Moto G60S Review
A dependable, if not desperately interesting or ambitious, 4G Android phone.
Verdict
The Motorola Moto G60S is a dependable, if not desperately interesting or ambitious, 4G Android phone. Key benefits include a large screen and super-fast charging, which will make the device appear much lower-maintenance to some of you.
Pros
- Large screen
- Very fast charging
- Solid value
Cons
- Mono speaker
- A few rivals have better cameras
- No 5G mobile internet
Availability
- UKRRP: £219.99
Key Features
- 50W chargingThe Moto G60S has a much more powerful charger than most, regardless of price, and can charge the battery in under an hour.
- Bundled caseHow is a bundled case a feature? The Moto G60S design appears to be built around the case because it’s one of the fewer phones that looks better with the case attached.
- 6.8in screenThis phone has an XL-size 6.8-inch screen. It’s a very tall display, so less imposing than it may sound, but is still great for gaming and apps.
Introduction
The Moto G60S is classic Motorola. It’s an affordable, slightly chunky phone that offers a generous amount of tech for your money.
It has a huge screen, four rear cameras, 128GB of storage, and one of the fastest-charging batteries you’ll find anywhere near the price. The Moto G60S’s charge rate is far greater than that of an iPhone 13 Pro Max, or Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra.
However, you don’t get 5G mobile internet or the stereo speakers that have been fairly common in recent Moto phones, and camera quality is just okay.
These compromises shouldn’t be a surprise, though. In fact, to get 5G at this level you often have to accept even more cuts: 5G is accessible nowadays, but not yet a “free” feature.
Xiaomi is the Motorola Moto G60S’s biggest problem. It has made several phones for buyers with this sort of money to spend, and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro is superior in several ways. It features a better camera, a glass back, a better screen and better CPU. However, it’s an outlier, and if you can’t get that Xiaomi at a good price with your chosen network then the G60S is a perfectly solid buy.
Design
- Budget plastic design…
- … but it looks good in the case
- It’s a large phone
No company has embraced the silicone case as much as Motorola. Not only do all the Motorola handsets I’ve tested recently include a case, but the recent ones have also had it attached in the box.
This thinking has reached its natural conclusion in the Motorola Moto G60S. It might be the only phone I’ve used that looks better in its case than out of it – and I think this is deliberate.
Remove the case and the Motorola Moto G60S looks and feels cheap. Its rear sports a contoured metallic plastic finish, designed to catch the light and shine. In the past, Motorola has typically reserved this style of ridged plastic for its cheapest Android handsets.
Put the G60S into its case and the slightly smoky finish of the silicone takes the edge off the shine, making the Moto G60S looks far more tasteful.
My advice would be to keep it in the case. It’s meant to be used; there also appears to be proper guidance for the positioning of the fingerprint scanner, which appears vague case-free.
So is it a success? Sort of. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro looks and feels so good without a case, it appears almost a shame to put on; but Motorola has shown it knows how to style out compromise.
However, size is the unfortunate side-effect. I came to the Motorola Moto G60S from using the very slim Motorola Edge 20. The G60S feels much heavier, and much more of a handful. You could say much the same about the majority of enthusiast 4G phones around this price, though, and the tall 20.5:9 aspect ratio means the G60S isn’t significantly wider than the Edge 20.
Other points of note? The Motorola Moto G60S comes with a headphone jack, but unlike some other Moto-series phones, it only has a single bottom speaker. This is a little disappointing in a phone that seems made for media, which has a pretty large cut-out for the tiny calls-only speaker.
Screen
- Large display
- High refresh rate
- A very tall screen
The Motorola Moto G60S has a 6.8-inch screen, which is larger than the 6.67-inch standard among affordable big-screen best mid-range phones. These numbers are slightly deceptive, though, because the Moto has a taller-than-most aspect ratio of 20.5:9.
This means the excess size is easier to appreciate when you read articles or watch cinematic 21:9 aspect ratio movies. It remains great for games, too, and just about everything else.
Motorola uses a Full HD resolution 120Hz LCD panel. This screen tech doesn’t provide the peerless contrast of an OLED, and there’s some loss of brightness at an angle.
You have a choice of Natural and Saturated colour; I recommend sticking to “Natural”. This isn’t because it offers more accurate colour, but because it has a warmer colour temperature. “Saturated” leaves whites with a slightly blue character, which is often used to make the display appear to pop more. However, to my eyes, a warmer tone simply looks better.
Performance
- Standard Motorola interface with minimal bloat
- Solid performance
- Tasteful Motorola additions
Motorola’s software is consistent across almost all of its phone, with a simple interface that you could mistake for “vanilla” Android.
There are a few attempts to inject a little Motorola character, and even these are tasteful and minimal.
For example, the default clock widget shows a ring around the time, in an approximation of the round Moto logo. We used to see this shape a lot more in Moto phones, in a glass ring around the rear cameras, and this is what remains of that particular bit of branding.
Software add-on Peek is the other Moto special. It’s a lock-screen display that shows icons to represent recent notifications, and the phone’s battery life.
However, Peek pops up less regularly on the Moto G60S than in some other Moto phones, likely as a result of its LCD screen. In a phone with an OLED display, only the lit pixels use significant power, where in an LCD the full-screen backlight is engaged whenever anything is shown. Still, Peek will show if, for example, you pick up the Moto G60S while it’s sleeping.
The software beneath Moto’s thin custom later is Android 11, and the MediaTek G95 is the processor powering it.
Historically, MediaTek CPUs have been considered budget alternatives to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors. MediaTek has started to turn that reputation around with chipsets such as the excellent Dimensity 1200. However, the G95 is a just-okay CPU that sits a little behind the Snapdragon 732G found in some rival devices at this level. It’s far behind the Snapdragon 860 in the Xiaomi Poco X3 Pro, which is probably the best gaming phone you can get with a Moto G60S-size budget.
In terms of gaming, the Motorola Moto G60S isn’t a bad phone; it just isn’t the best. I played Ark: Survival for long enough to get mauled by a few dinosaurs and found that the game is playable at its “epic” graphics setting, but only if you use quite a loose interpretation of that term. I experienced frequent frame rate dips. Fortnite ran okay, but you will have to use lower the graphics settings to get close to a consistent 30fps frame rate – and dips at the beginning of rounds are unavoidable.
The mono speaker plays a factor here, too. Stereo speakers are better for gaming, and the Moto G60S doesn’t have them.
Camera
- Fair-quality camera
- Clear drop in quality from the main camera, which is normal
- Mediocre night performance, like most at the price
Motorola includes four rear cameras in the Moto G60S, and one on the front. You get a primary 64-megapixel camera, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide, a 5-megapixel macro and a 2-megapixel depth sensor.
Not surprisingly, even the main camera uses a budget sensor. It’s the OmniVision OV64B40, which was reportedly the first 64-megapixel sensor of this type to shrink pixels down from 1-micron to 0.7-micron. For us phone photographers, smaller sensor pixels aren’t good news.
Nevertheless, the Motorola Moto G60S can still take perfectly good photos in most conditions. It’s helped by Auto HDR processing, and while the OV64B40 isn’t a top-end sensor, it holds up pretty well considering its compromises.
Performance sits between the Xiaomi Poco X3 Pro, which tends to mush up shadow areas, and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro, which has a better camera setup all-round.
I have found the Moto G60S’s camera fine considering its price. Sure, many of the shots came out excessively cool in terms of colour temperature, and the foreground will be a bit mushy if you shoot a sunset. And, while the Night mode is absolutely worth using, its primary benefit is for stopping blown highlights, rather than radically improving detail across the frame.
The phone’s 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera, in typical budget phone fashion, is less detailed and can’t handle middling lighting as well as the primary sensor. Nevertheless, it holds up okay against similarly priced rivals. The macro camera is a step above the genuinely terrible 2-megapixel cameras seen in some phones, and takes a solid stab at close-up nature photography. However, it isn’t on a par with some Xiaomi rivals, which use slightly better lenses.
Finally, the depth sensor’s only real job is to let you take background blur portrait photos of subjects other than people. It’s a poor piece of hardware, but does have an important role.
The Moto G60S’s video is limited in many of the ways that other phones are at this level. You can shoot at 1080p or 4K resolution, but 4K disables software stabilisation, so it’s best avoided most of the time.
Battery Life
- Good battery life, but not Moto’s best
- Very fast charging
- No wireless charging
The Moto G60S features the same battery capacity as the majority of Moto G-series phones at 5000mAh. I have found that it doesn’t last quite as long as some of its series siblings, such as the 5G Moto G50, but that makes sense. This phone has a larger screen, a high refresh rate, plus a different MediaTek processor that uses an older fabrication process and may well be a little less efficient.
I don’t think battery life is an issue here, however. The Moto G60S still sails through full days with a decent chunk of charge remaining by the end of the day. It’s just that some Motorola handsets have excellent battery life, while here it is just “solid”.
The Moto G60S does have an unusual benefit, though. The Moto G60S comes with a 50W charger, which isn’t only far more powerful than most budget phones, but many of the best phones too. It takes the phone from flat to 50% charge in just 17-18 minutes, and it’s full in 56 minutes.
There’s no wireless charging here, but the decent longevity plus excellent charging speed is a compelling combo.
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Should you buy it?
Like most of the best Moto phones, the G60S is a no-nonsense, low-fluff phone with good-looking software and decent battery life. Its screen is large, too, and battery charging speed is excellent.
The G60S fails to stand out in the way some arch-rival Xiaomi phones do. With no specific focus here, it can seem there’s little of note. Some rivals offer better cameras, and are significantly better for gaming as well.
Final Thoughts
The Moto G60S isn’t one of this great series’s most dynamic releases. It doesn’t have 5G, nor a chart-topping camera or notable processor.
However, it does largely ace the “low maintenance” angle that has always been a Moto draw for me. Its software is quirk-free, battery life is solid, if not Moto’s best, and charging speed is excellent. The large screen is great for casual gaming and video, too – although this isn’t the best 4G gaming phone you can get for your money.
It’s a sound option, though, particularly if you have owned a Motorola budget phone before and like how they operate. But there are more exciting alternatives available from companies such as Xiaomi and Realme.
How we test
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Used the phone for over a week
Used the camera in a variety of lighting conditions
Performance tested in real-world and synthetic tests
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FAQs
The phone is rated for basic IP52 water-resistance and is described as water-repellant, meaning there are some seals to keep the innards safe in the rain.
The phone offers cabled charging only; there’s no wireless.
This phone isn’t 5G. If you see “5G” mentioned in reference to it, this refers to its 5GHz Wi-Fi band. Check out the Moto G50 5G instead if you need 5G mobile internet.
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Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
