Motorola G72 in-hand review

On Motorola’s European website, it says, “For a high resolution display smartphone and top sound quality phone, pick Moto G72,” but in India, you would receive one “for all the colours of your life.”

One of the primary selling aspects of the Moto G72 is undoubtedly its display, which is a 6.6″ 1080p 120Hz OLED with support for a billion colours. There is promise on the sound front as well because you do get dual speakers, a headphone connector, and an FM radio.

With a weight of only 166g and a 5,000mAh battery, the Moto G72 is surprisingly light. This is one of the specification sheet’s most notable numbers. With the very plain Mediatek Helio G99 chipset, which lacks 5G functionality, Motorola claims a battery life of over two days. We can understand how that would be the case.

We’re looking at a 2+1 rear arrangement with a 108MP headlining, 8MP ultrawide, and 2MP macro, while selfies are handled by a 16MP punch hole unit – what appears to be a good intermediate combination. What you won’t have is 4K video recording, although these cost-effective gadgets have recently adopted this as the new standard.

Unboxing of Motorola G72

The recycled brown packaging are saved for the Edge series, whereas the Moto G72 is packaged in the same blue box as all other G-series Motos. The information is quite typical.

The phone is shipped with a clear, soft silicone cover that is useful but not particularly stylish. The 33W Turbo-Power converter and a USB-A to USB-C cable for charging and data transmission are located underneath.

Design

The Moto G72’s physical characteristics are mainly notable for its modest weight. It’s one of the more pocketable phones you can buy at just 166g, despite the fact that it has a 5,000mAh battery inside and is essentially a 6.6-inch “full-size” gadget.

Yes, the dimensions accurately represent the size of those parts, and the footprint and thickness are essentially “normal” for the category. However, the curved back borders effectively conceal the thickness (not that the 7.9mm thickness is all that thick to begin with), and the contrast between the G72’s small weight and virtually “normal” size makes the device feel even lighter.

Of course, they did not use any magic to do it. You won’t be handling any “luxury” materials with the Moto G72 because it is primarily made of plastic, including the frame and the back panel. Although it doesn’t seem fancy, that should be sturdy and keeps weight down.

The Moto G72 fits Motorola’s practise of marketing the majority of its smartphones as splash-resistant. There is considerable uniformity behind such terms since there is an official IP52 rating in the spec sheet.

Our review unit is the Meteorite Gray colorway, which has a base colour of black but can change colour depending on how light strikes it. Polar Blue, a more commonly accessible substitute, has a similar color-changing effect but in the bluish-green region of the colour spectrum. A Mineral White option is also available, although it’s only present in some areas.

Our review unit’s frosted coating is more slippery than others and does have a tendency to pick up some smudges; not a terrific combination. The G72’s small and light appeal is diminished if you use the accompanying case, which will add an additional layer of protection and improve grip. The buttons are somewhat clicky on their own, but not so with the case. It also makes pushing keys seem very squishy.

The actual buttons are situated above the power button on the right, above the volume rocker. They are conveniently located and are easy to access with either hand.

The G72’s optical underdisplay fingerprint scanner is positioned a little too low for our tastes, but since the phone is so light, using it doesn’t endanger the phone’s life in the same way that it could if it were heavier. The real identification process, on the other hand, went well and without any problems in our experience.

It’s important to note that the Moto G72, which is the less expensive model, features an underdisplay fingerprint sensor while the allegedly more expensive Moto G82 has a side-mounted capacitive one. We respect the G72’s more modern approach, but you could be one of those folks that like the conventional way.

There are some nods to the past on the tour of the perimeter, but they are, we think, in a nice way. On the bottom, there is a headphone jack, and on the left, in the card slot, you may swap the second SIM for a microSD card.

The majority of the front of the G72’s OLED display is covered by bezels that are typical of mid-range current smartphones. The selfie camera punch-hole is another “normal” feature, but we’ve moved past making a big deal out of it.

The sort of protective glass that covers the front would have been helpful to know, but Motorola’s specifications are silent on the matter.

Overall, the Moto G72 doesn’t have a very striking design; middle-of-the-road would be a better description. From, most crucially, it has a sense of compactness that makes it anything but unattractive.

Display

The Moto G72 has a 6.6-inch OLED screen with a pixel density of 402ppi and a resolution of 1080x2400px in a 20:9 aspect ratio. It provides a refresh rate of 120Hz; there are no shoddy 90Hz alternatives available.

It is extremely brilliant, maybe the brightest in its class. With the Adaptive brightness option on and the phone in bright ambient light, we measured 1015nits; comparable OLEDs at this price point generally hover around 700nits. The figure we manually entered into the slider, 501nits, is essentially the “standard.”

Color accuracy

The G72’s colour reproduction isn’t nearly as good, but it’s also not too awful. The phone displayed around average accuracy for our DCI-P3 targets in the default Saturated mode, with a fairly average blue shift to the white point and the grayscale swatches. That is quite normal, but the problem here is that moving the temperature slider to the warm end caused the image to change from blue to green to yellow rather than remaining neutral. We’d continue using the default selection.

However, there is a slight cyan shift to the greys. Normal mode, on the other hand, is calibrated for sRGB content and is often fairly close to goal.

Refresh rate

You have three options for refresh rate: 60Hz, 120Hz, and Auto. Just that—hard parameters that the phone will (almost) always abide by—is what you’ll get by using either of the fixed refresh rate options. You can receive the highest refresh rate in 120Hz mode in all browsers, video-playing applications, games, etc.

The Auto mode uses 120Hz fairly liberally as well. For games that allow high frame rates, it will set the default to that, and for browsers, it will keep 120Hz so long as there is moving content present. When used for most other purposes, the phone ramps down to 60Hz after a brief period of idleness before resuming 120Hz when you engage with it. It would occasionally display 90Hz as well, usually as a transitional step between 120 and 60, rather than as a setting it keeps for any length of time. The monitor that isn’t constantly on showed 48Hz as well.

HDR Support

Support for HDR on the Moto G72 is a bit of a grey area. We were told the phone supported HDR10+ at launch, but Motorola spec sheets no longer make any mention of HDR functionality. The Helio G99 processor is not said to enable HDR by Mediatek either. In spite of HDR10 (rather than HDR10+) capability being reported by hardware testing applications, HDR streams weren’t really available anywhere, not even on YouTube. However, it is fortunate that the Widevine L1 certification does support FullHD streaming.

Perhaps we should embrace the Moto G72’s display for its high brightness, simple refresh rate managing, and all-around OLED beauty rather than focusing on what it lacks because it may be unrealistic to expect everything from a phone in this price bracket.

Battery Life

It’s difficult to believe the Moto G72 has a 5,000mAh battery inside when you’re just looking at it (and much more so when you’re holding it). But it does, and its endurance statistics reflect this.

This Moto’s voice call duration was 43 hours, making it a good option for people who still converse on their phones a lot. It’s really rather good when the display is on; 14+ hours of web surfing (at a steady 120Hz) and more than 19 hours of looping films make for an impressive performance while the device is in use. The total Endurance rating came out to 121h when the standby was included in the equation.

Charging Speed

There is a 33W TurboPower adaptor included with the Moto G72. It is not USB PowerDelivery compatible based on the numbers displayed on it, and having a USB-A connector further indicates that it won’t be as adaptable as you would like. Still, it does a fair job of topping off the Moto itself.

The Moto was displaying 53% half an hour into a charge from flat, and it took 74 minutes to charge it all the way to 100%. However, it will take an additional 17 minutes, which is a little longer than usual, for the phone to truly reach the “Charged” condition.

The G72 is about in line with the class average in both the 100% and 30-minute measures. It is noticeably superior to the G62 and somewhat on level with the G82, although the Edge 30 Neo is much faster.

Speakers

The Motorola G72 is equipped with what has now come to be the standard stereo speaker configuration: a bottom-mounted “main” speaker joined by an earpiece that handles the other channel. When the phone is held vertically, the earpiece moves to the left, and the channels are rearranged to correspond to the landscape orientation.

In our test, the Motorola Moto G72 received a “Good” loudness rating, matching that of the G82 and falling short of the “Very Good” G62 5G. (which, in all fairness, only barely made it there). According to our ears, the G72 and G82 sound almost comparable, so you’d receive clear output with well-defined treble, good voices, and little low-end presence.

Software

With Android 12 as its operating system, the Moto G62 isn’t exactly cutting edge. While Motorola may be a little late with the OS upgrades, continuous support isn’t lacking. We did receive a few minor updates on our review device over the previous few weeks. You would receive a basically stock UI, with few internal modifications and some long-standing proprietary features, as is typical with Motorola phones.

The user interface and general design resemble stock Android. This excludes the huge pill-shaped quick toggles in the notification shade as well as the auto brightness toggle, which Motorola and Google both preserve in the display settings.

The app drawer and the recent apps menu, which presents applications in a carousel configuration, are also unaltered.

Motorola has, as is customary, provided a few helpful extras. All of them have been included to the Moto settings app, which organises them into categories.

The first one is Personalization, where you may change typefaces, the arrangement of programme icons, accent colours, icon shapes, and themes.

The Moto G72’s scale, which is by default smaller than typical – in a nice manner, if that makes sense – is one aspect that is difficult to define. Of course, you can modify it to your preference in any direction, but for this specific reviewer, the default is perfect.

However, the additions that are most helpful incorporate motions. The recognisable ones are present, such as the karate chop for the flashlight or the wrist twist for the camera app. Another option is the Power touch, which activates an extra app panel from the right side of the display when the power button is double-tapped. It functions precisely like other Android skins’ smart sidebar does.

In order to prevent the screen from going black while you are halfway through an article, the attentive display keeps the screen on when the front camera identifies a face gazing at it. When the phone detects you are nearby and you pick it up, Peek Display illuminates the lockscreen. For motion detection, it makes use of the proximity sensor and the accelerometer. Additionally, if there is a notice, you may quickly preview the text by tapping and holding on the notification symbol. Although the Always-on capability is almost as nice as the Peek display feature, we would have loved to have the option to pick.

The Overcharge protection option in the Battery menu is a very recent addition. When it notices that the phone hasn’t been unplugged for three days in a row, it will stop charging and keep the battery charged at a much healthy 80%.

Naturally, the “Ready For” function Motorola offers on certain of its Edge devices is absent from the Moto G72.

Performance

The Helio G99 chipset, a basic Mediatek processor without 5G connection, powers the Moto G72. It is produced using a 6nm technology and is aimed at efficiency, but its octa-core CPU is still able to do basic tasks owing to a few Cortex-A76 cores running at up to 2.2GHz (the other 6 Cortex-A55 cores max out at 2.0GHz). It has a Mali-G57 MC2 GPU.

There just seems to be one storage choice, the 128GB, which is easily extensible through microSD (though you’d have to give up the second SIM for that). RAM comes in 6GB or 8GB sizes (our review unit).

In terms of single-core CPU performance, the Moto G72 is comparable to the G62 (SD480), but a little slower than the G82 (SD695). The Moto is outperformed by other SD695 phones as well, although the Exynos 1280 Galaxy A53 5G and A33 5G are much more competitive. In multi-core testing, the disparities are less, but the G72 still occupies a position in the bottom half of the rankings.

Once more, GPU performance falls into the “satisfactory” category; the Moto G72 won’t break any frames-per-second records, but rival models based on the Snapdragon 695 will.

Lower-end chipsets have the advantage of not often throttling; even though they may not be producing enormous amounts of power, they may keep their output virtually forever. In both the 3DMark stress tests and the CPU Throttling test, we saw that on the Moto G72.

Camera

On its rear, the Moto G72 boasts a somewhat well-equipped triple camera arrangement. It has a 108MP primary sensor, an 8MP ultrawide, and a 2MP specialised macro sensor for good measure. A 16MP camera on the front is responsible for taking selfies.

The main camera has a Samsung HM6 sensor, one of the newest Nona-pixel models with a 1/1.67-inch sensor size “visual format It uses the smallest pixels possible (0.64 m), bins 9 of them for a total 1.92 m pixel size, and produces pictures with a resolution of 12 MP. The lens has an aperture of f/1.7 and an approximate 24-millimeter equivalent focal length; it is not stabilised.

A tiny 8MP sensor, the 4H7 from Samsung, is used by the universal camera. It has a 1/4 “1.12-micron pixels and optical format. The lens has an f/2.2 aperture and a stated coverage of 118 degrees. The focus is set.

The OmniVision OV02B10 sensor, a 1/5″ unt with a 2MP resolution and 1.75m pixel pitch, serves as the foundation for the “macro” camera. The aperture of the fixed-focus lens is f/2.4.

The hi1634 from SK Hynix, a 16MP sensor with 1.0 m pixels and a Quad Bayer filter array, is taking your selfies. The aperture is f/2.5, and the focus is fixed.

Despite the Moto G72’s software package having a pretty standard appearance, the camera app is customised. The core elements remain the same; the camera modes are grouped in a carousel configuration that is customisable. The less often used shooting modes are located under the “More” option at the right end of the carousel.

Pro mode works on all three of the rear cameras (including the macro), but not the front-facing one. It allows you complete control over the camera’s settings, including white balance, ISO, focus, shutter speed, and exposure compensation. There is only a little live histogram shown; neither focus peaking nor zebras are included.

Swiping down in the viewfinder will reveal more options for each camera mode. If you miss the little bar at the far end that indicates that, you can be left wondering where some options are, such as the frame rate and flash settings in video mode and the self-timer and self-flash settings in photo mode.

Even more settings are contained under the gear icon for the general settings menu. The full-res mode for the selfie camera, for instance, can be found here; the Ultra-res mode on the carousel is only applicable to the main camera on the back.

Daylight photos

The Moto G72’s primary camera produces average daytime pictures. While the detail is acceptable, the structure is a little grainy. For the class, contrast and dynamic range are excellent. Additionally, colour saturation is well-balanced, although the attraction is diminished by the white balance’s tendency to lean cool.

There is some more information that the full-res photographs do manage to capture. Compared to the 12MP ones, they can occasionally be a little more contrasty, but they normally keep the same appearance.

Although there isn’t a 2x zoom shortcut in the viewfinder, we considered using the 108MP sensor to zoom, so we pinched to a 2x magnification. The outcomes may be better because they clearly have an upscaled and sharpened appearance. You would do much better to crop after taking the photo at 108MP.

gGiven its class, the ultrawide camera does a respectable job, and the hardware doesn’t detract too much from the image quality. In ideal lighting, detail is acceptable, but in low light or inside at any ISO setting, it can become mushy. Additionally, noise is pretty obvious. Because of the shorter than typical dynamic range, situations with more contrast may experience blown highlights. A strange occurrence that we saw was a kind of software overcompensation that seemed like a reverse vignetting, with the corners being brighter than the rest of the image.

Low-light photos

If you’d rather have control over the situation, you may turn off the toggle that automatically activates Night Vision in Photo mode when the light level is low. On this particular instance, neither the full-fledged dedicated Night Vision option nor the Auto Night in Photo mode are nearly the same.

The large dynamic range that the Night processing offers is nearly entirely utilised by the Auto, despite the fact that it takes less time to shoot and produces slightly less crisp images. It’s not the most dramatic of the Night settings, and sometimes, especially in darker environments, items might appear underexposed. Both in terms of saturation and white balance, the colours are spot on.

Finer textures and clearer detail are available in the specialised Night vision mode, albeit at the cost of somewhat longer capture durations. Considering this, we think the extra time is worthwhile.

You may anticipate roughly the same performance in terms of detail if you disable Auto Night Vision in Photo mode; however, you run the risk of blowing your highlights. We had to seek for it because it’s a rather small change.

No matter the mode, you probably won’t love the images if you shoot at 2x at night, but we’d still call them usable. The photographs in Photo mode, with Auto Night Vision activated but not immediately active, can be somewhat grimy yet are fairly detailed. Although limited, the dynamic range is still acceptable.

The specialised Night Vision will level out the noise and boost dynamic range, especially in the highlight zone, at the sacrifice of some detail.

Low-light images taken with the utlrawide camera are incredibly soft and noisy. There isn’t a lot of detail there, notably in the shadows, despite the fact that they are respectably well exposed and maintain a good amount of colour saturation. Images captured with the Auto Night Vision on and off barely differ from one another. The utlrawide does not have access to the specific Night Vision mode.

Closeup

The Moto G72’s 2MP “macro” camera takes straightforward closeups. These images have a small dynamic range, noticeable noise, and little detail. At least the colours are vibrant, which isn’t usually the case with modules that are identical.

Selfie camera

Selfies are automatically captured at 4MP on the Moto G72. It has two zoom settings, with the cropped option being the default. Even in this situation, it continues to produce 4MP files, indicating some upscaling. Compared to the full-coverage mode, the negative impacts are less pronounced, albeit the absolute image quality does drop.

Portrait mode

The Moto G72’s portrait mode features good subject identification and a preset blur effect that looks realistic. The only drawback is that it lacks the processing ability to recover highlights in backlighting environments.

video recording

No 4K video recording is possible on the Motorola Moto G72; only 1080p30 may be captured with the ultrawide and up to 1080p60 at 60 frames per second with the primary camera. H.265 encoding is still an option if you want to reduce file size.

The films all receive a 20Mbps bit rate with stereo sound compressed at 256Kbps, whether you’re filming at 30 or 60 frames per second or using the main camera or the ultrawide.

Our Verdict

The Moto G72 has a strong self-defense argument. It boasts a display that wouldn’t look out of place on a phone costing twice as much, enough battery life, rapid charging, and good image quality for its price range. Along with the audio package, another key selling factor is the body’s small weight. And it’s simple to appreciate Motorola’s software suite, which combines a Pixel design with additional home functions.

The outdated OS version is less engaging, and Android 13 can’t come fast enough. However, it won’t support 5G connection or 4K video recording, so if any of those features is crucial to you, the Moto G72 should be avoided. However, this Moto has a lot going for it if you don’t care much about video capturing and can wait till your next phone for the next-generation connection.

PRO’S & Con’s