Four new Motorola smartphones are coming January 14th, with pre-orders opening today. The Moto One 5G Ace is the company’s most affordable 5G-enabled smartphone to date, with a $399 price tag, while the new Moto G Play, Moto G Power, and Moto G Stylus are 4G phones with starting prices ranging from $170 to $300.

Moto One 5G Ace

This phone is new to the North American market, but it’s not exactly a brand new device, having launched internationally as the Moto G 5G last month.

It’s a smartphone with a 6.7 inch FHD+ IPS LCD display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G processor, and a 5,000 mAh battery.

On the back of the phone there’s a fingerprint reader and three cameras: 48MP primary, 8MP ultra-wide and 2MP macro. On the front is a single 16MP camera.

Other features include a 3.5mm headphone jack and support for 15W fast charging, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.1, and NFC.

The version of the Moto One 5G Ace available in the US has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and it’s available for pre-order from Amazon for $400.

Moto G Stylus (2021)

Available for pre-order for $300, this phone gets its name from its most distinctive feature: a pen that slides into a slot in the case when you’re not using it, and which can be ejected when you want to write or draw.

The smartphone has a 6.8 inch FHD+ IPS LCD display, a 4,000 mAh battery, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 678 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage.

It has a fingerprint reader,  48MP primary, 8MP ultra-wide, and 2MP macro cameras on the back and a 16MP selfie camera on the front. On the bottom of the phone there’s a USB-C port, headphone jack, and the stylus slot.

Interestingly, this model has an IP68 water resistance rating, which makes it a little more rugged than the pricier Moto 5G Ace, but it has a less powerful processor, tops out at 10W fast charging, and lacks support for 5G and NFC.

Moto G Power (2021)

This $250 smartphone has a 6.6 inch, 1600 x 720 pixel LCD display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 5,000 mAh battery and 10W fast charging.

Motorola will also offer a $200 version with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, but I don’t see a pre-order link for that version yet.

The Moto G Power (2021) has an 8MP front-facing camera, a 48MP primary camera plus 2MP depth and macro cameras.

Like other Moto G smartphones, the Moto G Power has a headphone jack. But the combination of a relatively efficient processor, a fairly low-resolution display and a big battery make it clear that the key selling points for this phone are likely to be price and battery life.

Moto G Play (2021)

The most affordable of Motorola’s new phones also has a 5,000 mAh battery and 10W fast charging. But the rest of the specs are a little less impressive.

The Moto G Play 2021 has a 6.5 inch, 1600 x 720 pixel LCD display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 460 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, a 5MP front-facing camera, and two rear cameras: a 13MP primary camera and a 2MP depth-sensing one.

On the upside, like all the other new phones Motorola is announcing, the Moto G Play (2021) has a headphone jack and a microSD card reader.

It’s up for pre-order from Amazon for $196, but the Moto G Play (2021) has a suggested retail price of $170, so you might want to wait to see if that price falls before pulling out your wallet.

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3 replies on “Motorola unveils 2021 budget and mid-range smartphones”

  1. The SD460 looks to be quite a big jump for the 400 series. While I have liked the 400 series for a while as I’ve used several, I think people expect them to be slower than they are and that perception may be hard to break. But for those who do not require the fastest thing available, the SD460 is a surprising evolution bringing powerful A73-based cores that would be similar(lower clock speeds, I think) to those found in high-end phones from several years ago. I hope the 460 gets picked up for a lot of phones and sets a great new base line for low-end phones in terms of CPU performance.

  2. If I’m interpreting the photo correctly, it looks like the Moto stylus is a simple capacitive one, and not a sophisticated pressure-sensitive one like they have support for in their Z4? I’ve never really seen the appeal of including a non-pressure-sensitive stylus, since it doesn’t really do anything different than your finger.

  3. I’m sorry to be a bore but I feel like it’s apt to copy-paste what I wrote under the post about the new OnePlus phones here, too a few days ago:

    https://liliputing.com/2021/01/oneplus-nord-n10-5g-and-n100-budget-phones-come-to-the-us-as-t-mobile-exclusives.html

    These new Android phones (regardless of brand) come in one size and one size only: XL. As long as it’s your preferred size, you are good.

    Maybe I’m not the best observer of the market but this is especially true in the last year or so. If I recall correctly you had a little more choice regarding size just two years ago. Unless you want to go ultra premium with a Samsung flagship. Unless you live in one of the handful countries in the world where Google sells Pixel phones at all. But many say it’s crap hardware (which would not be surprising, given Google isn’t a hardware company). So in general I talk about the screen sizes offered by the major Android manufacturers in the price range most people will eventually buy.

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