Motorola released its ultra-affordable Moto G Power earlier this year, but today the company just announced yet another affordable Moto G Power. You may be wondering: Why? Well, there are a couple differences.
The new $US200 (A$275) Moto G Power has the same starting price and big 5,000 mAh battery as the previous model, with the new model getting a slightly smaller 6.5-inch 720p display (down from 6.6 inches) with a slightly faster 90Hz refresh rate. And just like the previous model, the new Moto G Power is still running Android 11, with Motorola committing to just one additional year of OS updates (though you get two years of security patches).
In fact, aside from some minor cosmetic differences and Motorola moving the new G Power’s fingerprint sensor to its back instead of integrating it into the power button like on the previous model, the main difference between the new Moto G Power and its predecessor comes down to a few upgrades on the inside of the device.
Instead of a Qualcomm 662 chip, the new G Power features a MediaTek Helio G37 processor, with the standard G Power getting slightly more base RAM (4GB) and storage (64GB), which is nice considering you previously had to pay $US50 (A$68) extra to get the same level of memory and storage on the older G Power. And if you want even more room for apps and media, you can also pay for an upgraded model with 128GB of storage.
Don’t get me wrong, a little extra RAM and storage is always nice, but after a little more than six months on the market, it seems like Motorola could have simply refreshed the previous model instead of making an entirely new device.
The new G Power features a similar triple rear camera with a slightly higher-res 50-megapixel main cam alongside a 2-MP macro cam and a 2-MP depth sensor.
Thankfully, Moto has left the G Power’s ports alone. The new model still features a dedicated headphone jack, a USB-C port for power and data, and microSD card expandability. And while it’s not much, the new G Power also supports IP52 water resistance, which is good for guarding the phone against sweat and a raindrop or two, but not much else.
And that’s about it. So while I can appreciate a solid budget phone as much as the next person, the specs of the new G Power are so similar to the previous model that I really have to question why Motorola feels the need to announce a second G Power for 2021.
Given the choice, I’d rather see Motorola offer more years of software support for its existing devices rather than make new ones that will lose support after just one year. Between the chip crunch and Moto switching to a MediaTek chip for this new G Power, it almost seems like this new phone may have been created to sidestep low supply for components on the previous phone in order to ensure that there’s at least one model of the G Power available for people to buy.
And to make things just a bit more confusing, the new Moto G Power will only be available from Republic Wireless and Metro when the phone officially goes on sale “sometime in the coming months,” with wider availability from carriers such as Verizon, Boost Mobile, Xfinity Mobile, AT&T, Cricket, US Cellular, and Google Fi coming sometime after that. If you want an unlocked version of the new G Power, you have to wait until sometime in “early 2022,” which again, really makes me question why Moto didn’t just wait a little longer to give the G Power a proper revamp.