There’s always One
Motorola’s gone a bit maverick with its mid-size, mid-price One: it’s a step above the familiar Moto range in some ways, but not in others…
Words Andrew Williams
£280 / stuff.tv/motorola1
The One is a bit of an experiment for Motorola. For a start, this isn’t a true big-screen phone: it has a notch, which lets Motorola fit more screen inches into a smaller frame. It also runs Android One rather than the usual Moto version. It has 2.5D glass on front and back, aluminium on the sides and slim iPhone XR-like display borders – and is a couple of millimetres narrower than the ‘accessible’ iPhone.
The rest is a case of pretty healthy mid-price box-ticking: 64GB storage; USB-C charging; a solid fingerprint scanner; and a trusty Snapdragon 625 processor. This is not a powerhouse CPU, mind, and its GPU can struggle with ultra-demanding games in other phones. And while that notched screen brings a 19:9 aspect ratio, the One has just a 1520x720 screen, missing more than a million display pixels compared to the Nokia 7.1, Honor 8X and Motorola’s own Moto G6. Still, mid-range phones excite us. How does this one perform? £280 / stuff.tv/motorola1