New Moto G phones have a rockstar finish for the price-conscious shopper thanks to luscious leather

When the Moto G was first announced in 2013, it was a breakthrough moment for Android. It saw Motorola – then under the control of Google – hitting one of the early promises for Android, creating one of the best affordable smartphones. The icing on the cake was the fact that it was basically pure Android, with no skin.

Motorola tried a number of different things with its phone UI, including the likes of Moto Blur, but in its 2024 guise, Motorola offers one of the cleanest Android experiences outside of Google's Pixel.

The Moto G is now a series rather than a single phone and offers great value for money, with the Moto G55 and Moto G35 updating previous iterations of these devices for more affordable goodness.

One of the great things about these new models is that they offer something that has often been the preserve of premium phones. Both these models offer a vegan leather finish, resulting in a phone that looks premium, even though it’s for the price conscious.

Best of all, those vegan leather finishes are in bright and vibrant colours. Motorola isn’t messing around: if you’re getting a leather-backed phone, you want to be noticed, so the G35 comes in an awesome Sage Green which is beautifully vibrant, while the G55 comes in Twilight Purple – and they look sensational.

The bad news is that if you pick up the Midnight Black option then it’s a plastic finish which doesn’t look anywhere near as good.

Outside of the finish, the Moto G models are built to hit low prices. The Moto G55 sits in the middle of the Moto G family, with a 6.49-inch display, MediaTek Dimensity 7025 processor and a 5000mAh battery, with support for 30W charging.

There’s a 50-megapixel main camera, supported by an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera on the back.

The Motorola G35 sits around the entry-level of Motorola’s G series phones and here you get a Unisoc T760 processor, a 6.72-inch display, while there’s a 5000mAh battery with 18W charging. Again there’s a pairing of a 50-megapixel main camera and 8-megapixel ultrawide camera on the rear of the phone.

These phones are admittedly built for the affordable end of the smartphone market, so they won’t compete with the best phones by any measure, but if you don’t want to spend a lot of money on a phone, you can at least get one that looks great, thanks to that vegan leather finish.

The Motorola Moto G55 will be available for £199.99 in the UK, €249 in Europe, and released in early September.

The Moto G35 will cost you £149.99 / €199 and is coming later the same month.

Sadly, we've been told that there are no plans to launch the phones in the US.