Motorola’s new low-cost Android phones will be among the cheapest to get Google’s Circle to Search. The new $200 Moto G and $170 Moto G Play for 2026, announced Tuesday, will ship with Android 16 and come with access to the Gemini-powered feature along with the Gemini assistant.
Google’s Circle to Search has been a particularly useful AI-powered feature since its debut, making it particularly noteworthy that it will now be available in devices that cost under $200. The $170 Moto G Play will arrive first on Nov. 13, followed by the $200 Moto G on Dec. 11.
Both phones will come with a 6.7-inch display and a 120Hz refresh rate, include 5G connectivity (which is a first for the Play series) and get a 5,200mAh battery.
The $200 Moto G.
The lower-cost Play phone will run on a Mediatek Dimensity 6300 processor and include 4GB of memory that can be virtually expanded to 12GB with the RAM Boost feature. That perk essentially borrows from the phone’s 64GB of onboard storage which can be expanded to 1TB with a microSD card slot, while its battery can be recharged at an 18-watt speed. It will also have a 32-megapixel main camera on the back, and an 8-megapixel selfie camera. It will come in one color called Pantone Tapestry, which has a blue-green shade.
The slightly pricier Moto G will also run on the same processor, but step up with 128GB of storage and a 30-watt wired charging speed. Its rear camera system leads with a 50-megapixel wide angle camera paired with a 2-megapixel macro camera, while its selfie shooter is a 32-megapixel camera. It will come in two colors, the Pantone Cattleya Orchid (a magenta-like shade) and Pantone Slipstream (a gray shade).
While I am glad to see lower-cost phones get Circle to Search, I am somewhat concerned that many of the specs in the 2026 edition of the Moto G are similar to the 2025 model — particularly the inclusion of 4GB of onboard RAM. I found the prior Moto G to have stability issues initially, which were largely resolved by using the RAM Boost setting to make the software simulate additional memory to assist with loading apps and multitasking. We’ll have to test to see if the new 2026 Moto G phones will optimize better under Android 16, and hopefully the bigger batteries will also allow these less-powerful phones to go even longer between charges.
