Motorola Moto G14 review: Decent budget phone with good looks

Motorola earlier in the month launched a brand new budget phone Moto G14 for Rs 9,9999 in India.

I used the phone for a week and here are my thoughts on Motorola's latest Moto G series handset.

Design, build quality and display

Our Moto G14 review unit is a sky-blue variant. It is one of the best-looking phones in the budget segment I have reviewed so far in 2023. Even the build quality is really good. The back case features acrylic glass made of Polymethyl methacrylate(PMMA) material, but still, it exudes a real glass-like hand feel. Most people can mistake it for an expensive phone. Also, the rear case does a fine job of resisting fingerprint smudges.

Also, the front panel is protected by a Panda glass shield against scratches. And, the company also offers a transparent silicone case to safeguard the device from cracking during accidental drops.

Add to that, the device comes with an IP52 rating, meaning it is protected against water splashes.

. At the base, it features a single-grill speaker tuned with Dolby Atmos system and delivers decent audio quality with less distortion even when the volume is put to the max. Besides the speaker, it features a Type-C port and a mic.

On the right side, you will find the volume rockers and a power button, which also doubles up as the fingerprint sensor. It works great without any issues.

On the left side, there is a SIM tray slot. Here, you can insert two nano SIMs and also a MicroSD card (up to 1TB). And, at the top, there is a 3.5mm audio jack.

. As far as the display is concerned, it features a 6.5-inch full HD+(2400×1080p) LCD panel with a 20:9 aspect ratio. Except for the thick chin as the base, all the other three sides have uniform slim bezels. It has an 89.47 per cent screen-to-body ratio.

The display quality is decent and has a pixel density of 405 ppi (pixels per inch). It is good enough to read messages, and emails outdoors, and consume multimedia content but under a shade or a vehicle. Under direct sunlight, you keep the display at full brightness at all times.

On a positive note, you won't face any issues as such indoors.

. Performance

Motorola Moto G14 is powered by a 12nm class Unisoc T616 octa-core processor with Mali-G57 MP1 GPU, 4GB LPDDR4X RAM, and 128GB UFS 2.2 storage. And, as noted earlier, consumers can expand the storage up to 1TB.

This will come in handy, as the device houses a lot of preloaded apps and with a microSD card, users can add extra storage to store thousands of photos and other multimedia content.

The phone runs Android 13-based My UX. It is clean and easy to navigate through the phone's settings and app drawer. Also, it is confirmed to get Android 14 and three years of software security support.

. As far as day-to-day usage is concerned, the phone works without any issues. One can even play regular games such as Candy Crush or Angry Birds or Solitaire without much fuss, but this phone is not built for extreme gaming. Also, while taking photos, the autofocus is kind of slow to fix onto the subject and takes a bit of time to process the image when you hit the onscreen shutter button.

This phone is built for normal usage such as web browsing, consuming multimedia content on OTT apps, video calling and other day-to-day use.

The new Moto G14 sold in India supports only 4G LTE. Other connectivity features include Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band: 2.5Ghz + 5GHz) and Bluetooth 5.0.

With a 5000mAh (type: Li-Po) capacity, it can easily last a full day even with binge-watching your favourite TV series or movies or while streaming a live T20 cricket game. The company is offering a 20W charger with the retail box.

. Photography

Motorola Moto G14 houses a dual-camera module— a 50MP (f/1.8) + 2MP (f/2.4) macro camera with LED flash on the back.

. Though earlier I mentioned that the Moto G14 takes some time to process the image, it does a fine job delivering decent-quality HDR photos. The colour of the subject is close to natural and does not come off as warmer and artificial as such.

. The portrait mode too does the job of getting a good bokeh effect in the background and most important get edges around the subject clearly without any issue of smudges at the tip of the petals.

. The macro mode too is good. It manages to capture minute details.

. In the night mode, the photo when taken of a landscape, is grainy. However, I should note, at first, it won't be visible on the compact screen of the phone, but when viewed on the big screen of the desktop, there are a lot of grans. However, when a photo is taken up close of a person or a flower with LED flash, the quality is the same as any other phone under Rs 10,000 range.

. On the front, it houses a pretty good 8MP(f/2.4) camera. It takes pretty good selfies in both outdoor and indoor conditions. Also, it comes with superficial tools to adjust the skin tones and even brighten the reddish hue of the lips too.

. Final thoughts

Motorola's latest budget phone Moto G14 is a stunner of a phone in terms of looks and build quality. It also delivers in terms of battery life and performance-wise, it is decent and works smoothly when doing video calls, web browsing, scrolling on social media platforms, consuming multimedia content on OTT apps and other day-to-day chores without any issues. But, it is not built for gaming and also during the photography sessions, the processing takes a bit of time, but as you can see the image quality, they are good.

. Besides the sky blue colour, the company offers the Moto G14 in a steel grey variant. The device is available in just one configuration-- 4GB RAM + 128GB storage-- for Rs 9,999 on Flipkart.