Motorola Moto G04 smartphone review – A well-equipped phone for very little money

Motorola has opted for a rather slow SoC, even within the very affordable price range, namely the Unisoc T606. Since the phone's screen has a low resolution, its graphics performance during our on-screen tests was still usable, but its performance during the browser benchmarks dropped sharply. In everyday use, this means that you will often have to live with stutters and longer waiting times.

On the other hand, Motorola hasn't been lazy when it comes to the phone's storage, installing UFS 2.2 flash which is fast and is also used in more expensive phones.

We measured a maximum temperature rise of 40.8°C on the device's case under prolonged load. This is not critical, but noticeable. The 3DMark stress test showed us that the SoC's performance remained roughly the same even after repeating a benchmark several times, in other words, the SoC is not throttled.

The speaker on the bottom edge has to make do on its own, so it can only offer mono sound. It is loud enough to fill a medium-sized room but our diagram already confirmed that it offers no bass and only a few lower mids. We were able to confirm this result after our listening test: voices and vocals are clearly understandable, but music sounds flat and very treble-heavy.

You'll usually get a better sound if you connect external speakers or headphones. This can be done via the 3.5-mm jack on the top edge of the case or via Bluetooth. There are several wireless audio codecs to choose from: In addition to standards such as AAC, SBC, aptX, aptX HD and LDAC, the phone also supports more exotic variants such as LC3 and Opus.

The Motorola Moto G04 gets average performance for its price class from its 5,000 mAh battery: In our WLAN test, the device achieved 15:07 hours, which suggests that you will be able to survive a day of moderate use without needing to charge the phone.

A charger is included with the phone but it can only provide a maximum of 10 watts, while the phone explicitly supports up to 15 watts of charging power. This is annoying in many respects: the charging process takes around an hour longer with the included charger. In addition, customers who want to take advantage of the full power may have to buy another charger, which produces additional electronic waste.