Motorola One review

Motorola has bossed the budget smartphone market with six successive generations of the Moto G family. No one makes desirable, well-rounded smartphones for a £200/$250/AU$400 budget quite like the Lenovo-owned brand.

The Motorola One isn't so much a step above the current Moto G6 range as it is a curious alternative. It sits right alongside the Moto G6 Plus in terms of launch price, but with a very different approach to both hardware and software.

Costing £270 / $400 (around AU$480) but already down to £200 in most UK stores, the Motorola One creeps into the lower end of mid-range territory, though is better value in the UK than the US.

It's well below the likes of the Huawei P20 Lite and the Nokia 7 Plus in the UK, and a little below the Honor 8X. It's also less than the Samsung Galaxy A6 in the UK, but costs more than the A6 in the US.

As those devices have shown to varying degrees, you can expect to get quite a lot of phone for this sort of money. In particular, we’ve come to expect a certain flagship flavor when it comes to design and feel, alongside a couple of stand-out features.

The Motorola One fits the mold with a dependable all-round package and a suitably modern design, but it only really stands out for one particular reason. Thankfully, it’s quite an appealing one.

There's only One Motorola

• Runs slick Android One software
• Likely to be updated to Android 9 Pie soon

Motorola describes the One as "smart, secure and simple". That alliterative trio of words refers to one thing: Android One.

The Android One program started life as a means to lower the hardware threshold - and thus end price - for smartphones in developing countries.

More recently, Google has been working with manufacturers to supply Android One options at a higher price point in developed countries. The Xiaomi Mi A2 was one recent example of this shift, and the Motorola One is another.

The benefits of running Android One are clear. You get a clean, fast, and more secure version of Google’s stock OS.

The lack of tinkering also means that these phones are primed to receive updates much quicker from Google, and indeed Motorola claims that the Motorola One will be among the first to upgrade to Android 9.0 Pie soon after launch.

We're massive proponents of stock Android here, and we'll talk more about some of the reasons for that a little later. But let's be honest for a second. Motorola is just about the last company in the world that needs to make an Android One phone.

The company's own software has always been among the most lightly and thoughtfully reskinned takes on Google's OS. What we'd really like to see is a Samsung One or a Huawei One, marrying those manufacturers' top notch hardware with Google's bloat-free software.

But perhaps we're being a little churlish here. If you want an affordable phone that's going to get Google's latest OS very shortly, then the Motorola One is vying with the Xiaomi Mi A2 for pole position.

Design and display

• iPhone X-style design is smart but derivative
• 5.9-inch 720p display not particularly sharp

The Motorola One design has undeniably been heavily influenced by the iPhone X, both front and back.

It has a more or less edge-to-edge notched display, albeit with a chin that makes it look a little lopsided. The phone also has a glass back and a vertically-aligned dual-camera module.

The Motorola One is far from the only phone to follow the iPhone X blueprint, of course. The Huawei Mate 20 Lite, the OnePlus 6, and even the Google Pixel 3 XL have all jumped on that particular bandwagon in recent times.

But those who recall the days of Motorola as a company with its own distinctive design approach (the customizable second-gen Moto X springs to mind) may just let out a wistful sigh when they see the Motorola One.

The notch itself is much more iPhone X than Pixel 3 XL - and thank goodness for that. It’s relatively wide and shallow, and thus easy to grow accustomed to.

Conversely, the flagship Google Pixel 3 XL at least had the decency to stash two cameras and a speaker in its notch as a way to justify its existence.

We'd argue that a no-frills mid-range Android smartphone like the Motorola One has no need of a notch. It's a complete affectation; a purely cosmetic response to Apple's practical design compromise.

Notch aside, the Motorola One is a pleasant phone to wield. At 7.97mm thin and 162g in weight, it fits that vague 'just right' feeling that means it won't jar your nerves every time you pick it up or slip it into your pocket. It's only a smidgen taller and wider than the iPhone XS.

Despite the clear nod to a much more expensive phone, the Motorola One doesn't feel that much more premium than it is. While the rim is aluminum, it has a glossy paint finish that looks and feels a little like plastic.

The rear glass panel, meanwhile, attracts fingerprints like nobody's business. Again, this isn't a problem unique to the Motorola One. But it does get grubby awfully quickly.

The natural home for fingerprints on the rear of the One is its recessed biometric sensor, which is well placed and reasonably accurate. It isn’t the most reliable or speedy example we’ve encountered, but it’s perfectly adequate.

It's also reassuring to find both a USB-C port and a 3.5mm headphone port on the One’s bottom and top edges respectively.

While that 5.9-inch 19:9 display dominates the front of the Motorola One, it doesn’t particularly impress.

It gets plenty bright enough, with a default auto-brightness setting that gets the job done in most situations - something that you don’t always find at this price point. The color balance is perfectly fine, too, with an eye-pleasingly natural tone.

But there’s a lack of pop to the picture that it outputs, which seems to come largely from a sheer lack of pixel density. At 720 x 1520, you’re looking at a 720p resolution. Stretched out over almost 6 inches, this results in a far from ideal 287 pixels per inch.

You won’t particularly notice this when flicking through the tidy menus of Android One, sending text messages and emails, or navigating through the phone’s menus. But interacting with visual media (such as films and games) and browsing text and thumbnail-heavy web pages shows up the lack of sharpness.

Apple might be pulling a similar trick with the iPhone XR, but on Android we’ve come to expect 1080p at this size and price point. Even Motorola’s own Moto G6 and Moto G6 Plus pack Full HD displays.

Battery life

• 3,000mAh battery yields impressive results
• TurboPower charges very quickly

With a fairly low-power chipset, a 720p display and a no-nonsense Android OS, you’d expect the Motorola One’s 3,000mAh battery to last you comfortably through a full day. We’re glad to report that this is indeed the case.

With light usage, you’ll conceivably be able to get through two full days before you need to recharge. On a couple of particularly uneventful days when using the Motorola One as a second phone, we got from 9am to midnight with around 70% left in the tank.

On more intensive daily driver days, the tank emptied much faster. While we still didn’t find ourselves exactly sweating over battery life in such situations, most people will find it to be a charge-every-nighter. Which is fine.

Our regular video test entails a looping 90-minute 720p video with the screen brightness cranked up to max. The Motorola One lost a consistent 17% of its charge in this test. That’s far from spectacular, but it’s also the exact same result as we got with the Huawei P20 Lite.

The Moto G6 Plus, meanwhile, lost 20% of its juice in this same test.

Stamina varies depending on your usage then (shocker), but one thing that remains consistent is the speed at which the Motorola One regains its charge. Motorola’s TurboPower charger has long been one of the most consistent fast-charging systems out there, snagging you up to 6 hours of power in just 20 minutes.

Camera

• 13MP and 2MP dual-camera just about reaches par
• 8MP selfie cam

The Motorola One packs a dual-camera set-up, but that’s pretty much table stakes here in the closing months of 2018.

In case you haven’t been keeping abreast of this technique, the Motorola One packs one main 13MP camera and one 2MP assistant. The latter provides the former with added depth information, which opens the door for a couple of neat photographic tricks.

The most commonly applied (and least gimmicky) of these is a portrait mode, which accentuates the blurry background effect, thus making the subject pop more than usual.

This is far from the best example of this technique that we’ve seen. Too much of the subject tends to be lost in the artificial bokeh effect for our liking. This can be partially mitigated by lessening the effect with a slider, but it feels rather imprecise.

One camera feature we did rather like here was Spot Color, which lets you draw out items of a particular color in a picture. The rest of the photo is rendered in moody black and white.

How many of your day to day shots you’ll actually want to do this with is another matter, of course. But it does what it sets out to do pretty effectively.

When it comes to those day to day shots, the Motorola One is… alright. Feed it with plenty of light and avoid lots of movement, and you’ll get some satisfying results.

In anything less than optimal lighting, the noise begins to encroach - whether that’s a night time shot with lots of artificial lighting sources, or the kind of slightly murky indoors snap that tends to fill most photo timelines.

There’s an automatic HDR mode, which is a welcome provision, but we found that it didn’t always kick in when we wanted it to. Successive landscape shops with bright cloudy skies failed to boot it into life, so we found ourselves manually switching it on. 

When we did that, the shots were generally improved, if occasionally a little unnatural-looking.

Overall the Motorola One’s main camera is perfectly acceptable. But it’s worth noting that similar money can snag you an Honor 8X with a 20MP/2MP combo and the company’s smart AI-assisted camera UI. The Xiaomi Mi A2 camera also produces sharper results.

One advantage the Motorola One has over that phone is 4K video capture. You also get Google Lens front and center, which lets you do things like copy text, identify objects and media, and scan barcodes.

Oh, and there’s an 8MP selfie camera, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Camera samples

Interface and reliability

• Stock Android 8.1 Oreo
• Moto Display and Moto Actions still included

As we’ve already outlined, the Motorola One is defined by its software. You’re getting stock Android 8.1 Oreo more or less the way Google’s engineers intended it.

It’s not a 1:1 match for the Pixel series, but it is a very clean and inviting mobile OS. Google’s round icons, distinctive fonts, and crisp white menus are a joy to navigate through.

The Android One program is built on a foundation of performance optimization, and sure enough it all moves along very smoothly on the mid-range Motorola One. We didn’t encounter any stalls or stutters in general day to day usage.

Google Assistant is also present and accounted for, though you can’t wake the Motorola One from sleep with the "OK Google" vocal prompt. You’ll need to have the screen on to do so.

While this is an Android One phone, Motorola has still included its most meaningful software tweaks and additions. The ‘double twist’ gesture camera shortcut and the ‘double karate chop’ torch provisions are still activated by default, as are Motorola’s subtle Moto Display notifications.

Neither these Moto Display nor Moto Actions options are as extensive as in other Motorola phones, but it’s good to see the essentials here.

The big advantage of Motorola’s decision to adopt Android One over its own custom take on Android will come with future speedy updates. 

Motorola One handsets have already started to receive an upgrade to Android 9.0 Pie, which brings a "new Intuitive Navigation and Recent App, improved Do Not Disturb mode, colorful settings menu, anticipated longer battery life, revamped split-screen and more" according to Motorola.

Less showy but arguably even more important to certain people will be the guarantee of timely security updates from Google. This is one of the more secure mid-range Android phones on the market, all thanks to Android One.

Movies, music and gaming

• 720p display not ideal for media
• 64GB of storage and a microSD slot

Smartphones in general have had a rather bumpy start to post-iPhone X notch-life, and it’s in the media experience where the glitches tend to manifest themselves. Video and landscape gaming content hasn’t always played nicely with these stretched out, asymmetrical displays.

The current solution - on the Motorola One at least - seems to be both functional and a little blunt: ignore the notch altogether.

Both the Netflix and Amazon Video apps make out like the Motorola One screen is a regular rectangle, though they treat the ‘problem’ in subtly different ways. Netflix defaults to a slightly zoomed-in view, making fuller use of the 19:9 aspect ratio - but rounding off the corners just short of the notch.

Amazon sticks to the native aspect ratio of the video, and no amount of hitting that zoom button in the app’s settings menu will change that.

The pre-installed YouTube app sits somewhere in between the two - defaulting to an Amazon-like bordered view, but with a pinch gesture serving to zoom in to that curved, notch-omitting view.

Games all seem to go the Netflix route, filling out the screen up to and excluding the notch. It actually works pretty well, but further calls into question the whole point of such a design decision.

Whatever the source of the media content, it all looks okay on the Motorola One’s 5.9-inch display. However, that 720p resolution means that none of it reaches its pin-sharp 1080p potential. And that’s certainly noticeable.

You don’t get stereo sound with the Motorola One, but its single bottom-mounted speaker is plenty loud and clear enough. You’ll likely find your finger covering the speaker during landscape-oriented games if you’re not careful, though.

The phone’s audio credentials are bolstered by the presence of that 3.5mm jack - something that’s started disappearing from the mid-range in the same way that it vanished from the top end of the market.

For audio playback you get Google’s Play Music as standard. It’s a decent piece of playback software and a strong streaming service in its own right, should you choose to sign up for it.

On the media storage front, you get both an ample 64GB of storage as standard and a bonus microSD card slot. This isn’t particularly unusual here at the 2018 Android mid-range, but it still feels like a generous provision.

Specs and benchmark performance

• Snapdragon 625 with 4GB of RAM provides adequate performance
• You can get faster for the money

Motorola has equipped the One with a Snapdragon 625 chipset. As mid-range processors go it’s reasonably capable, but it’s also getting a little long in the tooth.

This is the chip you’ll find in the likes of the two-year-old Moto Z Play and last year’s Moto G5S Plus. On the plus side, it’s backed by a healthy 4GB of RAM.

The result of this setup is generally fluid performance for the most part. Navigating through the home screens and flicking between apps is plenty fast enough, as you might expect - though Android One doubtless helps with that.

Slightly more demanding tasks like using the fingerprint sensor and jumping into the camera app from a sleep state aren’t the quickest processes around, but nor are they irritatingly sluggish.

Gaming is a bit of a mixed bag. Guns of Boom runs fairly fluidly, while less demanding fare like Badland Brawl and Alto’s Odyssey are pretty much faultless. On the other hand, PUBG needs to operate on the lowest possible settings, and Asphalt 9 isn’t even compatible with the phone.

An average Geekbench multi-core score of 4,251 isn’t bad at all, and would seem to match the similarly priced Moto G6 Plus (which scored 4,167). But do bear in mind that the G6 Plus and its Snapdragon 630 CPU attain that score while driving a Full HD display.

The Honor 8X hammers the Motorola One in the performance stakes, scoring 5,552 points with its custom Kirin 710 CPU. And this despite it having a 1080p display and a relatively cumbersome custom UI.

We should also point out that you can get much better performance with a 1080p display and at a potentially lower price, but with similar Android One perks, in the slender form of the Xiaomi Mi A2. That phone uses the newer Snapdragon 660 to impressive effect.

Verdict

The Motorola One is the latest in an increasingly long line of mid-range Android phones to offer iPhone X looks at an affordable price point. It’s a smart, well-balanced phone with few glaring weaknesses.

While its design largely holds its own with rivals from Huawei and co., however, there are a couple of shortfalls. The phone’s display isn’t sharp enough, while it also runs on a slightly outdated chipset.

The presence of Android One is a plus point, but even then it’s not a massive departure from Motorola’s usual software efforts. All in all, a decent phone, but far from an essential pick.

Who's this for?

The Motorola One is for those who want the security and up to date software guarantee that Google’s Pixel family provides, but without the flagship price tag.

It’s also a good bet if you like Apple’s iPhone X design work, from the notched display to the glass-sandwich composition. This phone’s a good looker.

Should you buy it?

The Motorola One is a decent all-rounder of a phone. It provides a friction-free experience in all the important areas, particularly with its light and intuitive Android One software.

Our overarching issue with the phone, however, is that it doesn’t absolutely shine in any one area. Its 5.9-inch display is well-balanced, but it’s not particularly sharp. Its chipset is capable enough, but fails to set advanced tasks alight. Its camera is just okay.

Even the presence of Android One doesn’t really set the pulse racing given that Motorola’s standard software effort is so reminiscent of stock Android in the first place.

But the real issue is, you can get a better or equal experience in each of these categories for the same or less money. We wouldn’t dissuade you from buying the well-rounded Motorola One, but nor can we herd you towards it with any great enthusiasm.

Looking for other options? Consider these alternatives:

Moto G6 Plus

Some people will be drawn to the Motorola One thanks to the trustworthy Motorola brand. In that case, Motorola has already provided a compelling alternative of its own.

For around the same price as the Motorola One, the Moto G6 Plus offers a sharper, notchless display, roughly equivalent performance, and a superior dual-camera set-up. You don’t get Android One, but Motorola’s software is very close to stock anyway.

The design isn’t quite as fresh and modern as the Motorola One, though, so if you really want an all-screen device and a screen notch (as many seem to), the Motorola One is the better bet.

Read our Moto G6 Plus review

Honor 8X

The Honor 8X is a seriously appealing alternative to the Motorola One. It outguns the Moto on performance, display sharpness, and photographic chops.

It’s also a fair chunk cheaper than the RRP of the Motorola One, which could be a major factor at this end of the market, though the One currently undercuts it a small amount in the UK.

Of course, the major advantage of the Motorola over the Honor 8X is that Android One software. Huawei’s EMUI is divisive to say the least, and there’s a lot to be said for a clean Google-approved experience.

Read our Honor 8X review

Xiaomi Mi A2

The Xiaomi Mi A2 is another recent Android One phone, but it offers a much more appealing package than the Motorola One in many ways.

It’s got a notchless Full HD display, a decent all-metal build, a much more capable chipset, and a camera that can produce really pleasing results. All this and it can currently be had for less money than the Motorola One.

The main issues are a lack of NFC and no 3.5mm headphone port, but if those things don’t affect your day to day usage, it’s a more compelling all-round package than Motorola’s effort.

First reviewed: November 2018