Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Review: Where Budget Meets Premium

Motorola has really been knocking it out of the park with phones these past few years, and although I can’t confidently say every single device they’ve made in that time is a winner, the ones I have personally tested have all turned out to be a shining example of Motorola’s efforts to produce good quality phones again. One of the brand’s latest devices is the Moto G Power 2026, a third iteration of the Moto G that, based on the name, you’d expect would either be pointing to this phone’s higher performance or its long-lasting battery. Perhaps both.

Either way, it’s a phone that you can be assured is going to be there for you at the end of a long day, with battery life to spare. That being said, is it that much better than the Moto G 2026 or the Moto G Play 2026 to warrant the extra amount in price? We’re talking about a jump of about $100-$120. If you’re already shopping for phones at this low of a price, then an extra $100 is no small amount. Did Motorola do enough to make this phone worth $299.99? There are certainly some upgrades, so you’re not spending more money for nothing.

With all this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at this review and see if the Motorola Moto G Power 2026 is worth your hard-earned money.

Motorola Moto G Power 2026

Rating

$299.99

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Long-lasting battery
• Pretty good camera for around $300
• Very stylish design
• Affordable price tag
• Lightning-fast fingerprint sensor
• Double the RAM and storage of the Play model

Cons

• Gaming performance is still a little laggy
• Rapid Charging won’t work witout Motorola’s charger

Disclaimer

Motorola sent out a review unit of the Moto G Power 2026 for us to review. We’ve been using it for a couple of weeks before writing this review. This is not a sponsored review and Motorola did not see this review before it was published.

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Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Specs

Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Review: Design and Build Quality

Just like with the Motorola Moto G Play 2026, the Moto G Power 2026 is a solidly-built device that really comes through when you look at it, but more so when you hold the phone and feel it in your hands. The phone’s sleek design with its textured vegan leather feels almost woven into the back of the device like fabric. And Motorola’s usual fun selection of PANTONE colors rounds things out and continues to make Motorola’s phones some of the best-looking devices on the market today.

From a design and build quality standpoint, it really shouldn’t be surprising that this device is well-made. Motorola has consistently been putting out phones of this caliber in these respective lineups for at least a few years now. It hasn’t broken stride yet, and it seems unlikely to do so anytime soon. Even if there was very little else about the phone that was good, Motorola has been consistent in this area, so I’m always happy to see that things haven’t changed in this regard. If I had one gripe at all when it comes to the build quality, it’s that the phone’s lack of heft in terms of weight can make it feel a little less high-quality than it is. Really, though, that isn’t the case. The Moto G Power 2026 is definitely high-quality, and at $299.99, I think Motorola has done a very good job in these two areas.

Notable hardware that time forgot

One of the best things that Motorola has kept going on its phones is the inclusion of hardware that feels just as high-quality as the rest of the device, but more importantly, something that most other phone manufacturers seem to have forgotten exists at this point in time. Of course, I’m referring to the 3.5mm headphone jack. What was once a common feature of just about every phone has been nearly wiped from existence, it feels like. As the industry moved toward USB-C only, Motorola is one of the brands that has refused to take this feature away from its modern phones.

Although I still personally prefer Bluetooth most of the time, it’s nice that I have had the option to plug in some headphones if I ever wanted to conserve battery life. The headphone jack can be found on the bottom of the device, to the left of the USB-C port and the bottom-firing speaker.

On the right side of the device, there’s the power button, and the volume up and down buttons. Then on the left, there’s the SIM card tray. The frame is also finished in a nice muted gold that matches the PANTONE Pure Cashmere color of the back. Overall, great design, great build quality. Thumbs up to Motorola once again here.

Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Review: Display

The display on a phone is something that is a hit or miss thing for me. Some users want the highest clarity possible that phones have to offer. Personally, I don’t mind having something lower resolution. After all, I’m not playing a lot of games or watching a lot of videos on my phone as I used to several years ago. That being said, I do like to have a standard that the phone is capable of meeting. I’m happy to report that the Moto G Power 2026 meets this standard. What’s the standard? At least Full HD or Full HD+. It doesn’t have to be a 2K or 3K screen. On a phone, I just don’t think this is necessary, but everyone has their preferences. For my part, the display on the Moto G Power 2026 is quite crisp, and it’s noticeably better than the display on the Moto G Play 2026.

In fact, I’m actually surprised at how much better it is. It really does make a big difference. The leap from the resolution on the Moto G Play 2026 to the resolution on the Moto G Power 2026 is certainly substantial. I think this is the sweet spot for me. If a display is at least as good as what the Moto G Power 2026 offers, I’m personally a happy user. I would not be disappointed with having spent money on this phone if this is the display I was greeted with when turning it on for the first time.

I think the display has pretty decent color output, and it gets bright enough for my needs, as I never really had to deal with glare issues or anything like that. It’s not exactly the best weather at this point in the year where I am, but I was afforded a day or two where there was a little sun for a couple of hours, so I was able to see what using this outside was like, and I didn’t have much of an issue in direct sunlight either. The High Brightness Mode goes up to 1,000 nits, so that’s probably going to be plenty for most people. It’s also a 120Hz refresh rate display panel, so if you do happen to play games that support 60fps or 120fps, like Fortnite, you’ll enjoy this display’s capability to deliver smoother visuals.

Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Review: Performance

This is where the phone starts to show some cracks, as performance won’t be amazing if you’re trying to do things like play high-end games with demanding graphics. You can still play those games, but you will have to adjust the graphics down to lower settings for the phone to hit a good frame rate target. This is just the nature of things with a chipset and RAM like this phone offers. It’s the same MediaTek Dimensity 6300 chipset that’s offered by the Moto G Play 2026. So performance isn’t going to be wildly different. However, this phone does have double the RAM, so that’s going to make an impact a little bit.

I did notice that it was slightly better at managing optimal performance in games like Genshin Impact than the Moto G Play 2026 was, but not enough to really set it apart. In other words, it’s noticeable, but it would probably be hard for the average user to tell the difference. In non-gaming scenarios, the phone’s performance was just fine. It was quite snappy in regular usage of the apps and browsing through menus, with what is once again an incredibly fast fingerprint sensor for unlocking this phone. This is still one of the most mind-boggling things to me about the 2026 Moto G series. For around the same price, Motorola’s latest G phones have fingerprint sensors that are so much faster than some of the competitors. I hope this never changes, and I hope it forces other brands to catch up.

Benchmarks

In addition to just regular old real-world testing, we also put the phones we review through benchmarks to see how they stack up on paper against other devices in a similar price range. We’ve done that here, testing the Moto G Power in apps like Geekbench 6, AnTuTu, and 3DMark to see how the scores came out.

While I do think performance is fine when it comes to real-world performance, especially if you go into things knowing what you’re getting, let me set the expectations that the numbers in the Moto G Power 2026’s tests aren’t anything to write home about. The scores are low, but it’s important to remember that the scores don’t always reflect how the device will truly perform on a day-to-day basis. With that said, let’s dive in. To kick things off, we ran the Moto G Power 2026 through Geekbench 6, and we put it through both the CPU and GPU tests, so that we can get the single-core and multi-core scores for the CPU, and then the GPU test for the GPU score. You can view those scores below. Interestingly, this phone actually scored lower on the single-core score, but higher in the multi-core and GPU segments than the Moto G Play 2026.

For the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, the results weren’t stellar, but given the price of the phone, that’s understandable and acceptable, really. When running the Moto G Power 2026 through the test, its best loop was 382, while its lowest loop was 379, and its stability was 99.2%. Across the board, this is slightly lower than the Moto G Play 2026, which scored 384, 382, and 99.5%, respectively. It’s worth keeping in mind that these phones have the same chip, and the Moto G Power 2026 has more RAM. So, the larger and higher resolution display must be impacting the score a little.

Lastly, we put the phone through AnTuTu 3D Benchmark, and its score was about what I expected. It’s in the realm of the other Moto G devices, but higher than the Moto G Play 2026, with a score of 567,466, compared to 548,738.

Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Review: Battery Life and Charging

With a name like Moto G Power, I would expect the phone to have pretty good battery life. Motorola really isn’t disappointing on this front; however, I was surprised that it lasted a little less time than the Moto G Play 2026. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be, since it has a higher resolution display that’s also slightly larger, and it has the exact same battery capacity. So you’re not getting a larger battery, but you are getting a phone that will end up draining that battery a little faster. Still, the Moto G Power 2026 lasted longer than plenty of more expensive phones I’ve tested in the past.

Throughout my time with the phone, I was ending up with about 6 hours of screen-on time by the end of the day and still having about 48% battery left. It’s almost as long-lasting as the Moto G Play 2026, but again, the screen being higher resolution seems to be a tad more draining. The resolution is FHD+, which is 2,388 x 1,080 for this phone, with the display being 6.8 inches in size. I also keep the screen brightness up to a pretty high level when I use any phone. With that in mind, you’re likely to get better battery life than I did if you adjust the brightness. As always, your mileage may vary and likely will considerably since we probably don’t use phones the same way. But this is what people can generally expect.

Benchmarks

Just like with the performance testing, we like to put our phones through a battery life benchmark test. To do this, we bring up a 24-hour video on YouTube, and we let the video play until the battery in the phone reaches 1%. Then we make a note of the time. For the Moto G Power 2026, I was able to let the video play for 22 hours, 35 minutes, and 30 seconds. This isn’t that much lower than the Moto G Play 2026, and at this stage, I don’t think the extra hour and 19 minutes is going to make a huge difference for most users. In terms of charging, the Moto G Power took 2 hours, 4 minutes, and 24 seconds to get back up to 100%. This is just a couple of minutes faster than the Moto G Play 2026.

It’s worth noting that the Moto G Power 2026 will support Rapid Charging up to a maximum of 30W. However, you need the Motorola TurboCharging 33W adapter for those speeds, and we did not have one of those. So the phone charged more slowly. If you go for this phone over one of the others, the faster charger is highly recommended. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with the phone.

Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Review: Software

Software is once again one of the strong points here for this device, but there’s no surprise there as it’s the same software that you’ll find in the Moto G Play 2026. The software is mostly a stock Android experience. It’s not quite as close to stock as ASUS provided, but it’s like right behind it. And that’s one of the best things about the software experience on Motorola devices. You aren’t forced to sit through a lot of extra bloatware and unnecessary software design choices. This also means the phone is a little more snappy because Motorola isn’t shoving a bunch of extra features in your face with this device. It might not be like that for every Motorola device, but for the ones I’ve tested recently, the experience has been pleasant.

The only thing with the software that I wish Motorola would change is what apps are pre-installed when you turn the phone on for the first time. I don’t personally need apps like Booking.com, Adobe Scan, Copilot, or Perplexity on my phone. You can uninstall these if you don’t want them installed on the device. So there’s that at least. But I still wish Motorola would save me the trouble and just leave them off the phone to begin with. Outside of these apps that I feel like didn’t need to be there in the first place, the software on the phone is pretty solid. I only ever ended up with the occasional slowness, but for the most part didn’t really see any issues. Overall, I think most people would be happy with how the software looks and reacts on this device.

Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Review: Camera

Whether you use the camera a lot or not, you likely want at least a halfway decent camera so you can take pictures that don’t look like they’re from 2010. Thankfully, camera hardware and technology for phones have progressed so much in the past 20 years that a lot of phones these days can take pictures that look good enough to replace a digital camera for a lot of people. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this could easily be a replacement for a digital camera, but it’s not far off.

If given the choice, I would 100% take my Pixel 10 Pro camera with me places over the camera in this phone. However, if I remove that choice from the equation, the picture quality on this phone isn’t too bad. The pictures come out with relatively good detail and color for a phone that costs $300. Several years ago, if I wanted good quality photos for this much money, I would have been dreaming. Because I knew it wouldn’t be possible. That is no longer the case with today’s hardware, and it’s so refreshing to see that even entry-level phones with lower price tags will end up with cameras that are fine.

You get what looks like the same amount of camera features and options as the Moto G Play 2026, but the quality does jump up. The portrait mode photos look nicer, and the overall image quality looks a little nicer, too. Not by leaps and bounds, of course. It does a little better in low-light situations, so that was nice to see as well. At $300, no one should be expecting this phone to have a world-class camera, but you will probably be pleasantly surprised with the results if you’re looking at phones around this price for other reasons.

Should you buy the Motorola Moto G Power 2026?

As with every phone review we do here, I think whether or not you should buy this phone depends on what you want out of a phone. Having said that, if you’re reading this review, or if you’re looking at reviews for this type of device, then chances are good you’re already looking at phones that won’t cost a lot. In that case, I think this phone is certainly worth considering. I think it’s worth weighing out whether or not you want a slightly bigger display, with a better resolution, and a slightly better camera. If those things don’t really matter to you, then I think the Moto G Play 2026 or the Moto G 2026 is a better value. You save at minimum $100, and you’ll get a similar experience.

However, those who want a better display, more RAM, and a better camera should go for this device. I think it’s worth the extra money to get these things. Motorola has proven it’s more than capable of making a really good high-end phone. But with the Moto G Power 2026, it does a great job at proving it’s still one of the best manufacturers for phones at the low end.

You should buy the Motorola Moto G Power 2026 if:

• You’re looking for a phone with a good camera at a low price
• You want good battery life
• You’re on a smaller budget

You shouldn’t buy the Motorola Moto G Power 2026 if:

• You want a much better camera
• You’re looking to spend under $200
• You want something that has higher performance

The post Motorola Moto G Power 2026 Review: Where Budget Meets Premium appeared first on Android Headlines.

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