh rate works well without too great a drain on the battery life, so while you can adjust it back to a constant 60Hz, there is almost no difference between that and Auto, so I left it there.
Audio wise, the moto g55 includes Dolby Atmos tuned stereo sound, pairing the earpiece with the bottom firing speaker. It’s a decent sound with plenty of volume, though quality wise it tops out causing some distortion above a certain level.
Overall, this is a good little phone for watching YouTube or your favourite streaming service – but for audio you may find headphones a better choice.
Performance
The MediaTek Dimensity 7025 octa-core processor is clocked at 2.5 GHz and is paired with 4GB RAM and 128GB of on-board storage.
The SoC/RAM combo works decently, though the Motorola RAM Boost function – which uses the on-board storage as virtual memory – adds a little pep, making things like multi-tasking and switching apps a little smoother – though not perfect. It’s still a little slow when powering on, switching apps, and launching games can take a little longer than you’d like but once loaded they run pretty smoothly.
On the storage front, the 128GB is serviceable, though getting a little small in the face of the 50MP pixel camera on the rear outputting 12.5MP snaps – but you can expand it with microSD cards if you want.
How does the moto g55 stack up against the competition in terms of performance? Well, I ran it through 3DMark and Geekbench and here’s how it went.
Camera
The moto g55 includes a dual camera array on the rear with an LED Flash alongside and a front-facing selfie camera embedded in the punch hole notch in the display. .
The rear camera array includes a 50MP main sensor which includes Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) paired with an 8MP Ultrawide sensor with 118° field of view. The selfie camera is a decently impressive 16MP sensor.
Motorola has been including a 50MP main sensor on their g-series phones for a while and it’s a solid option offering a quad-pixel binning arrangement that stacked pixels to create a 12.5MP final shot. The final shots are fairly impressive in all types of light, though extreme low-light does present challenges that phones in this price bracket don’t normally do well with. Still it’s a decent shot.
The main sensor offers a 2x digital zoom, which is fairly serviceable and you can blow that out to an 8x digital zoom which is definitely far from useful with the image fairly blocky.
The moto g55 does get a slight update from last years g54, with the secondary sensor bumped from a 2MP Macro sensor to an 8MP Ultrawide. The 8MP sensor also offers macro functionality – with Motorola describing it as able to get you ‘4x closer to see the finest details, giving you the best of both macro and ultrawide.
Battery and Charging
The 5,000mAh battery inside the moto g55 promises a full day of use, while the phone supports 30W charging to top you up quickly – and in a surprise twist, they include a 33W charger in the box.
The battery life is great, as I’ve found with previous moto g-series phones, giving a full day of use and even lasting into the second day. The phone won’t last a full two-days though, so charging overnight is likely going to be your best bet here.
The charging is only 30W which is disappointing, taking about 30 minutes to get to just under 50% charge, while it takes just under 90 minutes to hit 100% full. It’s not overly great, but given you do get the charging brick, it’s not bad.
Software
Android
The moto g55 comes with Android 14 on-board with motorola’s ‘My UX’ laid over the top.
Running Android 14 out of the box, the moto g55 includes two years of OS Updates, as well as four years of bi-monthly Security Maintenance Releases (SMR).
The phone comes out of the box with the July 2024 update, though an Over-The-Air (OTA) update will bring the October 2024 OTA, and then the January 2025 OTA straight after. So you can likely expect your security updates quarterly.
Apps and MyUX
The MyUX addition to the OS brings personalisation to the theming, letting you select layouts, fonts, wallpaper, icon shapes, display size and loads more. You can also take advantage of features like attentive display and customisable lock screen – as well as my favourite moto features, the gestures, which include Flip for Do Not Disturb, Lift to unlock, Swipe to split for split screen apps and more.
Motorola incluedes the Moto app to more easily access all the customisation and personalisation options. While it’s could be argued it’s a bit bloat-ish, I personally love the app as it puts a lot of the often unused or unheard of features in front of the user.
There’s also a slew of moto apps including Moto Secure offering secure folders for apps and media, phishing detection, network protection and more. There’s also Moto Family Space – a convenient, ‘kid-friendly’ space you can set up with access to limited apps, including no access to your personal data. You can also try out the moto Unplugged app to get a digital break.
Unfortunately despite Motorola’s history of clean skins, there’s been some creep in the form of third party apps being pre-installed. I found TikTok, Booking.com and LinkedIn apps were pre-installed. I also found their ‘My Games’ service appears to be downloading and installing games including Candy Crush, Stack Ball and Bottle Jump 3D and you then get notifications to update or install more.
You can remove all these apps – just long press and uninstall, but the fact they’re on there in the first place is annoying and I’m not a fan of these app installs and installation services being on by default.
Overall, the software on the moto g55 is still quite good. While Motorola has previously been a clean OS option, there’s a lot of creep starting with the pre-installed apps and services. It’s easy to remove, but still frustrating that you have to remove any apps and it’s just something to be aware of.
The softwaer update situation is
Should you buy it?
The moto g55 offers respectable performance, camera and design at an affordable price, making it a decent offering for those looking at a phone in the sub-$300 market.
The battery lasts all day, and the performance is decent for this end of the market though can be a little choppy when loading games or multi-tasking. It also sports a nice, bright – and large display paired with stereo audio. It also comes with a decent camera that can cover most use cases.
The downsides are the less than ideal software update schedule and the performance, however while you’ll only get two OS updates, the SMR releases will cover the phone for 4 years making it quite a decent device for long term use – especially for a sub-$300 device.
In the market though, the moto g55 faces some stiff competition from OPPO with the A60, as well as older model Motorola phones which are being reduced like the moto g84 which is down to just $329 most places – so it would pay to check out other options.
As far as the moto g55 goes though, the hardware and software is sound, and offers a good budget friendly option.
The motorola moto g55 is available in Forest Grey, Smokey Green and Twilight Purple at Harvey Norman, Officeworks, Big W, The Good Guys, Bing Lee, Mobileciti, Amazon, JB Hi-Fi (online only) and motorola.com.au.
Daniel has been talking about, learning about and using tech since he was able to toggle switches and push buttons. If it flashes, turns on or off or connects he wants to use it, talk about it and learn more about it. Like this article? Buy me a coffee!
