Motorola Moto G35 5G review: Can’t beat last year’s best

The Motorola Moto G35 5G is a symptom of a larger problem. I’ve spoken before about how cluttered and confusing Motorola’s selection of budget smartphones is, with too many models that perform a similar function stuffed into the £100 to £200 price range.

With a larger, sharper display, improved camera suite and refined design, the Moto G35 5G is, for the most part, an improvement over its predecessor. The problem is that it doesn’t do anything to offset the frustrations of the lineup at large, with few reasons to choose it over better models from last year that are now roughly the same price.

Motorola Moto G35 5G review: What you need to know

The Motorola Moto G34 5G offered little beyond cheap 5G connectivity, so the Moto G35 5G doesn’t have a high bar to clear. It starts with a larger display, now 6.72in instead of 6.5in, and has a sharper 2,400 x 1,080 resolution but the same 120Hz refresh rate.

Inside, there’s a new Unisoc T760 chipset with a maximum clock speed of 2.2GHz, backed up by 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage space (expandable by up to 1TB via microSD card). The battery is once again a 5,000mAh cell that supports 18W charging, though you don’t get a plug bundled in the box this time.

The 50-megapixel (f/1.8) main camera is unchanged from last year but the paltry 2-megapixel macro lens has been replaced with a more functional 8-megapixel ultrawide shooter, just as we saw with the Moto G55 5G. The 16-megapixel selfie camera has a slightly narrower f/2.5 aperture than the G34 5G’s f/2.4.

Motorola Moto G35 5G review: Price and competition

The Moto G35 5G launched for the same £150 as its predecessor but quickly dropped to £129. Even with that semi-permanent discount in play, there’s fierce competition around this price.

Motorola’s Moto G54 5G was, until recently, my favourite budget phone, with the best balance between price and features of any smartphone in its price range. It’s since been supplanted by the equally impressive Motorola Moto G55 5G but, for now at least, stock for the G54 hasn’t completely run dry, and it’s going cheap. Currently costing just £144, the G54 5G is a mere £15 more than the G35 5G, and far better value for the money.

There are a couple of other notable handsets at this price, including last year’s Motorola Moto G34 5G at just £109 and the repairable Nokia G42 5G at £130, but the Moto G55 5G poses the largest threat here.

Motorola Moto G35 5G review: Design and key features

One area in which the Moto G35 5G is indisputably superior to the G34 5G is the design. I found the latter’s build slightly bulky and unwieldy but things have tightened up somewhat here. The larger display demands a frame to match, so it’s a little taller and wider than before, at 166 x 76mm, but the depth is a slimmer 7.8mm, which makes the whole thing feel more svelte than the G34 5G.

The Leaf Green style reviewed here and the fetching Guava Red colourway use vegan leather on the rear, while the Midnight Black variant is a more traditional glossy plastic. The plastic version weighs a little less (188g vs 192g) but I prefer the more premium look and feel of the vegan leather.

We’ve got the usual grab bag of features, including a fingerprint sensor embedded in the power button on the right edge, face unlocking via the selfie camera and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom edge. The stereo speakers support Dolby Atmos playback – a perk of all recent Moto phones – and overall quality is decent, with reasonable volume and detail. Though, this is still a budget phone, so keep expectations in check.

On the software front, the Moto G35 5G launches with Android 14 and is promised a single year of OS updates and three years of security patches. Whether that means that it will eventually get next year’s Android 16, or top out with Android 15 despite launching around the same time, is unclear. Either way, it’s not great.

The general software experience is solid, at least, with only a couple of preinstalled mobile games cluttering the home screen and otherwise straightforward and user-friendly layouts.

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Motorola Moto G35 5G review: Display

The 2,400 x 1,080 resolution is a decent improvement over the Moto G34 5G and makes everything look a little bit sharper. Brightness is better, too, hitting 531cd/m2 on manual mode and peaking at 716cd/m2 on adaptive brightness with a torch shining on the light sensor.

Unfortunately, the compliments end there, as just about every other part of my testing turned up issues. The contrast and black levels are both rather weak, at 1,184:1 and 0.40cd/m2, respectively, meaning that black areas often look a little grey and icons don’t pop as well against the background.

General colour fidelity isn’t amazing, either: on the Natural colour profile – ostensibly the most accurate – I recorded an sRGB gamut coverage of 91.6% and a total volume of 99.5%. Most telling was the average Delta E colour variance score, which came back at 2.74 – quite far from the target value of 1 or under. This isn’t dramatic enough for colours to look wildly out of place but the odd red shade showed up slightly washed out in my testing.

Motorola Moto G35 5G review: Performance and battery life

Unisoc processors usually underwhelm but the T760 scored reasonably well in my testing – in the multi-core portion, at least. Here, it surpassed the G34 5G’s by 18%, despite falling 15% behind it in the single-core results. It’s not the nippiest phone in the world (testing it right after the Moto G55 5G showed how much legwork the latter’s extra horsepower is doing) but this is still a reasonable enough result for a phone of this price.

The red bar in the graph below may make the G35 5G look like a downgrade over last year in the on-screen gaming stakes but that’s just due to it having a higher resolution screen (more pixels means more power needed for each frame). Look to the orange bars instead and you’ll see that all of these cheap phones perform very similarly – fluid 3D gaming is out of reach but simple fare like Candy Crush and Solitaire will run just fine.

Battery life is also barely any different than last year – though the larger, sharper display makes this a positive in my book. Despite having to light up all of those extra pixels, the Moto G35 5G managed to last for 22hrs 56mins, which is just seven minutes less than its predecessor. The Moto G55 5G and Nokia G42 5G are still a few hours better but this isn’t a bad result for the G35 5G.

We’ve once again got 18W wired charging support. In my testing, it got the phone to 50% in 40 minutes and to 100% in around an hour and a half, which is decent enough for this kind of money.

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Motorola Moto G35 5G review: Cameras

The 50-megapixel (f/1.8) main camera has been something of a mainstay on budget Moto devices in recent years. This feels a little lazy but it’s at least a reliable shooter, with solid detail and vibrant colours when capturing photos in good lighting.

It’s not as impressive after dark, with a fair amount of noise in the sky and generally fuzzy detail, but the brightening is reasonable enough for a cheap phone.

The switch to an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera is a good decision here, as the previous 2-megapixel macro camera was beyond pointless. It’s still not perfect – detail drops off towards the edges and the colouring is more muted – but it’s a more practical secondary camera overall.

Video gets a minor improvement, too, adding 4K shooting to the selection. It’s only 30fps, however, with no 60fps mode at all, and the lack of stabilisation still makes footage sway more than I’d like.

Motorola Moto G35 5G review: Verdict

No matter which way you slice it, there’s no compelling reason to buy the Moto G35 5G. Your best bet is to spend a bit more on the Motorola Moto G55 5G (~£180) – it’s superior across the board, with a better display, faster performance and speedier charging. Otherwise, last year’s Moto G54 5G is an appealing silver medalist, outclassing the G35 5G while only costing £15 more.

The only problem with that recommendation is that the Moto G54 5G will disappear from shelves sooner rather than later, leaving you with no alternative other than the G35 5G for a sub-£150 5G phone. In that specific circumstance, with the better option discontinued to avoid cannibalisation of sales, the Moto G35 5G will serve you just fine. While the G54 5G is still available, however, there’s simply no reason to settle for the Motorola Moto G35 5G.