Moto G53 5G Water-resistant design Review

Design and build

Our It the Moto G 53 is a budget friendly midrangerthat is a big departure from last year’s Moto G 52.The major upgrades here include 5G connectivity anda faster refresh rate on the display.But unfortunately, to make those upgrades happenand keep the price down, there hadto be some downgrades elsewhere.I’ll get to those in a bit.The Moto G 53 is made of plastic,and the design is overall pretty minimalistic.The flat back has a subdued frosted finish.The frame is flat too, but has a chamfered edge.There is no official ingress protection here, but Motorola claims the design is water repellent.

Screen specs

On the front is a six five inch IPS LCDwith a 720p resolution and a 120 Hz refresh rate.The 120 upgrade here up from 90 Hz last year.It’s smooth, and the display can dial down based on what’shappening on screen to a minimum of 60 save energy.But besides the refresh rate, this 720PLCd is a notable downgrade from the1080p AMOLED in the previous model.The picture isn’t as sharp and not as contrast either.At least colors can be decentlyaccurate if you tweak them.In settings for brightness, we measured a maximumof 490 knits with a manual slider, andthis boosts up to 600 knits.In auto mode it’s all right,

Stereo speakers test

In auto mode it’s all right,but nothing impressive for audio.There is a standard headphone jack andstereo speakers with Dolby Atmos support.The speakers are pretty loud andthe sound quality is okay.

Side-mounted fingerprint reader & Storage options

There’s a side mounted fingerprint reader for Biometricsbuilt into the power button, and you canget the phone with 64 or 128 gigsof storage, and that is expandable through microSD.

Android 13 – Snapdragon 480+ 5G

The software experience of the Moto G 53 ispretty much what you’d get on other Motorola phones.It’s a very clean and near stock Android 13with a few custom Moto features on top.These are all conveniently organized within theMoto app and include personalization options, gestureshortcuts and the peak display function.The whole point of the Moto G 53 is the5G connectivity, and that’s provided by its 5G capable chipset.It’s a snapdragon 480 plus, but besides being 5Gcapable, the performance is nothing to write home about.In benchmarks, the Moto G 53 sits prettylow on the charts compared to most othermidrangers, at least in graphics test.The Moto G 53 has an advantage over similarlyequipped devices because of its less demanding 720p display.The G 53 does a decent job for your day today use and some casual gaming, but many competitors do offerboth 5G connectivity and more raw power for a similar price.

Battery life and charging speed

Battery life, though, is no concern here.There’s a large 5000 milliamp hour battery, and thephone scored an excellent endurance rating of 123 hoursin our tests, but for some reason this yearthere’s only support for basic ten watt charging.That’s compared to 30 watts in last year’s model.With that ten watt adapter, we were only able to chargethe G 53 from zero to 22% in half an hour.A full charge takes over two and a half hours.

Main cameras

The camera setup is yet another area in whichwe see a downgrade compared to the Moto G52, there’s no ultra wide cam this time around.The G 53 has just a 50 megapixelmain cam and a two megapixel macro camera.The main cam captures 12.5 megapixel photos.

Daylight image quality, rear cameras , Low-light image quality, rear cameras

by default due to pixel binning.They have plenty of detail, good contrast anddynamic range, and true to life colors.Look closer though, and you dosee some softness and graininess.The main camera can also capture decentportraits with pretty good edge detection.The macro camera’s two megapixel closeups areokay with a decent level of detailconsidering the resolution and nice colors.In low light conditions, the Moto G 53 struggles a bit.The main cam’s photos have some detail, and lightsources are handled decently well, but overall the shotsare soft and grainy and also quite dark.The Moto G 53 has an automatic night mode which cankick in, or you can toggle a manual night mode.It removes noise but also smooths out the details.The eight megapixel selfie camera doesa decent job for the price.

Selfie camera image quality Video quality, rear cameras

There’s enough detail and colors look nice.Video capture on the G 53 is limited to FPS.The main cam captures a decent amount of detailfor this resolution, and the colors are well saturated.

Conclusion – Selfie camera video quality

The main cam captures a decent amount of detailfor this resolution, and the colors are well saturated.The contrast is way too high though,and the dynamic range is limited.There is electronic stabilization and it works pretty wellto smooth out bumps and shakes, but introduces somefocus hunting so that’s the Moto G 53.We do like the great battery life,the stereo speakers, the 120 Hz refreshrate, and the clean software experience.However, compared to the previous model, there areplenty of downgrades, and it seems like Motorolasacrificed a bit too much in order toinclude 5G connectivity in the budget.Right now, there are plenty of other phones onthe market that can offer a lot more bangfor your buck than the Moto G 53.