Moto One Power Review

Motorola shifted its interest from the E series and the G series and now is coming up all-new One series with which it will bring an all-new range of smartphones and one of the first moto devices with a notch in this range. Motorola is planning to come back with a bang with it’s an all-new range of the One series.

We are going to take a detailed look at the all-new Motorola one power.

Interestingly the one power will be available only in one variant that is the 4 GB RAM combined with 64GB of storage which is on sale for INR 12,999 and will be sold only in one color which is black and will exclusively be available on Flipkart.

The box contains many items other than the device itself:

 – Transparent Case

 – Turbo Charger

 – USB Type-C Cable

 – Sim ejector tool

 – Documentation

The Motorola one power comes in the box with the phone already has a transparent case protecting it. You’ll find a sim ejector tool along with a Type-C cable and a turbocharger.

Unsurprisingly there won’t be any headphones included in the box.

Here’s a quick look at what all will the device be packing inside it

 – Display: 6.20-inch , IPS Full HD+ 1080 x 2246 pixels

– CPU & GPU: Snapdragon 636, Adreno 509

– Rear camera: 16MP F1.8, 5MP F2.2 telephoto lens

– Selfie camera: 8MP, F2.0

– Battery: 5000mAh capacity with 15W turbocharge

– Security: fingerprint sensor

Moto phones have always had a unique design, take the G series, for example, it had round camera space at the back and the notch style was also different but with the one series, they have changed their design pattern. The Moto One Power has rounded edges with a big notch up in the top front which makes the look of the phone a bit premium-ish. The back has a vertical camera set up in the corners and around fingerprint sensor in the middle at the top. The whole design makes it look like the iPhone X. Not having an issue with the iPhone but the copying of design is just annoying. The big notch is unnecessary as it doesn’t house anything other than that of the camera and the proximity sensor. It had almost edge to edge display but the bezels are a bit big at the bottom of the phone. The phone is not in unibody design but has three parts at the back, the middle part is the metal and the top and bottom parts are plastic. There are two speaker grills at the bottom one housing the microphone and the other housing the speakers in between which is the type-C charging port. At the top, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack and a secondary microphone. The screen is curved and the edges are rounded. The whole phone sports a symmetrical design which is satisfying to the eye. The sim tray has a dedicated sim slot to increase the storage upto 256GB which is great.

The device comes with a 6.2 inch Full HD+ IPS display which is rounded at the edges and comes with the protection of corning gorilla glass (the generation not mentioned by the company). The screen to body ratio is at 81% which is not the best but is considered decent. The one thing that annoys the most is the big notch which is very disturbing and is unnecessary. Takes up most of the space at the top and the screen left on either of the sides is very less to display much information. There’s another surprise with the display and that is the notch cannot be hidden in the settings so it will keep annoying the users until the company decides to make it right with the next update.

The One Power is powered by the favorite chipset of all the budget devices, snapdragon 636 designed on 14nm paired with 4 gigs of RAM which on paper is decent enough and works on the device as well. The chipset also supports Bluetooth 5.0 and the latest Wi-Fi standards along with dual 4G and dual Standby. On basic usage the phone performs well and surely can give competition to rivals such as the Redmi Note 5 Pro. 

One Power uses the stock android without any bloatware from Motorola and is as smooth as a stock android should feel. It does get sticky or stutters when a lot of apps are in the memory which is due to lack of RAM management. The device comes with Android Oreo and promises to bring Pie to this device in the next update. This is the first Android One series from the company and hopefully, the updates and the security patches will be consistent in the near future.

As the world is into the gaming mode and all the devices are trying their best to improve gaming on budget smartphones, the moto one power is not far behind in the league. As for Pubg the game runs smoothly on the device but only on low graphics. The thing to note here is that the device rarely gets hot while playing this game.

The device houses a dual-camera setup at the back with a primary sensor of 16 Megapixels and a 5 Megapixel secondary depth sensor. Kindly keep in mind that moto didn’t opt for the wide-angle sensor whereas all other smartphones that are upcoming are having three camera sensors at the back. The camera is set to an 18.7:9 aspect ratio by default and you’ll need to switch to 4:3 to take 16-megapixel shots. You also get a shortcut for digital zoom, helping you zoom in quicker than using two fingers to pinch or stretch on screen. There are quick toggles for HDR, flash, timer, and different aspect ratios. Google Lens is also baked into the camera app and lets you identify objects you are pointing at.

The front camera is 8MP single selfie camera which does have a flash beside it although that doesn’t do any justice to the sensor as the lowlight images are not as good as its competitors have to offer.

The low light images through the back camera are decent but not up to the mark as well. The camera software needs improvement to improve the low light images.

The Moto One Power packs a 5,000mAh battery which is massive for a smartphone in that range, but not quite rare. The Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1 also sport similar capacity, and based on the PCMark Work 2.0 score, the Moto One Power lasted 11 hours 57 minutes, a good one hour more than the Max Pro M1. That’s primarily because the Zenfone Max Pro M1 variant we tested had more RAM, but that shouldn’t make for this big a difference.

Nevertheless, the Moto One Power will last you a good one and a half days if you use it moderately. Long hours of gaming will drain the battery quicker, but regular social media browsing, instant messaging, Netflix binging for an hour or two and ample use of the camera will easily last you more than a day. And in case you do need to top up the phone in a hurry, the bundled Turbo Charger fast charges to 50 percent in around 40 minutes, enough to last you a day.

Moto is always considered good in terms of the audio side and it still is good at that aspect. The speakers are good in the One Power and it does support Dolby digital with the headphones for which there can’t be any complaints. As for the security, the One Power comes with a fingerprint sensor at the back which sports a batwing Moto logo on it which looks super cool. It does feel fast but has a slight lag to it. As soon as the finger is put on the sensor the haptic feedback kicks in and vibrates the device but the screen takes a second to light up. That might be a software issue which I’m sure will get fixed in the next update, other than that it also has face unlock which is merely based on camera and software and is fast. But there is no dedicated sensor for the face unlock.

Pros:

 – Great battery life, thanks in part to an efficient chipset and also bloat-free software

 – Decent, if not spectacular LCD display

 – 15W quick charge support and a compatible charger included in the box

 – Very loud single speaker that benefits a lot from the included Dolby Audio equalizer

 – Near-stock Android Oreo ROM

Cons:

 – The body is entirely plastic, including the frame and the finishes feel cheap. Despite the claimed Gorilla Glass finish on the front, our unit picked up scratches easily

 – Some nifty Motorola added features and gestures were missing from the OS on our review unit

 – The slightly dated Snapdragon 625 chipset might be efficient, but it is also quite under-powered