Smartphones are expensive. Whether you opt for a £499 Google Pixel 9a or a £1,099 iPhone 17 Pro, spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a mobile device is a serious financial decision.

But some phones are cheap. The big question is whether they are any good.

That’s why I decided to test out Motorola’s recently released Moto G06, an Android handset that costs just £69 from Currys. That price isn’t because it’s old, either. The phone was released in September.

Do barely-enough specs make for a bargain phone, or would I want to launch it out of the nearest window?

I test the latest and greatest high-end smartphones, and have done so for the past decade, so I am usually spoiled by cutting-edge hardware and excellent modern specs. I wanted to find out if buying a smartphone right at the bottom of the price ladder is a good idea, or if the sacrifices you need to make to get a phone this cheap simply aren’t worth making.

Out of the box, the Moto G06 makes a decent impression. It feels sturdy and substantial despite its plastic frame, and it’s big thanks to a 6.88-inch screen. The back is covered in a faux leather finish that feels grippy and means it won’t get covered in fingerprints. It feels more expensive than it is. The volume and power buttons are clicky, and you even get a headphone jack.

But then I turned the phone on, and staying positive became difficult.

The G06 has a MediaTek Helio G81 Extreme processor, which is very low-spec. Combined with a (for 2025) paltry 4GB RAM, the phone chugged through the set up process. Once I’d signed in with my Google account, the Android 15 operating system continued to stagger and shudder into life.

This unfortunately is how the phone acts all the time. Unlocking it with the fingerprint sensor in the power button is reliable, but the screen lights up to jerky animations, with things feeling a second or two behind your taps.

You can navigate the phone with Android’s swipe gestures, but I was inclined to revert in the settings to the traditional, old three-button navigation because the swipes are hard to register when the phone can’t keep up.

I was also faced with an alarming amount of bloatware, the term used to describe the apps phone manufacturers pre-load onto new phones without your asking.

Just to emphasise how much rubbish is loaded onto this phone on set up, it has: TikTok, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, LinkedIn, Amazon Music, Temu, Facebook, Pinterest, Solitaire, Block Blast, Vita Majong, Toon Blast, Candy Crush Saga, Booking.com and Monopoly Go. 15 unwanted apps! I guess this is what you get for paying naff all for a smartphone.

Thankfully, you can uninstall any app you don’t want, but it’s not a great first impression.

Motorola’s Android skin is very plain, in a good way. The decision to rely on Google Photos, Calendar and other apps instead of also including duplicate Motorola versions is sensible too. I put my SIM card in the phone, pleased to see the tray has room for two SIM cards and a microSD card to expand the stingy 64GB storage.

It’s rare to see this on phones that cost a thousand pounds these days, and along with the headphone jack means you can have quite a versatile setup. There’s even a silicone case in the box.

This is only a 4G phone though, so you can’t connect to 5G networks. That didn’t bother me too much. This is a slow phone, so you can’t play online games with intense 3D graphics. YouTube videos loaded fine, and you can make video calls with the 8MP selfie camera, but photos are poor all round, including on the single 50MP sensor on the back.

That’s a high megapixel count, but the sensor is not of very good quality. Shots in the daytime are acceptable, but in any kind of low light they are noisy. It’s also difficult to focus images even when tapping to focus, and the edges of all photos are blurry. Without the optical image stabilisation (OIS) found on most phones, the G06 is not a great camera.

But surely anyone buying a phone this cheap really only needs it for simple tasks. Calls sounded clear and loud enough, and apps such as Gmail, WhatsApp and Google Maps all worked perfectly well, even if the phone does take about two seconds or so to load them when you tap on the app icon. This isn’t the end of the world, but your current phone is probably a lot faster.

With not a lot of power under the hood, battery life was great. This phone easily lasted me two days of use with its large 5,200mAh battery, but then again I found it so frustrating to use in its sluggishness that I didn’t do too much to wear the battery down. I listened to Spotify through Bluetooth headphones, sent WhatsApp messages, checked my email and made some calls like I would any other day.

Perhaps this is a good phone to get if you are on your phone too much and want to use yours less. The bestselling iPhones and Samsung Galaxy devices, or indeed Motorola’s more expensive phones, are so performant that it’s easy to seamlessly beam hours of mindless social media scrolling into your face. The G06 splutters into life when you open Instagram but scrolling is janky, and the LCD display suffers from ghosting, where things appear blurry when scrolling, despite the 120Hz refresh rate.

It’s hard to bag on this phone because it costs £69. Yes, it’s annoying out of the box with all the bloatware, and apps are slow to load. Even for basic tasks I had to slow down my thumbs and tap icons or swipe slower because the poor thing couldn’t keep up.

But the reality is, this phone costs about £1,000 less than many of the other Android phones I’ve tested recently, and it can still run 90 percent of the apps I use regularly, even if at a snail’s pace. If you want a phone that works, albeit apprehensively, this is the least you can spend on one in 2025.

Just proceed with extreme caution, and don’t expect to do anything in a hurry. That might be enough for you. As a smartphone enthusiast, it’s far too little for me, though.

The Motorola Moto G06 is available for £69 from Currys