How bad can a £69 Android phone be? I found out | Tech News

Smartphones are costly. Whether you go for a £499 Google Pixel 9a or a £1,099 iPhone 17 Pro, spending a whole lot or hundreds of kilos on a cellular gadget is a severe financial resolution.

But some telephones are low-cost. The large query is whether or not they’re any good.

That’s why I determined to check out Motorola’s lately launched Moto G06, an Android handset that prices simply £69 from Currys. That price isn’t as a result of it’s previous, both. The phone was launched in September.

Do barely-enough specs make for a cut price phone, or would I wish to launch it out of the closest window?

I take a look at the newest and biggest high-end smartphones, and have accomplished so for the previous decade, so I am normally spoiled by cutting-edge {hardware} and glorious fashionable specs. I needed to search out out if shopping for a smartphone proper on the backside of the price ladder is a good thought, or if the sacrifices you need to make to get a phone this low-cost merely aren’t value making.

Out of the box, the Moto G06 makes a respectable impression. It feels sturdy and substantial regardless of its plastic body, and it’s large due to a 6.88-inch screen. The back is roofed in a fake leather-based end that feels grippy and means it received’t get lined in fingerprints. It feels more costly than it’s. The quantity and energy buttons are clicky, and also you even get a headphone jack.

But then I turned the phone on, and staying constructive turned troublesome.

The G06 has a MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme processor, which may be very low-spec. Combined with a (for 2025) paltry 4GB RAM, the phone chugged via the set up course of. Once I’d signed in with my Google account, the Android 15 working system continued to stagger and shudder into life.

This sadly is how the phone acts all of the time. Unlocking it with the fingerprint sensor within the energy button is dependable, however the screen lights up to jerky animations, with issues feeling a second or two behind your faucets.

You can navigate the phone with Android’s swipe gestures, however I was inclined to revert within the settings to the normal, previous three-button navigation as a result of the swipes are arduous to register when the phone can’t keep up.

I was additionally confronted with an alarming quantity of bloatware, the time period used to explain the apps phone producers pre-load onto new telephones with out your asking.

Just to emphasize how a lot garbage is loaded onto this phone on set up, it has: TikTok, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, LinkedIn, Amazon Music, Temu, Facebook, Pinterest, Solitaire, Block Blast, Vita Majong, Toon Blast, Candy Crush Saga, Booking.com and Monopoly Go. 15 undesirable apps! I guess that is what you get for paying naff all for a smartphone.

Thankfully, you can uninstall any app you don’t need, however it’s not a great first impression.

Motorola’s Android pores and skin may be very plain, in a great way. The resolution to depend on Google Photos, Calendar and different apps as an alternative of additionally together with duplicate Motorola variations is wise too. I put my SIM card within the phone, happy to see the tray has room for 2 SIM playing cards and a microSD card to broaden the stingy 64GB storage.

It’s uncommon to see this on telephones that price a thousand kilos today, and together with the headphone jack means you can have fairly a versatile setup. There’s even a silicone case within the box.

This is barely a 4G phone although, so that you can’t connect with 5G networks. That didn’t trouble me an excessive amount of. This is a sluggish phone, so that you can’t play online video games with intense 3D graphics. YouTube videos loaded positive, and also you can make video calls with the 8MP selfie digicam, however images are poor all spherical, together with on the one 50MP sensor on the back.

That’s a high megapixel rely, however the sensor shouldn’t be of superb high quality. Shots within the daytime are acceptable, however in any sort of low gentle they’re noisy. It’s additionally troublesome to focus pictures even when tapping to focus, and the sides of all images are blurry. Without the optical image stabilisation (OIS) found on most telephones, the G06 shouldn’t be a great digicam.

But absolutely anybody shopping for a phone this low-cost actually solely wants it for easy duties. Calls sounded clear and loud enough, and apps corresponding to Gmail, WhatsApp and Google Maps all labored completely properly, even when the phone does take about two seconds or so to load them whenever you faucet on the app icon. This isn’t the top of the world, however your present phone might be a lot sooner.

With not a lot of energy underneath the hood, battery life was great. This phone simply lasted me two days of use with its massive 5,200mAh battery, however then again I found it so irritating to make use of in its sluggishness that I didn’t do an excessive amount of to put on the battery down. I listened to Spotify via Bluetooth headphones, despatched WhatsApp messages, checked my e-mail and made some calls like I would another day.

Perhaps that is a good phone to get in case you are in your phone an excessive amount of and wish to use yours much less. The bestselling iPhones and Samsung Galaxy units, or certainly Motorola’s more costly telephones, are so performant that it’s straightforward to seamlessly beam hours of senseless social media scrolling into your face. The G06 splutters into life whenever you open Instagram however scrolling is janky, and the LCD show suffers from ghosting, the place issues seem blurry when scrolling, regardless of the 120Hz refresh charge.

It’s arduous to bag on this phone as a result of it prices £69. Yes, it’s annoying out of the box with all of the bloatware, and apps are sluggish to load. Even for primary duties I needed to sluggish down my thumbs and faucet icons or swipe slower as a result of the poor factor couldn’t keep up.

But the truth is, this phone prices about £1,000 much less than many of the opposite Android telephones I’ve examined lately, and it can nonetheless run 90 % of the apps I use commonly, even when at a snail’s tempo. If you need a phone that works, albeit apprehensively, that is the least you can spend on one in 2025.

Just proceed with excessive warning, and don’t anticipate to do something in a hurry. That is likely to be enough for you. As a smartphone fanatic, it’s far too little for me, although.

The Motorola Moto G06 is out there for £69 from Currys