Motorola announces the new Moto G Play (2023)

Motorola is out to announce its new Moto G Play at a reasonable price just in time for the holiday season, though it won’t be available for purchase until January 12, 2023. The new Moto G Play will be available unlocked in the US at Best Buy, Amazon, and Motorola at a really budget-friendly price of $169.99. It will also be sold in Canada on Motorola’s website.

What’s new in Motorola Moto G Play (2023)

Well, let’s start with the screen, which remains the same size and resolution as the previous generation Moto G Play, with the one difference being that it now supports a 90Hz refresh rate — a really nice plus.

On the rear side, the camera array has also received an upgrade, with the main camera now being 16MP with an f/1.22 aperture and 1.0µm pixel size. There’s also a 2MP and two 2MP depth cameras, making it a set of three in total. However, given the phone’s price range and what we’re used to seeing from Motorola with its budget phones, it would be safe to assume that the photos aren’t all that impressive. At best, the main camera might make for some usable shots, but we’ll let you know once we review the phone itself.

On the other hand, one of the major good aspects of Motorola’s affordable phones was their huge batteries. It’s no surprise that the Moto G Play gets a 5,000mAh battery, which should provide great battery life. Motorola claims it can last up to three days on a single charge. Unfortunately, though, the charging speed is quite disappointing at 10W, which means the large battery size will take a long time to charge.

Another downside that’s honestly hard to ignore is the lack of NFC. There’s no reason a phone can’t have NFC, especially in 2023. Many people use this feature every day to pay with their phone. It makes more sense perhaps to drop the IP52 water-repellent certification, which the new Moto G Play has, and include NFC connectivity instead.

As for what makes the phone tick, the 2023 edition of the Moto G Play comes with a MediaTek Helio G37 processor, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 512GB via a microSD card. Suffice it to say, this phone won’t be able to do more than some of the ones we browse, text, and make calls do. Some might also consider the lack of 5G connectivity support a setback, but the truth is that 5G hasn’t yet made a difference that would outpace 4G connectivity, so there’s not much to lose on that front.

Perhaps the biggest upgrade over its predecessor is the design of the Moto G Play (2023), which is now a lot more modern and cleaner. It may be a super budget phone, but at least it looks decent and respectable, albeit still made of plastic.

All that being said, the 2023 edition of the Moto G Play is shaping up to be a hard phone to recommend, but we’ll have to wait until we can walk it through its paces and see if it’s useful in real life. Stay tuned for our next review if you are interested in buying one for yourself.