Motorola Moto G35 5G
At just £150, the Moto G35 5G is another glowing example of Motorola’s ability to squeeze previously top-tier features into a phone half the price of some household fans.
Pros
- Brilliantly priced with sleek looks
- Competitive performance
- Bright, fast, clear, and colourful display
Cons
- Slow to charge
- Mediocre camera
- Not great for multitasking
Key Features
- 6.72″ 120Hz Full-HD displayThe Moto G35 5G packs a high-resolution screen that runs twice as fast as many others.
- 5G SupportThe Octa-core processor under the hood supports rapid data deliver over 5G networks for smooth downloads, buffer-free streaming, and clear internet calls.
- Solid competitive gaming performanceCompetitive titles like Pokémon Unite, PUGB Mobile, and League of Legends: Wild Rift can sustain above-average frame rates on the smooth display, offering a competitive advantage on a budget.
Introduction
Back with another highly affordable smartphone, the Motorola G35 5G is a bargain prospect at a bargain price.
With the lines between budget and mid-range handsets continuing to blur, is the Motorola Moto G35 5G another prime example of how little today’s top-end phones truly offer for the price?
Design
- Lightweight with plenty of smooth edges
- Ultra-smooth rear chassis with a satisfying glimmer
- Good grip with a tall but thin bar-like shape
The Motorola Moto G35 5G follows a very familiar design to the company’s last few bargain endeavours, the Moto G55 5G and Moto G85 5G.
Being further down the price bracket, the smart dark colours still use a glitzy rear chassis that’s simply colourful plastic doused with fine stone-like sparkles. Opt for a pop of colour and you’ll nab the vegan leather texture seen on more premium Moto phones.
It’s a great handset to clutch. Being a tad taller rather than wider like many XL phones of today, it’s easy to wrap your palm around, and easier still to reach your thumb to icons on the far side. However, you’ll still have to slide it down to go for the top.
The bottom showcases a three-grill speaker on the right, a centered USB-C port, a tiny microphone, and a 3.5mm jack on the far left. With another microphone on the top, the only other thing of note would be the power button and twin volume keys on the right and the SIM/MicroSD tray on the right.
Then there’s the lightly raised camera bump housing twin sensors and a verticle flash. Again, it’s nothing out of the ordinary, but it’s refreshing to see minor elevation on smartphone camera arrays for a change.
Like the rest of this year’s Moto line-up, the G35 5G comes in a thin, light brown cardboard box ready to be tossed in the bin. You get a rubber case, a short charging cable, and a SIM tray tool. To little surprise, there’s no charger included.
Screen
- 120Hz 1080p display
- Vibrant and impressive colours
- Loud but lacking speakers
Packing a 6.72-inch display with an impressive Full HD resolution of 2400 x 1080, the Motorola Moto G35 5G is very well positioned in this price range.
There’s a very slight chin at the bottom. This isn’t the pOLED curved display of the higher budget Moto handsets, but it’s far from a slouch.
It’s a great display for the price. Its strategically vibrant default lock screen immediately grabbed my attention. Colours are bold, bright, and a pleasure to look at, with great range across bright, moody, and downright dark scenes.
It’s a neat little content-consumption device, able to get bright enough to support HDR, meaning video pops in reasonable lighting conditions.
Best of all—at least for a snob like me—it’s 120Hz. Though it will hit the battery, a smooth screen (twice the speed of even the iPhone 16) means text blur when scrolling social media, a news article, or panning through a book is more or less gone.
It’s one of those must-have features you never knew you needed. And to have that on a £150 handset is sublime.
Unless you’re doing nothing but reading, the screen isn’t the whole story when it comes to consuming content. With just a three-grill speaker at the bottom, it’s up to the earpiece to bolster the phone’s sound capabilities. And it’s alright.
We never expect much from the speakers in budget phones: the sound gets harsh as you crank up the volume.
And the Moto G35 5G is no exception. Able to get a pinch louder than my iPhone 13 Pro Max at around 78dB, clarity certainly dips at the peak.
It’s nothing major, and you won’t struggle to enjoy vocal performances in a podcast or Netflix show at reasonable volumes. There’s just an unsurprising lack of warmth and little on the low end.
Camera
- 50MP main sensor with 2x zoom
- 8MP ultrawide sensor
- 16MP selfie camera with tuning
Packing a 50MP main snapper and an 8MP ultrawide, the camera system is a tougher sell.
It has potential. Slow memory appears to be the major culprit, but the CPU also shows its weaknesses here. Longer processing times can make getting quick, subsequent shots a challenge.
Even in average indoor lighting, shots of my dog keeping warm in the winter came out ironically cold, slightly oversharpened in areas, and noticeably soft in others.
They’re far from unusable shots. Like the rest of what’s on offer, they’re still good for the price. But anyone expecting a great point-and-shoot experience will be disappointed.
Any movement will result in heavy blur on the main shooter. Shots of stationary objects or landscapes will work, but you’ll want to adjust the colours.
You’ll also lose a good degree of quality swapping over to the 8MP ultrawide for vistas. And while the 2x zoom delivers smooth results, don’t expect to be pinch-zooming into further distant details.
The main snapper can manage HDR 4k30fps video. Stability leaves something to be desired, but static recording, say of external action, moments, or video calls, can look great.
And like the Moto G55, the selfie camera is surprisingly strong. At 16MP, twice that of the rear ultrawide, it’s clear Motorola accounted for the changing trend of smartphone usage.
So long as there’s half-decent lighting to back up your composition, you can get good snaps of you and your friends, video call with great clarity, and record decent video.
Performance
- 8-core Unisoc T760 chip
- 4GB RAM
- Great all-round performance
Now, powering that sort of snappy screen takes a half-decent chip. It’s hard to measure whether the Moto G35 5G manages it reliably with its 8-core Unisoc T760 chip, but it certainly feels smooth to the touch once things get going.
Sliding along the Google Discover feed is like touching silk. Tap into an article and, surprisingly, the performance is maintained even as images, ads, and pop-ups load in.
Honestly, the difference between it and my iPhone 13 Pro Max in real-world use is negligible. This is a £150 phone keeping up against one worth 10x that three years ago.
But browsing the web isn’t the most taxing challenge for any chip: despite how they can have cheaper laptops and tablets buckling under the weight of auto-loading videos and other annoyances.
Try much else and you’ll notice where Motorola managed to cut costs. This is typically in places like storage.
While the 128/256GB options will be more than enough for everyone but the most avid of trigger-happy camera snappers, it’s slower UFS 2.2 storage.
Installing and loading apps takes a little longer, reboots take a hot minute and a couple more to settle, and taking fast camera snaps can be a struggle as they attempt to save.
It’s no reason to scoff at its price, but it’s worth keeping in mind. The phone flies in most everyday scenarios. It’s just those fringe moments where you’ll be reminded that it costs a tiny fraction of those advertised as the next big thing.
4GB of RAM doesn’t help in situations like this. So long as you’re not looking to juggle too many tasks at once, though, it keeps up.
You only need to run a couple of benchmarks to see where the SoC lacks computational oomph. Single core performance was rated at 743 with the eight cores managing 2156.
Scoring 11fps on the GFXBench Aztec test and 15fps on the Car Chase sequence, it can’t hit the 30fps sweet spot a typical video game needs to hit to be considered “playable.” It’s also a far sight away from maxing out that 120Hz panel.
Interestingly, it’s barely a hair below the Moto G55 which, in turn, wasn’t far off the Moto G85. The former coming in at the same price during Black Friday discounts only further highlights its value proposition.
However, in real-world gaming performance with 5v5 competitive arena game League of Legends: Wild Rift, 120fps was just a hair away on max settings.
Performance during multi-character fights settled closer to 90 on high settings after a couple of minutes, suggesting an aggressive thermal profile was in effect to keep the phone from heating up.
Knock things down to Low, which honestly looks the same on a screen of this size, made hitting a smooth 90fps far more manageable.
Dips to the low 80s were still relatively common, but competitive gaming is possible on this bargain phone. For the single-player type, 3D open-world titles like Genshin Impact will struggle, but older or simple games like Grand Theft Auto and Dead Cells work just fine. For the kids, Roblox and Stumble Guys are good to go.
Software
- Android 14 (upgradeable to Android 15)
- 3 years of security updates
- Semi-moderate bloatware
The Moto G35 5G runs Android 14 out of the box with room to upgrade to Android 15 update. It’s also slated to get regular security updates until August 2027.
On startup, this version of Android 14 looks quite tame. And it is.
The first homepage has all your typical Google apps nestled in folders at the bottom. Large white backgrounds beneath each app’s colourful icon serve to highlight the screen’s strengths out of the gate.
It’s only when you swipe that you see some of the software bloat that isn’t atypical for a phone of this price. A lone game sits in the top-left corner.
Pull up the app tray and you’ll find just a couple more games that are easily removed. Outside of Tiktok, Fitbit, Booking, and Opera, the only potentially unnecessary apps are from Motorola itself.
Battery
- 5000mAh battery
- Average battery life
- Sluggish 18W wired charging
Another area where you may feel the sting of this cut-cost phone is the battery. But not in capacity or run time. At 5000mAh and draining a fairly typical 10% after an hour of Netflix and around 5% with a flashy 2D game like Dead Cells, it’s unsurprisingly average in that regard.
Where things take a little turn is with charging. There’s no convenient wireless charging on offer, nor does it ship with a plug. And even if you have a fancy fast adapter at home, the Moto G35 5G won’t make much use of it.
That’s because this one caps out at 18W charging. Filling up a battery of its size takes time. Plug it in during your morning shower to gain around 22%. Stretch that out through a 30-minute breakfast routine to get closer to 37%—typically where ultra-fast chargers would cap out other phones these days.
To completely refuel this from empty, you’re looking at a good hour and a half while it’s out of action. Use it during and it could slow down to two hours at a minimum. It’s the one moment this phone feels like it was made in the 2010s; which is still high praise given everything it does right.
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Should you buy it?
You want a bargain handset for everyday use
The Moto G35’s CPU makes great use of its above-average display. It’s a comfortable smartphone for browsing, reading, watching, and even light, competitive, or retro gaming.
You want to capture memories
Slow storage and a not-so-strong rear camera setup means the Moto G35 5G isn’t well equipped to snap precious moments of hyperactive families. Video is fine, but shots take time.
Final Thoughts
Closing in on under £100 during recent sales, the Motorola Moto G35 5G is a lot of phone for the price. The rear cameras aren’t the best, and the audio could do with a little more life, but everything else is solid.
The smooth, bright, and vibrant display is great for watching video and scrolling the web. Surprisingly, the budget chipset can pair well to offer a competitive advantage in the most common online multiplayer titles, too.
So unless you’re in desperate need of a device to capture memories on a holiday, chances are the Moto G35 5G is all you need. Otherwise, it might be wise to look at the best budget handsets. Both the G55 and G85 sport slightly better cameras. There’s always the Nothing CMF Phone 1, too.
How we test
We test every mobile phone we review thoroughly. We use industry-standard tests to compare features properly and we use the phone as our main device over the review period. We’ll always tell you what we find and we never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Used as a main phone for over a week
Camera tested in a variety of conditions
Tested and benchmarked using respected industry tests and real-world data
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FAQs
Yes, there’s a flexible rubber case in the box.
There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom of the device.
No, this phone only supports wired charging.
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