Motorola Moto G53 review

Fast IPS display

The Moto G53 comes with a 6.5-inch, HD+ IPS LCD display. Its predecessor - the G52, has a 6.6-inch, FullHD+ OLED display at its disposal. So, quite the obvious downgrade. The only silver lining is that the display can now refresh at 120Hz instead of 90Hz.

The G53 doesn't offer amazing display performance, but it is decent enough for its price point. In terms of brightness, we managed to measure 489 nits on the slider, with a max auto boost to 599 nits in bright outdoor conditions. Neither figure is super impressive. We did struggle a bit using the G53 outdoors in direct sunlight.

The Moto G53 has two color modes - "Saturated" and "Natural". The default saturated mode aims for the sRGB color space and covers it well. Its color profile is a bit cold for our taste, but it can be corrected using the included temperature slider.

Color modes

Natural mode also aims for the sRGB color space and basically nails it with deltaE values low enough for it to be considered color-accurate.

The G53 has no HDR support and reports no decoder support in software, either.

HDR support • DRM info • Netflix playback properties

On the Plus side, it does have the highest possible Widevine L1 certification, allowing streaming services like Netflix to offer it HD quality and saturate its display resolution.

High refresh rate handling

As already mentioned, the Moto G53 has a 120Hz display. It offers a total of three refresh rate options in settings - 60Hz, 120Hz and Auto mode. The first two are really straightforward - the phone is simply set to a static 60Hz or 120Hz, and that's that.

Display refresh rate options • Available display refresh rate modes

However, 60Hz, 120Hz and 144Hz are not the only refresh rate modes available on the G53. That list actually includes 60Hz, 90Hz and 120Hz. There is no 48Hz mode, as we have seen with other Motorola phones. Auto refresh rate mode promises Ai-driven automatic refresh rate switching and delivers on that promise as well, with a very dynamic and content-aware system in place.

What basically happens in practice is that the OS actively monitors what is currently on screen. If it sees any motion, it then determines whether it requires a boost up to 90Hz or higher to 120Hz and acts accordingly. The system works exceptionally well in our experience.

Here is a quick video showcasing how well Auto refresh rate mode detects things like the BlurBusters UFO test in a browser and then a video playing in both a local player and YouTube and switches to the optimal refresh rate on the fly.

Automatic refresh rate mode wasn't perfectly reliable when it came to high refresh rate gaming. We tried a few titles we know can render at over 60fps, and in some cases, the Moto G53 did trigger its 120Hz mode to accommodate that, while in others, it worked at 60Hz.

Games running in Auto mode

Setting the display refresh rate to a fixed 120Hz did not fix the issue, with the Moto still insisting on running some games at 60Hz. Thankfully, you can still override this by selecting a refresh rate on a per-game basis using the Moto Play interface, which is great to see.

Gaming with a forced refresh rate

Overall, despite a few oddities here and there, we are quite impressed with the dynamic, accurate and content-aware way automatic refresh rate switching works on the Moto G53. It has one of the better systems around.

Battery life

The Moto G53 has a hefty 5,000 mAh battery on board. Also, the Snapdragon 480+ has already proven in the past to be a very efficient chipset. It does not disappoint here either, with the Moto G53 scoring an excellent endurance rating of 123 hours in our proprietary test. This falls in line perfectly with other Snapdragon 480+ devices like the Moto G51 and Moto G62.

The Moto G53 excels particularly well in off-screen network tests. The X51 5G/LTE modem integrated inside the Snapdragon 480+ is proving to be quite efficient as well.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage patterns check out our all-time battery test results chart where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging speed

There is no point beating about the bush - the Moto G53 charges slowly. Painfully so. We honestly have no idea why Motorola decided to remove its support for TurboPower charging. Its predecessor, the G52, has 30W charging. Even the lower-end Moto G23 has the feature. Unfortunately, the G53 is stuck with basic 10W charging, and we have to dock some major points for that.

When we say basic, we do mean basic. The charger bundled with the Moto G53 is rated for an output of 5V@2A. That's as standard USB power as it gets. Using that, we were able to get the G53 from dead to just 12% in 15 minutes and then 22% in 30 minutes. A full charge took us a whopping 2:35 hours.

Speakers

The Moto G53 has a hybrid stereo speaker system, with one channel being handled by a dedicated bottom-firing speaker and the other by an amplified earpiece. This is a pretty common solution.

The speakers on the G53 are not particularly well balanced because of this trait, but on the plus side, they do get pretty loud. That's both a pro and a con, though, since there is a lot of distortion at high volume, especially from the top speaker/earpiece. At least you can rest assured that you will always hear your phone ringing.

The Moto G53 is mostly unexceptional but overall decent in terms of output quality. It sounds decent-enough to our ears at moderate volumes with nice vocals, some bass and slightly muddy treble.

Motorola has also included Dolby Atmos on the G53. It offers a very robust set of equalizers with more than a few presets to choose from.

Dolby Atmos

The default Smart Audio option does a great job automatically optimizing for most scenarios, though, so we would recommend just sticking with that.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.