Motorola One Zoom review: a good smartphone with a problem

Motorola One Action release date and price

In the middle class or better-said premium for all, Motorola wanted to win back old fans with the internal restructuring at the Lenovo Group. But Motorola also wants to open up new target groups and for this reason they created the One series. Actually the complete series was delivered with Google's Android One before the presentation of the One Zoom, but with the One Zoom the US manufacturer makes a U-turn. Instead of Android One, Motorola reinstalls its own interpretation of Android on the premium mid-range smartphone with four cameras.

The Motorola One Zoom with an RRP of €429 is priced in a segment where Google with the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL is becoming more and more popular. In addition to Google itself, more and more Chinese manufacturers in the same price segment want to encourage buyers to change. First and foremost Xiaomi with its Mi 9T Pro. Motorola's One Zoom must stand out from the sheer mass of smartphones. In terms of design, the US brand with its Chinese parent company is already beating the competition in terms of design.

A modern look with luminous Batwings

How can you actually give a rectangular product like a smartphone a beautiful dress? There's no room for creativity on the front, but there's plenty of room for the designer on the back. I think Motorola's One Zoom has created a coherent look that doesn't look like a copy of an Apple, Samsung or Huawei smartphone. One could almost say that Motorola has conjured the small rectangular into the large rectangular.

Inside the small rectangle, Motorola has installed not only the four cameras, but also the Motorola logo , affectionately called the Batwing by connoisseurs, and provides it with a design element that has hardly been found in any smartphone to date: an illuminated company logo. During the day, the logo is inconspicuous, but as soon as it gets dark, the illuminated Motorola logo is a visible sign. It's just a shame that the logo neither changes the brightness nor can it be used as a notification LED. So it's just a wow effect to impress your friends. If you have had enough of the glowing Moto logo, you can at least deactivate it completely in the settings.

But not only the camera accommodation and the illuminated Motorola logo inspire me, but also the frosted glass, which pretends to be aluminum. But it's not only visually very appealing, but it's also less prone to fingerprints in everyday life and has an even better grip.

When the question of IP certification comes up, it has to be answered negatively. All Motorola One smartphones, at least to this day, do without it. Nevertheless, Motorola says that the smartphones have a P2i coating to protect them from splashing water.

A small and subtle idea from Motorola's design department is also the transfer of all necessary product labels and logos from the back to the bottom edge of the smartphone. Although the frame around the USB-C port looks very unsteady, no CE mark or other legally prescribed markings interfere with the back of the smartphone. Will the positive impression also continue on the side of the smartphone that users most often stare at?

Big and beautiful

The short answer is yes! The 6.4-inch AMOLED display 'only' achieves a Full HD+ resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels, but the displayed image is sharp and rich in contrast. If you want to criticize the display a bit, then it's the lack of possibilities to adjust the color temperature. Personally, I would wish that you could not only choose from the three presets from the manufacturer, but that you could also adjust the color temperature to your own taste.

The preview display of the Motorola One Zoom is chic. This is the Motorola term for the Always-on Display. Notifications are typically displayed as icons, but with the Peek function, when you tap on the icon and hold it you get a preview. So you can take a quick look at the messages from the Always-on Display and decide if the message is so important that you need to unlock the One Zoom and read the message completely.

The Motorola One Zoom is the first smartphone from the One series to install an in-display fingerprint sensor. This is fast enough and the recognition rate is quite good. Alternatively, facial recognition can be used or parallel to the fingerprint sensor.

Nothing new about the software, which is good

When it comes to software, Motorola plays a strange game with its customers. Instead of the series name, the Motorola One Zoom doesn't use Android One like the rest of the line. It can be assumed that Motorola has decided to install Android 9 Pie with its own near-stock interface to be able to offer an Amazon exclusive smartphone with Alexa the digital voice assistant.

Of course, Motorola has adapted some things in the operating system and added some apps like the one for the camera. Bloatware? No, at least not on our test sample.

It's just a pity that no security patch has found its way to our Motorola One Zoom yet, because the current patch is still from July 1, 2019. In general, Motorola's update policy has become a bit more economical. Security patches are promised and a major software upgrade is guaranteed. But it is unclear whether the major software upgrade means that the upgrade to Android 10 will be available in the near future, or whether Android 11 will not be included until 2020. Here Motorola should return to its former strength and simply deliver the updates and upgrades faster and more consistently.

Equipped for everyday life

Inside the Motorola One Zoom, Motorola again relies on a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The Snapdragon 675 is an eight-core processor consisting of two 2.0 GHz Kryo 460 Gold and six 1.7 GHz Kryo 460 Silver. The GPU is an Adreno 612 plus 4GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, which is expandable.

Motorola One Zoom benchmark comparison

	Motorola One Zoom	Google Pixel 3a XL	Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro
3D Mark Sling Shot Extreme ES 3.1	1971	1680	5647
3D Mark Sling Shot Vulkan	1061	1560	4208
3D Mark Sling Shot ES 3.0	1113	1801	5617
3D Mark Ice Storm Unlimited ES 2.0	24158	29946	62327
Geekbench 5 (Single / Multi)	505 / 1569	353 / 1326	630 / 2564
PassMark Memory	25973	19413	26939
PassMark Disk	65785	62867	75020

The Motorola One Zoom can match Google's Pixel 3a XL through from Paroli for pure power. But Xiaomi's Mi 9T Pro shows that you can already buy a top smartphone for around €430. In all respects, the One Zoom stays behind this Chinese bombshell.

In terms of network performance, the Motorola One Zoom supports LTE Cat 12 with a maximum of 600 Mbps in the download. All this should make the Motorola One Zoom a solid companion for everyday use. In everyday use, however, the One Zoom performs well. Only if you shoot photos and want to view them immediately after taking them in the gallery app, will you notice that the hardware is not extremely fast. Often the software needs a second to load the portrait or night mode photo.

With four eyes you see better

As a smartphone designed primarily for photography, the One Zoom has a total of four cameras on the back. These are as follows:

• 48-megapixel Samsung with Quad Bayer Mask, f1.7, OIS and PDAF
• 16-megapixels ultrawide-angle lens with 117-degree field of view
• 8-megapixel, 3x optical zoom telephoto lens with OIS
• 5-megapixel, depth camera

On the front, Sony has installed a 25-megapixel camera that, like the main camera, can bundle four pixels into one to deliver better images in poor lighting conditions. Such night shots are then taken with 6.25 megapixels.

Well, actually there are only three cameras plus one camera for depth of field information. But the fact that the sum of cameras does not necessarily mean the best photos, as proved by Google's Pixel 3a XL, which has only one main camera. 

But back to the Motorola camera. As long as there is good daylight, the Motorola One Zoom shoots good sharp and colorful photos with good contrast values. If you take a closer look you might notice that the sharpness is a bit too aggressive.

Practical on the Motorola One Zoom are, as on some other competitor smartphones, the additional cameras. An ultrawide-angle camera is especially handy for large panoramic photos. The quality is good, but details are rather blurred, especially if you compare the picture with the same shot from the standard wide-angle camera. 

The telephoto camera brings distant objects closer. With the latter, the One Zoom offers a 3x optical zoom that increases to 10x in hybrid mode. In this mode, Motorola combines the image information from the 48-megapixel main camera with that from the telephoto sensor. The result is quite respectable.

Night Vision and Portrait modes

The three different focal lengths of the cameras partly also help with special recording modes. For portraits, Motorola's One Zoom combines images from the ultrawide angle with the normal main camera and enriches the image data with depth information from the depth camera. The result is quite impressive. The Motorola One Zoom even separates problematic fences for other smartphones well. 

In night mode, the Motorola One Zoom has to compete with the Google Pixel 3a XL in terms of price and doesn't hold up badly. The result, if you have a steady hand, is quite good. But on closer inspection, the Pixel 3a XL tickles out more details with less noise at night.

Still, it's very good what Motorola has achieved with the photo quality on the One Zoom.

• Gallery of photos taken with the One Zoom

More than enough battery

.In the  One Zoom Motorola uses a battery with 4.000 mAh. That's 500 mAh more than in its One siblings. And the battery life is excellent. In our benchmark test, the One Zoom achieved a full 13 hours and 50 minutes with 50 percent display brightness and active Wi-Fi and inserted SIM card. In real everyday life with intensive use, I had to be plugged in again after one and a half days. Great Motorola! It's just a shame that the battery is quickly charged with only 15 watts, Other manufacturers have already gone further.