Motorola is pumping out a new set of phones today. The most interesting is the new mid-range Moto G, and it also sounds like the flagship Motorola Edge 40 Pro is getting repackaged for the US as the Motorola Edge Plus.

First up, the mid-ranger. The Moto G hits a pricing sweet spot at $250 and will arrive in stores sometime this month. For $250, you get a 6.5-inch 1600×720 LCD with a surprising 120 Hz refresh rate, 4GB RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery. The SoC is a Snapdragon 480+—that's two ARM Cortex A76 cores and six A55 cores build on an 8 nm process with an Adreno 619 GPU.

There's a fingerprint reader somewhere, but Motorola's spec sheet doesn't say where. The phone has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi 5 support, and 15 W charging. The body is plastic, a big downside is that there's no NFC, and while the "water-repellent" design can protect against "accidental spills," it's not submersible. For cameras, you get a 48 MP main sensor and a just-for-looks 2 MP "macro" lens. The front camera is 8 MP.

Unlike most Motorola phones, which look positively generic (see below), the squared-off sides and chamfered edges of the Moto G look pretty good! It's one of the few distinguishable phones in Motorola's lineup.

Next is the 2023 Motorola Edge+, which goes on sale in the US on May 9 for $799. Motorola seems to have the habit of taking one core flagship phone design and slightly tweaking and rebranding it for individual regions. So the company's impenetrable flagship lineup includes the Euro-centric Motorola Edge 40 Pro, Asia's Motorola Moto X40, and this Motorola Edge+ for the US. If you break out the magnifying glass, you'll find some minor spec differences between the phones, but the designs are all identical. You might also have thought the freshly released Lenovo ThinkPhone would serve as Lenovo/Motorola's US flagship, but that "business" device uses last year's flagship Qualcomm chip, while the third-generation Edge+ has a newer Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. So in the past six months, Motorola/Lenovo have released four phones you might classify in the "flagship" group. It's very confusing, and that's not even counting the foldables we'll probably hear about soon.

Advertisement

This one has a 6.7-inch, 2400×1080 165 Hz OLED, 8GB of RAM (less than the Edge 40 Pro), 512GB of storage (more than the Edge 40 Pro), and a 5100 mAh battery (more than the Edge 40 Pro). There's an impressive-sounding 68 W quick charger, 15 W wireless charging, NFC, IP68 dust and water resistance, and Wi-Fi 7 support. The cameras include a 60MP front camera, and then on the rear a 50 MP main sensor, a 50 MP wide-angle, and 12 MP 2x telephoto.

The core problem with all Motorola phones is the company's update reputation, which is flatly the worst in the industry. Motorola promises the Edge+ will get the usual three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates, while the Moto G will get one major OS update and three years of security updates. Notice Motorola does not say when any of those updates will arrive, as the company is very, very slow at updates. For instance, the 2022 Motorola Edge does not have Android 13 yet, despite that update being 8 months old. For flagships, where there is lots of competition, that makes Motorola tough to recommend, but the $250 Moto G has very little competition in the US.