Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite Review

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Motorola only uses the "Power" suffix when it's putting a high-capacity battery into its phones, and to date that's been the case for a number of highly affordable phones where the heavy-duty battery was the entire selling proposition for the phone.

Adding "Lite" behind "Power" feels oddly contradictory in those terms, but in the case of the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite, it's an apt description. This is a phone that has plenty of power – in terms of numerical battery capacity – but it's distinctly light on power when it comes time to run applications. That's a compromise that was a little easier to live with back when budget phones really had little going for them, but in 2020, the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite has lots of really good, low-cost competition.

Design

Design

• 6.5-inch 720p display
• Fast rear fingerprint sensor

• Read more about the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's design

  The Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite is an affordable phone, and historically that has meant pretty plain designs, especially from Motorola. Still, even the Lenovo-owned phone maker can't ignore the broad industry trends towards more attractive phones. While I wouldn't call the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite a real standout looker in its class, it's nice enough for a cheap phone, with a reflective blue – sorry, "Royal Blue" – plastic rear case adorned with that classic Motorola batwing logo.

  Like so many of its counterparts, the Motorola logo is also where you'll find the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's fingerprint sensor. In an age where we're seeing a quick shift towards slightly iffy in-display sensors, it's a genuine pleasure to hit a mechanical sensor that works quickly, and that's precisely what the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's fingerprint sensor does. It's also easy to hit first time with your finger thanks to the included clear plastic case, which is pre-applied onto the phone in the box – another nice touch.

  Around the front, you'll find a 6.5-inch display that Motorola somewhat optimistically refers to as its "Max Vision" display. With an HD+ (720x1600) resolution, I'm not exactly sure what's "Max" about it, given that some competitors in this price space are offering full HD displays. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally rather average for a phone at this price point. There's a teardrop style notch at the top to house the front-facing camera sensor, but it's also got a somewhat prominent top bezel, so this almost feels like a case where Motorola should have gone for a full bezel instead.

Camera

Camera

• Easy-to-use photo app
• Average camera results

• Read more about the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's cameras

  Prior very-low-cost Motorola phones have tended towards dual-camera arrays at best, but the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite has a trio of rear sensors in play for photography. However, that's not quite the same thing as a full triple-lens array. Along with the primary 16MP f/2.0 sensor and secondary 2MP f/2.4 macro lens, there's a 2MP f/2.4 depth sensor. This is a common enough play in this price bracket, with the depth sensor used for bokeh effects on portrait shots only; it's not a lens in its own right that you can shoot through.

  The Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's camera app is quite easy to understand, which is a big plus, although it can be somewhat slow to launch and slow to respond when shots are being taken or if you want to tweak settings between shots. The primary photo mode has a setting for Google lens, with portrait and macro modes to the left and video and panorama modes to the right, and that's your lot.

  It's been genuinely interesting to see which features have filtered down into the budget space, and the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's feature set is fair but not stunning compared to what we've seen on other phones in this price range. Take the Macro mode for example; it's fun without a doubt to get close-up shots, but the sensor and speed of the camera do limit the kinds of shots you can easily get.

  In regular photo mode, the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite predictably struggles in lower light or with faster moving subjects, and it also had some issues with overexposing shots that other phone cameras in this price range managed with more ease.

  The Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's cameras were very average for this price range, and if you were keen on getting good shots, it's not a strong argument for purchasing one.

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

Performance

• Android 9 is disappointing
• MediaTek Helio P35 is slow

• Read more about the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's performance

  MediaTek is the processor choice for budget phones, and Motorola equips the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite with a MediaTek Helio P35 paired up with 4GB of RAM. Even within the budget space that's a mediocre recipe that rather predictably doles out mediocre performance, both in benchmarks and everyday usage.

  Here's how the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite compares against a range of similarly priced phones using Geekbench 5's CPU test:

  And here's how it compares using 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme test:

  This is not a powerful phone, even within its price bracket, and you do get that feeling while you're using it. A few years ago that's very much what you'd expect in the true budget range, but it can't help but feel that for a phone that has a "power" suffix, the one thing it could have used was just a smidge more processing power.

  What's also annoying here is that this is a phone that Motorola has brought to market in mid-2020, only a short while before we should start to see the first true Android 11 phones. The Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite isn't Android 11, and that's no surprise. Instead, it's shipping with Android 9, which is by this stage nearly two years old. That's not a move that inspires confidence in terms of future upgrades.

  You do get a limited range of Motorola's "Moto Actions", including the fun chopping motion to fire up the torch, which is always welcome. Thankfully, there's really not too much more preinstalled to take up the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's 64GB of onboard storage.

Battery life

Battery life

• 5,000mAh battery gives fair but not great performance
• micro-USB charging is disappointing

• Read more about the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's battery life

  When the predecessor to the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite, the Motorola Moto G7 Power hit the market, it stood alone as the sole 5,000mAh budget phone you could buy, giving it an immediate point of difference and value. At that time, a lot of its competitors were generally hovering around the 3,200mAh battery level if you were lucky.

  The Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite features a 5,000mAh battery like its predecessor, but it's far from alone in offering higher battery capacities, with a whole raft of competitor phones providing similar battery capacities.

  The reality of a low-power processor and a high capacity battery is that you absolutely will get a single day's usage out of it unless you're hammering it with gaming pretty much full-time. However, I was curious to see how the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite's battery compared to similar modern competing phones in the same class, so I threw it through our standard battery test.

  This involves streaming a full-screen YouTube video for an hour at full brightness and moderate volume and measuring the battery drop from 100%. Here's how the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite compared:

  It's not the worst score we've seen from a budget phone of late, but considering it's outpaced on battery endurance by several 4,000mAh phones and one 5,000mAh phone, it's not an encouraging sign.

  It's also not encouraging – although not entirely surprising – to see the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite stick with micro-USB charging. Motorola has adopted USB-C charging for some phones, but not all of them.

Should you buy the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite?

The Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite is priced like a budget phone, and it feels like one.

The issue with that statement in 2020 is that we've seen a recent raft of phones in similar price brackets offer more than the Motorola Moto G8 Power Lite can manage, whether that's in camera features, processing performance or, surprisingly, even in overall battery endurance.

It's relatively inexpensive even for a 5,000mAh phone, and if you can score one at a discount price even better, but there's little here really worth getting all that excited about. Considering that the previous Motorola "Power" phone sat atop our best budget phones list for a good long time, that can't help but feel like a fall from grace.

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Image source: Alex Kidman