Motorola Moto One
The One you’ve waited for
One phone’s number comes up
When a product name gets cut to a single word, and that word is ‘One’, expectations will be tough to live up to. That goes double for the Moto One, successor to the Moto G line that led the budget smartphone field for years.
Like last year’s Moto G6 Plus, the One has a 5.9in screen. But its resolution is a less-than-full HD 720x1520 pixels and colours aren’t very accurate, although it’s bright. The 19:9 aspect ratio is even more stretched than the fashionable 18:9, but the large notch at the top is still annoying, and there’s a border at the bottom as well. The glass back (in black or white) gets grubby quickly and doesn’t feel quite integrated with the metal frame.
The rear dual camera is at the top left, eschewing the G6’s distinctive centre circle, just above a fingerprint reader built into the Motorola logo (which supports payments). There’s nothing exceptional here, but we were happy with our photos and videos. A mid-range Snapdragon 825 processor runs Android 8.1 smoothly, though games aren’t a strong point, and under Google’s Android One scheme you’ll get free updates at least to version 10.
The Moto One’s standout feature might be battery life, at 17 hours 30 minutes in our video-playback test. If that sounds a bit dull, well, yes. But, discounted at the time of writing from £269 to £229 and selling widely at £210, a lack of direct rivals makes the One a winner by default.