Moto G9 Power review

Display

The Moto GP Power offers a large 6.8-inch IPS LCD screen with basic HD+ resolution and a 20:9 aspect ratio. The sharpness is far from ideal at 263ppi, but the phone is rather cheap, so it's not unexpected. The panel has a punch-hole cutout around the top left corner and in that whole is the selfie camera.

There is no information on the screen's protective glass, so we can't tell for sure where it's a Gorilla or something else.

The first thing you'll probably notice is the uneven backlight around the selfie cutout. This has always been an issue with LCD screens, especially ones of lower quality, and there is no workaround. You will get used to it, eventually, and it's only really prominent against light backgrounds.

The Moto G9 Power screen doesn't look that bright, and our display test confirms it. We measured a maximum brightness of 435nits in manual mode and 521nits in auto mode. It's an average result for an LCD screen, so screen legibility may not be stellar on a bright sunny day.

The black levels of the Moto G8 Power screen turned out quite good, and overall, the panel offers an excellent contrast ratio of 1680:1.

The minimum brightness at the far left of the scrubber is just 3 nits, which is a great one.

The Moto G9 Power offers three color modes - Natural, Boosted, Saturated (default). The color reproduction isn't great when you are using the default setting - we measured an average deltaE of 5.4 against sRGB targets and a maximum deviation of 8.2. There is a noticeable blue tinge here. Choosing Boosted yields similar results.

If you opt for Natural colors, the accuracy improves, and we captured an average deltaE of 2.7 against sRGB targets - a pretty great one.

Battery life

The Moto G9 Power has one of the beefiest batteries within a smartphone - a massive 6,000mAh cell. According to Motorola, it should last you about 60 hours on a single charge.

Well, we've put the G9 Power through our battery life test, and it did splendidly. The G9 Power outdid its predecessor and scored a magnificent endurance rating of 155 hours. It did splendidly in all scenarios - video, calls, web browsing and even stand-by performance.

We do appreciate the Moto G9 Power massive battery, but we can't but feel some of its potential has been wasted by the fact that it doesn't support reverse charging, so you can't use it as a powerbank.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Moto G9 Power for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

Charging speed

The Moto G9 Power supports 20W Turbo Charge, and a 20W adapter is included as part of the retail bundle. Don't expect a miracle, though, especially with that large battery.

Just like previous Moto G models, this G9 Power isn't charging that speedy. In fact, 20% for 30 minutes is rather sluggish.

30min charging test (from 0%)

• Realme 7 Pro
  94%
• Realme 7
  58%
• Poco X3 NFC
  55%
• Motorola Moto G9 Plus
  54%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 9S
  37%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T
  33%
• Motorola Moto G9 Play
  31%
• Motorola Moto G8 Power
  29%
• Samsung Galaxy A42 5G
  27%
• Poco M3
  25%
• Motorola Moto G9 Power
  20%

You need about 75 minutes to hit the 50% mark, while a complete top-up takes 2 hours and 19 minutes.

Time to full charge (from 0%)

• Realme 7 Pro
  0:37h
• Realme 7
  1:05h
• Motorola Moto G9 Plus
  1:15h
• Poco X3 NFC
  1:15h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 9S
  1:45h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T
  1:50h
• Samsung Galaxy A42 5G
  2:01h
• Motorola Moto G9 Power
  2:19h
• Poco M3
  2:30h
• Motorola Moto G9 Play
  2:39h

Speaker loudness and quality

The Moto G9 Power has one bottom-firing speaker, and that's quite disappointing. The Moto G8 Power had one very loud stereo speaker setup; it was one of its key features, in fact. But for reasons unknown, Motorola gave that feature the boot.

So, the one speaker on the G9 Power scored an Average mark on our speaker test. As for the quality - it's okay but not as good as on the G8 Power. While the G9 model offers some bass and okay mid-tones, it seems to completely lack in the high-frequency range.

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.