A few months ago my beloved Motorola Moto G10 started having microphone issues, so I looked around at what budget Motorola phones were on the market and the G22 looked a good spec phone for its price.
I am not a heavy user, mainly calls, social media, listening to music and shooting youtube videos. I’m not a gamer. The octa-core processor, 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage seemed decent enough, but perhaps I should have read some more reviews before purchasing one – well two actually as my wife got one too.
I have never had any performance issues with Motorola phones. I switched to Android about 7 years ago and have had several Moto G handsets in that time. They have all been solid work horses with excellent battery life.
However, it was a very different picture with the Moto G22. From the moment it was out of the box and setting it up, it just felt different. The screen was unresponsive, going through the menu and set up was delayed and I seemed to be in an update loop for a while.
Once set up, the problems got worse. Opening one app was fine, however trying to do two or more things on it at once just brought the whole phone to a crawl. I was willing to let this slide, perhaps it was just busy doing a lot in the background – so I thought I would give it a day or so.
Even after a few days, nothing improved – in fact the problems got worse.
Firstly, there is no fast charging on this phone. Something I thought was a little odd in 2022. But the bigger problems were the glitches in the operating of the phone itself. Apps would freeze or quit and on numerous occasions the phone dialer would open to a white screen so you couldn’t make a call and randomly throughout the day the keyboard wouldn’t pop up while writing a message or trying to do a Google search. Even a reboot didn’t always resolve it.
With all these issues I decided to contact where I bought it from, but was told because it was used I couldn’t return it. So I decided I would have to grin and bear it and thought maybe a software update would resolve the main issues at some point.
A month in to using it and the problems had not gone away. Not being able to make a call or reply to a message when needed has caused no end of problems over the past few weeks.
My wife was experiencing the same issues, so I knew it wasn’t a problem with just my handset.
So I decided to contact the retailer I bought it from again and this time I got a bit further. I was told to speak to Motorola – which I did via live chat – and within minutes I was told to return both handsets, so that was progress.
At least I won’t have to suffer these issues any longer, but a phone with these performance issues and horrendous bugs should not be allowed on the market.
Looking around at tech review sites and personal reviews, most have had similar problems with a lot of the issues being put down to the severely under-powered Helio chip, just not being able to cope with even the most basic of tasks.
I have never had an issue with any Motorola handset I have had in the past, all exceeded my expectations and outperformed some high end phones.
I just can’t believe a phone with this many issues which performs so badly could ever get released. Did nobody at Motorola notice it in production or testing?
Has it put me off going down the Motorola Moto route in the future? I have to say it has.
Written by Simon Royal. Follow me at twitter.com/simonroyal
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