Should You Buy Motrolla G77 Or Not?

A wee bit tender:

So, another week, another budget Motorola smartphone lands at our towers. In fact, they just launched four fresh Moto Gs, so it looks like our entire week’s going to be spent seriously fondling some affordable blowers. The Motorola Moto G77 boasts the usual slick Pantone design and stock Android vibes. But how’s the gaming chops, the battery life, the camera tech, and those other bits?

Well, let’s have a proper good squint at the Moto G77. And for more on the latest and greatest tech, before we get started, as well, a brief hungover uncle alert. Last night was kind of a big one, kiddies, so apologies for any grunting, swearing, excessive sweating, etc. Not that we don’t do that stuff all of the time anyway.

Design:

Now, one of the things we really appreciate about affordable Motorola phones is that they don’t actually look that similar to the more premium flagship-y Moto blowers. There are some telltale signs that the Moto G77 is a bit more wallet-friendly, the slightly thicker bezels surrounding that display, and the fact that you’ve got a plastic frame rather than metal. But hey, look at how beautifully slim the Moto G77 is, and yes, you once again get another one of those wonderful soft.

Touch Pantone approved arses, and this feels lovely against the palm and also adds a nice bit of grip can get quite mucky, however, especially if you like the occasional bit of greasy fried good stuff, you know, the odd pork scratch and or chicken leg or whatever.

But we do love how they integrate the camera bump into the back ends, just a gentle slope connecting the two. The colour of that back end matches the frame as well. There are actually two colour options for the Moto G77. This here is the shaded spruce, which apparently captures the gentle serenity of an evergreen forest.

Alternatively, there’s Black Olive, no serenity for you. That one presumably captures the eternal darkness of the void, sweet oblivion. That’s our analysis, by the way, not Motorola’s marketing guff. And despite being a skinny and lightweight chap, the Moto G77 is pretty durable. You’ve got a Gorilla Glass 7i display, which certainly in the past has proven pleasingly scratch-resistant, just as well because there’s Buggerall pre-installed screen protector on here.

And the motor g77 has also passed no less than 13 military standard 810h tests just to prove one absolute hard case it can put up with all kinds of things, extreme temperatures, drops, etc. It can even survive being stuffed into your uncle’s spurs trousers for days on end, for which frankly it deserves a medal. Oh, and it’s IP64 dust and splash resistance, not full-on water resistance. Don’t go drop.

It’s in a sink, a bath, a pool, or whatever. If you just spill your vodka on it, it should be alright.

Features:

Now, to unlock the Motorola Moto G77, it has a basic in-display optical fingerprint sensor positioned quite low down on the display, so you don’t have to stretch a wee bit to actually activate it. But it seems to work okay. Yes, occasionally we’ll have to tap our digit a couple of times, especially if our hands are a wee bit moist or sticky or whatever.

And you’ve also got face unlock as well, which is okay, as long as the lighting isn’t completely cack. And Motorola used to be, shall we say, a little bit pants when it came to actually keeping its smartphones updated, but thankfully, times are a-changing. And so, even though the Moto G77 is quite a budget phone.

Friendly handset, you’ll still enjoy three os updates and four and a half years of security patches, and oddly specific, it’s good to go until we believe it’s June 2030. Is that good maths?

Yeah, we think that works. And as usual with Motorola phones, it’s quite a stock Android experience, but with a few tweaks here and there to make it a Moto blower. Ooh, half price, Dino Crisis, nice. Unfortunately, crapware has started sneaking onto Motorola phones in recent times. It’s not too bad, the likes of Instagram, LinkedIn, and Amazon Music, so that can absolutely be booked.

But the good news is you’ve got pretty much the full suite of Motorola’s own apps here on the G77. Including the likes of Family Space, you’ve got Moto Secure and Smart Connect. And as always, the best place to start is that Moto app. Because this basically grants you quick and easy access to all of Motorola’s best bezel bits, so, for instance, you can quickly and easily customise your Moto G77, right down to fiddling with the icon shapes and the fingerprint animation. One of our favourite Moto additions is the excellent gesture support, which includes, yes, that all-time classic fast torch.

Here you can dive into the Moto Secure features, which nicely complement Google’s own built-in Android security shenanigans. And if this is your first Motorola Rodeo, you’ve got various tips on how to get on with it. And just a few wee grumbles, like for instance, there’s no always-on-display option, which Motorola seems to hate.

Putting on its smartphones for whatever reason. And also, here in Blighty, the only storage option appears to be 128 gigs, which, we mean, that’s just not good enough. That’s piddly. You know, if you shoot a lot of photos and videos, that’ll fill up in no time, and it’ll be gone pretty much instantly if you download stuff like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves.

Wuthering Waves over 50 gigs these days, so it almost takes up half the sodding smartphone, but thankfully, you can at least shove a micro SD memory card into the Moto G77’s second SIM slot. Expand that storage up to two terabytes, although you can only use this to really back up.

Photos and videos etc, you can’t install apps onto that but, we was proper chuffed to see you’ve got eSIM support as well as physical SIM support here on the Moto G77, and still quite rare at this sort of price point but, it is invaluable if you do a lot of traveling whenever you bugger off to a country where your SIM card is not supported means that before you even head to the airport you can get yourself an eSIM sorted online.
And then boom, you’re back on the internet the second you land. And you don’t have any of the Moto AI shenanigans on here, but we’re not too bothered about that. The good news is you do have the likes of Gemini, as well as Co-Pilot, and a bit of Perplexity. So well and truly sorted for AI assistant shenanigans. Tell you one thing, they can’t bloody do though, and that’s sort out our sodding head.

Display & Audio:

And bugger all complaints when it comes to the 6.78-inch extreme AMOLED display. Not really sure why Motorola calls it extreme exactly, it’s just very nice. We guess very nice AMOLED doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. But they’ve gone with a 1.5K resolution, which is lovely to see on a budget-friendly handset. Means that despite the spacious size, those visuals are nice and crispy.

There’s no love for HDR streaming in the likes of Netflix or Disney+, but the contrast? Still commendable. It’s nice, natural-looking visuals. Those colours are quite poppy on the default vivid settings, but you can bump that down to natural if you want, which tones things down a bit. And that screen is certainly more than bright enough for outdoor use, although again, with the caveat that we’re just surviving at the moment.

So we can’t testify as to how it’ll handle Barbados in the summertime or anything. We’re certainly finding perpetual gloom. It is absolutely retina-combusting when you max out that brightness. And as you can see there, not phased at all by the fierce studio lights.

And also gets reasonably dim for a bit of evening viewing. You’ve got the usual eye comfort features as well, including flicker prevention if you are a bit more sensitive to OLED displays and your standard refresh rate shenanigans as well. It’s typically at 60 hertz but can bump up to 120 hertz when required for a more silky smooth experience. You can actually stick on the hyper smooth mode and have it running at 120 hertz full time.

The audio you’ve got yourself a stereo speaker experience here on the Moto G77, although as with a lot of more affordable smartphones. It’s quite an imbalanced setup, so that bottom speaker certainly pulls most of the weight when you bump that volume all the way up. certainly you get a lot of audio, it’s pretty bloody loud, but it’s also quite tinny, quite distorted, so we prefer having it a couple of notches down, but it is significantly quieter and also everything’s a lot clearer, not quite as nasty on the ears, you’ve got Dolby Atmos support, the Bluetooth streaming is absolutely fine, bugger all headphone jack though.

Performance & gaming:

For the performance, it’s MediaTek’s Dimensity 6400 that’s stuffed inside the Motorola Moto G77, been used on a few budget-friendly realme and Tecno smartphones so far. The everyday running is absolutely fine, but you will see the occasional bit of slowdown under heavy use, especially, for instance, using the old camera app if you’re tapping away trying to get lots of portraits on the go.

And that right there is an absolute keeper. And sometimes even simple stuff like just deleting lots of photos in a row can sometimes be a little bit slow, shall we say? But hey, as long as you’re not horrifically impatient, you should get on absolutely fine with the Moto G 77.

And if you are a gamer, well, optimized Android titles like Call of Duty and PUBG run absolutely perfectly. You can stick it on the higher graphics settings, and it’ll still maintain a smooth frame rate, no worries, even if you’re gaming for well over an hour. Of course, if you want to play more demanding fare like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves, well, you’ll definitely have to temper your expectations, because these generally run like a constipated granny with knackered knees.

Even on the lower graphics settings, weather and waves are a bit of a juddery mess, so we’d certainly skip that one, and we were pleased to see Motorola’s game time feature back in action, which can boost the performance when needed, and you’ve got some handy tools to block calls and notifications, record the phone can get a wee bit warm when gaming, but nothing too troubling.

Battery life:

And as for the battery tech, well, it’s a 5200mAh battery stuffed into that skinny chassis, which is actually kind of a measly capacity these days, certainly compared with a lot of Chinese rivals.

But actually, it’s fine because the Moto G77 proves that numbers aren’t everything. The battery life on this thing is fantastic still. There are even super-demanding users like ourselves who will happily make it through a long, intensive day on a full charge of this thing. And that’s with like six, seven, eight hours of screen time, plenty of camera play, a bit of video chatting, some gaming on the side. And if you are a bit more chill, well, you could well make it through a full weekend on a single charge of the G77.

Helped along by various factors like the energy-efficient chipset, the fact that there’s bugger all always on display, of course. If you are running low on juice, well, it’s 30-watt wide charging support, so not the nippiest. That’s official when it comes to recharging, and there’s bugger all wireless charging support, although hey, that’s still pretty rare at the sub point.

Cameras:

And let us conclude this lovely video on the Motorola Moto G77 by having a good, hard squint at the camera tech. And what you’ve got here is a 108 megapixel primary shooter and the usual Motorola camera app.
Plenty of camera modes to play around with, including, of course, a portrait mode, you’ve got a dedicated pro mode which can capture raw format images if you want, you’ve got the usual white balance, shutter speed, ISO levels, etc. to tinker with. You can shoot at the full 108 megapixel resolution as long as the lighting is decent. For our testing, we just left it in the photo mode, and the Moto G77 is a perfectly acceptable budget snapper.

Don’t expect particularly crispy detail, even in quite strong light and HDR-type conditions, which sometimes throw it off, so you will see some saturation and also quite a lot of murk. But it can pump out some respectable enough portrait snaps, has quite natural-looking colours, and it’s got the usual caveats about making your subject stay as still as possible because any motion tends to result in a bit of blurry bollocks.
And of course, yes, in the evenings and in crappier light, you can expect a fair amount of noise and grain to invade your photo. There’s no telephoto lens here, but you can pinch into a three times zoom level and enjoy reasonably crisp results still.

Although again, those detail levels are slightly lacking when you check out your photos on a big screen. And you do have a basic 8 megapixel ultra-wide-angle shooter if you want a slightly different viewpoint. And you can shoot your home movie shenanigans at up to 2K resolution as we’re doing right now. That’s a cap.
At 30 frames per second, you can lower it to full HD resolution and then boost the frame rate to 60 fps if you like, but at the 2k level, the stabilization is pretty good, and the audio pickup is fine as well as long as it’s not too blustery or anything, then you get that horrible distortion. Hopefully, our commentary is coming through nice and loud.

And then around the front end of the Moto G77, you’ve got yourself a 32 megapixel selfie shooter. You can use this to once again record yourself at 2K resolution at 30 frames per second but if you bump down to full HD there’s no 60fps option and you know it’s okay for a bit of video chatting and stuff but we wouldn’t use it for vlogging, colours are a little bit lifeless and there’s quite a lot of noise usually as well. Hopefully, you can see it sort of around this sort of general area.

Verdict:

And there you have it, our lovelies. That, in a delicious wee nutshell, is the fresh new Motorola Moto G77. Another absolute stunner at its budget price point, as to be said. Motorola does make the best-looking budget phones. And cracking AMOLED technology.

Display but apart from that nothing really particularly stand out here to be honest the battery life is pretty good performance is okay the camera tech is serviceable although as always we do love that these stock android vibes on here with some of those moto bonuses and it’s great that they’re actually finally giving you years of support rather than pretty much bugger all that’s what this old northern knacker reckons anyway be great to your thoughts on the moto g77, we’re hoping to update our best budget smartphones.

So stay tuned for that, cheers everybody. Love you.