Motorola One Macro review

Display

The Motorola One Macro has a 6.2" IPS LCD screen with a waterdrop-shaped notch at the top. The resolution is rather low at 720 x 1,520 pixels and so is the density of 270ppi - that's not an ideal sharpness, but still usable for this class. These specs make for a wide 19:9 screen aspect ratio.

The text is sharp enough though some pixelization is visible here and there. The icons on the homescreen are somewhat blurry because of the low resolution, too. In spite these, the screen is still enough for the entry-level class.

The One Macro display has a maximum brightness of 442 nits - not a great one for an LCD panel. The black levels turned out quite deep and so the One Macro screen scored an excellent contrast ratio of 1733:1.

For those following our tests closely - the lower brightness we could achieve on the Macro is 2.8 nits, which is dim enough for comfortable use in the dark.

The color rendering is average at best - the screen offers accurate enough colors and we measured an average DeltaE of 5.6. The representation of the white and gray colors is way colder than it should be (DeltaE of 10.7).

Battery life

The Motorola One Macro is powered by a large 4,000 mAh battery. it supports regular 5V/2A charging and the bundled 10W charger restores about 29% of the battery in 30 minutes. Not exactly fast, but it's the best a 10W charger can do.

The One Macro scored a brilliant result in our battery test with a 110-hour Endurance rating. It did an excellent job across all test scenarios - video playback, calls, web browsing and also proved to be quite efficient during standby.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Motorola One Macro for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

Speaker loudness

The Motorola One Macro has a single bottom-firing speaker. It scored a Very Good mark in our loudness test. As far as the output quality is concerned - it is good but not great. There is enough bass, and the mid-tones are fine, but the speaker seems to be lacking in the high tones.

Audio quality

When it comes to output through the 3.5mm audio jack, the Motorola One Macro did very well with an active external amplifier. It delivered excellent loudness and the perfect accuracy we’ve come to expect from smartphones these days.

Sadly it lost quite a lot of brilliance when we hooked up our standard 32oHm headphones. Stereo separation suffered significantly, the signal to noise ratio dropped and plenty of distortion appeared. Loudness fell to below average too, rounding up a rather disappointing showing on this occasion.

Motorola One Macro frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.