Motorola Moto G6 Play review: Hands on with the cheapest Moto G6

The Moto G6 Play looks great for the money but its core specification suffers a little

It’s fairly easy to guess what a “Plus” phone might be – it’s likely to be bigger or better in some way, perhaps faster and with more features – but what on earth does “Play” mean? There’s no intuitive answer. However, it’s fairly simple to explain how the new Motorola Moto G6 Play differs from the Plus and the regular Moto G6: it’s cheaper.

Motorola Moto G6 Play review: What you need to know

There’s a little more to it than that, of course, but the lower price tag sums it up neatly enough. It’s £169, £50 less than the Moto G6 and £100 less than the Moto G6 Plus and, yet, it looks remarkably similar to both.

There are, of course, differences. That curved rear – finished in a rather attractive chrome in these pictures – is made from plastic rather than glass and, although the screen is still 5.7in corner to corner, it has a lower resolution. There’s no dual-lens camera, either, and no water-repellent treatment.

As you might expect of a cheaper phone, the Moto G6 Play has a less powerful processor, but weirdly it has a bigger battery than either of its siblings and, at 4,000mAh, it ought to delivery serious stamina. This is where the Play moniker comes in: it lets you “play” longer – geddit?

Motorola Moto G6 Play review: Specifications, price and release date

Screen: 5.7in IPS, 720 x 1,440
CPU: 1.4GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 (Adreno 505 graphics)
RAM: 3GB
Storage: 32GB
Rear camera: dual 13MP, f/2, dual pixel phase detect autofocus, dual-LED flash
Front camera: 8MP, front flash
Price: £169
Release date: First week of May 2018

Motorola Moto G6 Play review: First impressions and key features

Despite the fact that it’s made from plastic (“polymer” in Motorola’s words), the Moto G6 Play is actually pretty attractive. The plastic Play feels much the same in the hand as the glass and aluminium Moto G6, and it looks stunning, too, especially the chrome-finish phone I got my hands on at the launch event.

Just like the G6, it has curves along the long edges at the rear of the phone and a large, circular camera housing that protrudes by a millimetre or two. The phone retains a 3.5mm headphone jack like the rest of the G6 phones and, given that it’s plastic, it ought to resist shattering a bit better than its more expensive siblings as well. Alas, I wasn’t allowed to drop it on the floor to find out.

The only physical difference with the Moto G6 Play, in fact, is that its fingerprint reader is on the rear, embedded in the Motorola logo just below the camera.

For software, though, its largely identical to its siblings, the Moto G6 Play running a clean install of Android 8 Oreo. That’s unequivocally a good thing, especially when the phone’s strongest competitors don’t do this. in fact, it’s a real point of difference between Motorola and Honor phones and, although Honor’s Emotion UI is improving, it still can’t match plain Android for usability.

Motorola’s install isn’t entirely vanilla, though. It has a number of subtle yet practical and unobtrusive tweaks, gesture control being my favourite. This is a highly convenient way to activate common functions – a quick double twist launches the phone and a double chop activates the torch – and it works brilliantly.

A cursory glance at the specifications list reveals that there are quite a few differences between the Moto G6 Play and its siblings, though, and the comparison doesn’t make for particular flattering reading. The screen first: that’s a 720p effort rather than 1080p and, at this size, you absolutely CAN tell the difference in sharpness.

Core specifications next, and the Moto G6 Play gets a Snapdragon 430 instead of a 450 – a chip that’s two years older and slower at 1.4GHz. I last saw this chip under the hood of the Moto G5 last year, a phone I was not particularly impressed with. It’s accompanied by 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, with a microSD slot allowing the addition of cards up to 128GB in capacity.

The camera is is weaker, too, with a single snapper rather than a dual setup. It captures stills at 13 megapixels, has an f/2 aperture and phase-detect autofocus and shoots video at 1080p and 30fps. Again, this looks uncannily similar to what Motorola put in the Moto G5 in 2017. The front camera is different, though – an 8-megapixel snapper accompanied with a front flash.

Where the Play comes into its own is stamina: the Moto G6 Play has an enormous 4,000mAh power cell inside. That’s 43% larger than the 2,800mAh unit in the Moto G5 and 33% bigger than the battery in the Moto G6.

Now, I can’t tell you how long the battery is going to last just yet, but the Moto G5 was mediocre, lasting less than 12 hours in our video-rundown battery test. A 43% boost in battery capacity should improve that considerably, although bear in mind that the Play’s larger screen could also play a part.

Motorola Moto G6 Play review: Early verdict

There’s no doubt that the Motorola Moto G6 Play, like the Moto G6 and the Moto G6 Plus, is an attractive phone, and it has a few other things going for it as well. It runs Android 8 Oreo with only a few subtle tweaks, and it will be interesting to see how long it lasts with that 4,000mAh battery inside.

The question is, will that be enough? Especially when the Motorola Moto G6 Play has the same internals as the Motorola Moto G5, a phone to which we awarded a mere three stars last year?

Only time will tell, but with Honor pulling out all the stops with the £140 Honor 7A and £170 Honor 7C, the Moto G6 Play will have a hard time competing.