Motorola has recently announced the launch of its first smartphone with a notch in India. Dubbed as Motorola One Power, the phone comes with a price tag of Rs 15,999 and it is available for purchase from Flipkart.
Motorola has recently made a change in its strategy and the brand is now focusing the One series for the online domain while the E-series and G-series will be meant for the offline segment. Coming to the smartphone, it does give you a fair share of features and hardware configuration. But, is it worth buying? Let’s find out.
Standard Design, Good Display
Motorola has opted for a standard design for its smartphone. The One Power comes loaded with a metallic design with slightly ergonomic design, which makes it easier to hold. However, the phone is a bit thick as compared to the likes Nokia 6.1 Plus or Xiaomi Mi A2. That said, we did like the placement of a fingerprint sensor as it was easier to reach without stretching your index finger. The company has also added its famous batwing logo in the fingerprint sensor, which looks good. The phone does give a sturdy look, however, we have seen other phones with better design language.
Interestingly, this is the first smartphone from Motorola to come with a notch on the top. The phone features a 6.28-inch Full HD+ Max Vision display with a screen Resolution of 2246 x 1080 pixels. The display offers some crisp text and the brightness is to the point. We quite liked the display of this smartphone as it offers some wide colour gamut and the viewing angles look great as well. Whether be it watching some movies or playing games, the screen will not let you down.
Decent hardware with Android One goodness
The Motorola One Power is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 Processor with Adreno 509 GPU. This coupled with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage, gives a smooth performance. The phone does not show any sign of lag when you use it as a daily driver. Multitasking is good as well. What we didn’t like about this phone was no support for dual 4G. The primary SIM is latched to 4G, while another SIM is restricted to the 3G network. Hopefully, the company might roll out an update to make the dual 4G functionality work.
Coming to the gaming performance, the phone handles most of the casual games like Candy Crush, Subway Surfers, Temple Run 2 and more without much trouble. While playing PUBG Mobile, the graphics were automatically selected as low and during the gameplay, we didn’t notice much lag in low graphics settings and there was no major overheating issue as well.
Coming to software, the phone runs on Android 8.1 Oreo and the best part here is it falls under Android One programme. This simply means that One Power will get three of security updates and two years of major Android updates. Further, Moto has revealed that the phone will get Android Pie update by end of this year. Coming to the user interface, you get the purest form of Android and it sure is a delight for those who want Stock Android experience. The interesting thing here is that Motorola has managed to add some of its signature features like Moto Actions and Moto Display.
With Moto Actions, users can perform gestures to perform different tasks. One can chop twice for flashlight and twist to quickly open the camera app. The Moto Display is like Always-On display found in flagship phones and it also allows you to interact with notifications without waking up the phone.
Camera is a mixed bag
On the camera front, the Motorola One Power is equipped with a dual-camera setup at the back, which comes with a combination of 16-megapixel primary sensor and a 5-megapixel secondary sensor. For the front, there is a 12-megapixel shooter for selfies and video calling. The daylight performance of the device is satisfactory and you get detailed shots when the light is ideal. However, when it comes to macro shots, the phone struggles to focus quickly and you need to tap multiple times to lock on the subject you want to highlight. The low light performance is quite average as the photos lack some detailing and the sharpness is not up to the mark.
There is a night mode, but it does not get automatically switched when there is low light, you have to manually switch it on. However, the photos with Night mode was a bit better than in normal mode. The front camera does a decent job in capturing photo and the front LED flash is helpful in low light conditions. The bokeh effect on both front and the rear camera looks natural and the phone supports up to 4K video recording. There is no stabilization, which results in shaky video output.
Battery is Impressive
The One thing we like about this One is the Power. The phone comes loaded with an impressive 5000mAh battery. During our testing period, the phone gave a good battery output. The phone comfortably lasted almost 1.5 days under normal usage. Under heavy usage which included using the web, streaming videos, playing PUBG Mobile, using WhatsApp and sending emails, the phone managed to last till the end of the day with some battery juice still left in it. Coming to charging, the TurboPower charge helps in Fast charging this big battery. The phone was charged almost 70 per cent in one hour and it took more than 2 hours to charge fully.