moto g9 power ( 6.8" Max Vision HD+, Qualcomm Snapdragon, 64MP triple camera system, 6000 mAH battery, Dual SIM, 4/128GB, Android 10), Metallic Sage

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Its large size is also a big benefit for almost all games and apps. Can you do better for the same cost? Yes. Xiaomi sells several phones for similar money with higher resolution displays. The Xiaomi Redmi 9 and Redmi Note 9 have 1080p screens, as does the Realme 6. It comes as no surprise, then, that performance is practically identical between the two models. Running the Geekbench 5 single- and multi-core CPU tests, the Moto G9 Play achieved the same score as the Moto G8, as well as the other Snapdragon 665 phone on the list, the Nokia 5.3. The only phone it managed to pull away from was the Samsung Galaxy A21s and its Exynos 850 chipset.

The situation in the US for this phone is a little complicated. The company unveiled its Moto G Play at CES 2021, and it seems similar to the Moto G9 Play but it isn't exactly the same. There's really only one selling point when it comes to the screen on the Moto G9 Power, and that's the size of it – which is sort of negated by the low 720p resolution. Compared with the very best smartphones on the market, the Moto G9 Power does look like a less expensive alternative, but when you measure it up against handsets that cost a similar amount of money, it more than holds its own. It's fair to say that for what you're paying, the G9 Power is a decent-looking smartphone, and that's all that you can really ask.There’s even a pleasant surprise for night shooting. Typically, lower-end phones in the Moto G series do not have Motorola’s Night Vision shooting mode, but the Moto G9 Play does. A PC Mark battery benchmark score of 25hr 44min is around double that of rivals like the Poco X3 NFC. It’s not far off three times better than the likes of the Realme 7. The Moto G9 Play has a 6.5-inch 720 x 1600 LCD screen. It has no particular high-end traits, but good, cheap displays like this now get you close enough to the experience of a much more expensive mobile. Flip it over, and it’s plastic all the way, though Motorola has gone for an extremely reflective metal look, which reminds me of the dazzling sheen of the HTC U11. In our case, this was a royal blue, but it’s also available in ‘blush gold’ if you like your phones on the shiny side. The glistening surface means that the Motorola ‘M’ logo is barely visible, but there’s no hiding the curved rectangle of the camera bump in the top left-hand corner, which houses four lenses and a flash.

It’s essentially the same story with graphical performance, where the Moto G9 Plus goes toe to toe with all its rivals, closing in on the superb performance of the Xiaomi Poco X3. Don’t be fooled by the red bars for the Moto G9 Power and Play, by the way – they’re close because the on-screen resolution is lower, and the fainter orange bar gives you a better measure of overall grunt. (The Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T is omitted here, as we couldn’t get GFXBench to install on it – we would assume similar performance to the Moto G9 Plus, however.) Macro shots are nice enough, as this zoomed picture of a 20p coin shows, but I question how often you’ll want to take pictures of anything this small. The competition heats up if you look further afield, to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9. That offers comparable hardware in most respects, but has a Full HD+ screen rather than a 720p one.

A repackaged Moto G9 for Europe, the Moto G9 Play is much the same as the G8, with a few changes and a slightly cheaper price

Motorola makes sparing, judicious tweaks here and there, many of which are accumulated in the classy Moto app. Here you can learn about Moto Gesture, which lets you do things like activate the torch with two chop motions, or twist twice to open the camera app.