Motorola One Vision Review

The phone also feels solidly put together and it features a glass back, which feels more luxurious than plastic, but the frame is not made of metal and it’s still glossy plastic. The back is slightly tapered at the edges for a more comfortable grip, which we appreciate.

The One Vision comes in two different color versions: both are unusual vertical gradients with the darker color in the middle. The one we have up for review is called Dark Sapphire and it’s a mix of a deep black center and blue sides, and there is a Bronze brown version available as well.

Display

An LCD screen with color issues and a big and noticeable camera cutout

You get a 6.3-inch Full HD LCD display on the Moto One Vision. There are two things to know about it: first, it’s obviously not an AMOLED screen, so you don’t get the rich colors and deep blacks of that newer technology, and other budget phones are already offering that. Furthermore, overall colors on this screen appear cold and whites have a noticeable blue tonality. This makes photos and videos appear less appealing than on a well-balanced display. Unfortunately, there is no way to tweak the white balance in the settings, which could have remedied the situation. And this is probably the biggest compromise made with the Motorola One Vision. The screen of a phone is one of its most important components and, sadly, this one leaves room for improvement.

The screen also comes with one interruption in the form of a big and very noticeable cutout for the front camera. We have seen this punch hole design in various phones including the Galaxy S10 series, but here the hole for the camera is way bigger and way more noticeable. Motorola says it could make it smaller, but that would have compromised the durability of the phone and the larger cutout ensures a thicker bezel that provides more protection for the front camera in case of a drop. And that’s a good reason, but we still wished that cutout was not as huge.

Fingerprint Scanner

We forget how amazingly good traditional fingerprint scanners are

The One Vision does not have any fancy 3D face recognition tech or in-screen fingerprint scanners. Nope. And it does not need them. Instead, it has a good old capacitive fingerprint scanner cleverly embedded in the Moto logo on the back of the phone. Placed in a slightly recessed area at the center of the back panel makes it extremely easy to find this spot with just tactile feel and... we forget just how amazingly good traditional fingerprint readers were!

Unlike most in-screen fingerprint solutions where you have to often try again and again just to get a proper finger scan, here everything happens momentarily. Tap and the phone unlocks. No failed attempts, easy as pie.

Interface

Moto’s approach to Android: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

The interface is Android One, which is a clean and bloatware-free version of Android. And this is a great thing. Motorola is also promising two major updates, so as this phone currently runs on Android 9 Pie, you will get the Android 10 Q update this year and the Android 11 R next year.

And in terms of extra features, there are just a few. Motorola’s approach to Android is: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and we wish more phone makers would adopt this philosophy. What you do get are Moto Actions, a few useful tricks that Moto phones have had in the last couple of years: twist the phone to quickly start the camera, double chop to turn on the flashlight and touch the screen with three fingers to capture a screenshot. All of these are neat time-savers.

Performance and Storage

An Exynos chip inside is enough for a smooth and speedy daily operation

Under the hood, the One Vision is powered by the Samsung-made octa-core Exynos 9609 chip with 4GB of RAM on board. This processor is similar in performance to the Snapdragon 660 series, meaning that is nowhere nearly as good as a flagship phone. But this does not mean that the phone is slow: quite the opposite! In the daily grind, it felt zippy, apps load fast, there is no stutter, it’s actually a very smooth experience. Gamers, however, would miss the extra performance power of a flagship.

We were also pleasantly surprised by the generous 128GB of storage that you get on board here, that is twice as much as most phones in the price range, and it’s also twice as much as you get on the more expensive Pixel 3a. The One Vision also has a hybrid card slot, so you can either use it as a dual SIM device or use it as a single SIM phone with a microSD card.

Camera

Moto’s new Night Vision mode gets surprisingly good results at night

Turning to the camera, you get a 48-megapixel main shooter and a 5-megapixel secondary camera that captures depth, while up front you have a 25-megapixel selfie camera. Motorola uses all these resources to combine four pixels into one to achieve better image quality, and it calls this Quad Pixel, so the actual photos that you get are 12 megapixels from the main camera and 6 megapixels from the front one.

Numbers, however, never tell the whole story about the quality of a phone camera. What matters is how photos and videos actually look. And the Motorola One Vision camera is good. Just good, not extraordinary in any way, especially when you compare it against new heavyweights like the Pixel 3a.

During the day photos are well-exposed and the colors are pleasingly realistic, not too strong or too bleak. The camera is also quick to capture photos and works reliably well, all great points. What we don’t like is that the whenever you have something brighter in the photo like the skies for example, those brighter areas are basically always burned and you just don’t have enough dynamic range.

Portrait Mode works quite well too and you can capture portraits with a blurred background with the front camera as well.



We also love the cinemagraph option in the camera interface. Cinemagraphs are basically a photograph part of which is moving and this format just invites you to get creative.


At night, you have two options. The first one is to just shoot and the photos that you get are quite dark, blurry and just… not very good. However, you can do something else too: you can switch to the Night Vision mode and wow, what a huge difference it makes! First, the Night Vision mode is surprisingly quick! It takes less than a second to capture a photo, so you don’t need to wait for a long time like with say Huawei phones, but the results are also truly impressive. Nope, this is not the next Google Pixel 3a, but it really is not too far behind! Colors, dynamic range, all of that looks great with this mode, and only when you blow up the phones on a big screen you see the typical issues with such shots like oversharpening and the lesser detail.

For video, you can record at up to 4K and 30 frames per second. Many other phones in this price range don’t have 4K video, so we appreciate having the option, but the quality is just not great, video turns out a bit shaky, colors appear a bit washed out and the focus hunts around a bit.