The Moto phone can be operated swiftly and reliably via the touchscreen. This is also due to Motorola's 90 Hz refresh rate, which enables smooth scrolling. For selfies and video calls, the front-facing camera is an 8MP affair with an aperture of f/2.0. The results are perfectly serviceable, as you can see from the office selfie below. The Moto G13 can use the earpiece as a second speaker and thus create a stereo effect. The sound is overall good and does not overdrive but the music sounds a bit muffled. The speakers are also not really loud. There is a 3.5 mm audio port at the smartphone's upper edge, that can be used for connecting headphones or speakers. External audio devices can also be connected via Bluetooth. Numerous codecs, such as aptX HD, LDAC, or LHDC-V, are available here. With 128 GB eMMC flash, the phone's mass storage is quite slow but is also extensive: at the moment, most similarly priced competitors still offer 64 or even only 32 GB data storage. There is also an NFC module, which is by no means a matter of course in this price range. The memory is unfortunately only slow eMMC, but the phone only heats up marginally under load and hardly throttles its performance. Apart from the somewhat too pressure-sensitive casing and the uncertain update situation, we hardly find any real points of criticism.

But all phones struggle when the light dips, and budget phones are especially susceptible to this phenomenon. As the sun sets, the Moto G13’s pictures get noticeably blurrier with added visual noise. Unfortunately, only very slow eMMC flash is used for storage, which means that copying and loading takes much longer than in high-end phones.We will probably see this level of performance more often in budget phones this year, but it's still great that the Moto G13 shows that even a cheap phone finally allows smooth navigation through menus and even somewhat more demanding tasks. But it actually eclipses the Xiaomi in graphical performance. Ignore the on-screen figures — that’s down to the 720p resolution (fewer pixels means better frame rate). But when you equalise the two at 1080p offscreen, the Moto G13 squeezes out a few more frames per second. While close-up macro shots can be fun, I’d personally trade both of these supplemental lenses for a stronger main camera, but I’m evidently in the minority, given budget manufacturers’ insistence that more is better. Finally, there are differences in the phones’ cameras. While both have triple arrays led by a 50MP main sensor, the G13 swaps a 5MP ultrawide lens for an admittedly less useful 2MP depth sensor. The front-facing camera also doubles the megapixels to 16MP. The mobile reception is decent for an inexpensive phone in our random tests during the review but can't keep up with high-end phones.

Unusually, it doesn’t seem to apply horrendously over-the-top beautification settings, and I couldn’t see any way to add them, either. The maximum temperature of 38.4 °C is not critical, and the performance is not affected by this, as the 3DMark stress test shows us: even after numerous runs of the benchmark, the achieved frame rate is about the same.

Performance, emissions and battery life - Moto G13 lasts long

It’s not too bad when viewed from a distance, but zoom in for a close crop and you can see exactly how little detail is captured. The Moto G13 comes with a triple-camera array composed of a 50MP (f/1.8) main snapper and two additional 2MP (f/2.4) lenses: one for macro, and another for depth. It’s a testament to how far budget handsets have come in the last decade that the Moto G13 looks pretty much like any other smartphone in 2023. Front Camera Setup: (f/2.0 Aperture, 1.12um Pixel Size), Camera Feature: Dual Capture, Spot Color, Night Vision, Portrait, Live Filter, Group Selfie, Pro Mode (W/ Long Exposure), Low Light AI Selfie, Shot Optimization, Auto Smile Capture, Gesture Capture, Selfie Animation, Face Beauty, RAW Photo Output, HDR, Timer, Best Shot, Active Photos, Assistive Grid, Leveler, Watermark, Video Features: Dual Capture, Spot Color, Timelapse (W/ Hyperlapse), Video Stabilization, Face Beauty, Video Snapshot

Does the gamble pay off? It’s a mixed bag. As you can see from the chart below, it’s some way off the Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 with its Qualcomm chip. And that’s over a year old now, even if it still tops our list of budget phones.

In good lighting conditions, however, the Moto G13 takes pretty impressive shots with a surprising amount of detail. Here’s a church near my house on a bright, sunny June day: The macro lens is fun, but probably the kind of thing you’ll only try once. Here’s a two-Euro coin close enough to see all the scuffs it endured while being passed around mainland Europe. Motorola's Moto G13 is a quite fast phone from the affordable mid-range with good features: 90 Hz display, NFC, and a lot of storage. Finally, its battery life is absolutely stellar. In our standard looped video test, the Moto was just three minutes away from hitting the 20-hour mark. That’s a bit behind the Moto G10 and the Redmi Note 11, but it’s not enough to lose sleep over. You’ll get a day out of a single charge, and then some. Motorola Moto G13 review: Cameras