Motorola Unveils Moto G8 Plus and E6 Play

Motorola announced the Moto G7 series earlier this year, and we were expecting another revision of its budget-oriented phones in early 2020. It’s not waiting that long, though. Motorola just unveiled the Moto G8 Plus along with the even cheaper E6 Play in Europe. The G8 plus has more cameras, more battery capacity, and a little less bezel. However, Moto doesn’t plan to release these particular phones in the US, and they’re still running Android 9 Pie.

The Moto G8 Plus (above) looks like it has an obscene number of cameras, but the design is a bit deceptive. There’s a front-facing 25MP selfie camera in a small notch on the front, and the back has a column of five camera elements lined up. Just two of those are cameras you can actually use, though. The main sensor is 48MP, and there’s an 8MP wide-angle camera below that. Moto also has a 2MP depth sensor that helps with portrait photos. There’s also a laser autofocus sensor dolled up to look like a camera. The flash is at the bottom of the column.

This is a rather large phone with a 6.3-inch 1080p LCD and a 4,000 mAh battery. That’s 1,000 mAh larger than the Moto G7 Plus from earlier this year, but the new phone only supports 15W fast charging instead of 27W. On the inside, we’re looking at a Snapdragon 665, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage.

The Moto G8 Plus launches in the UK in January for £239 (€269), and it will expand to other markets later. The US is not one of those markets, though.

The US also doesn’t get the new Moto E6 Play (directly above). This phone is even cheaper at £99 (€109), but it’s a big step down in specs. It has a quad-core Mediatek MT6739 ARM chip, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage. The 5.5-inch LCD is only 720p, and there’s just a single 13MP camera on the back.

We expect different versions of these phones in the G8 and E6 series will launch in the US and other countries eventually. It’s just odd that Motorola is rolling these devices out in Europe so early. Motorola also took the opportunity to re-introduce the Motorola One Macro, which it revealed earlier this month. This phone’s claim to fame is its dedicated 2MP macro camera. This phone will cost £179 (€199) when it launches later this month.

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