Motorola One Vision review

The Competition

The mid-range market is the most hotly contested battleground in the smartphone realm for the past couple of years and has the widest selection of devices among all segments. Any significant shortcomings are thus costing dearly could ruin a phone's market prospects. Luckily, Motorola didn't just get the One Vision's specs sheet right, it also made sure the phone performs up to standard in everyday life.

The One Vision is indeed a thoughtful all-round smartphone with enough key features to stand out. For as low as €300 the Vision has a cinematic 21:9 screen with a punch-hole selfie camera, solid Exynos chipset that even does well for casual gaming, and an excellent camera. The design is also eye-catching and the color options are very intriguing.

But even so a tough fight awaits the One Vision. Even within its own family you have the Moto G7 Plus, which is a few euros cheaper and offers a more traditional 19:9 display with a waterdrop notch and a better selfie camera. Its Snapdragon 636 is not as powerful as the Exynos, though.

The Galaxy A50 has the essentially the same chipset as the Moto One Vision but offers a larger AMOLED with in-display fingerprint scanner on top of that. The A50 may not be capable of matching the image quality of the main camera, but it has an additional wide-angle snapper and a much better battery life.

Then there's the Huawei P30 Lite, which offers the same primary camera minus the OIS but also an ultrawide snapper or at least in most markets. Its Kirin 710 trails in GPU benchmarks, but does as well as the One Vision's in CPU tests, but the Huawei has a clear edge in battery life.

Motorola Moto G7 Plus • Samsung Galaxy A50 • Huawei P30 lite

There are a few more phones to threaten the One Vision, but those are mostly available in Asia. Take the just launched Realme X for example. It has a large notch-less AMOLED, powerful Snapdragon 710 chip, the same main camera as the One Vision sans the OIS, a pop-up selfie shooter, and a larger battery. All of these on a much more affordable price, but with the China-only availability it's hardly an alternative for most.

Then there are also the Redmi Note 7 and Redmi Note 7 Pro, which have excellent screens and superior battery life plus similar cameras albeit sans OIS. The Note 7 phones are much cheaper though again the Pro is not coming to Europe. A more important distinction here is the MIUI software, which has everything but the kitchen sink in terms of features, but not quite as much polish in terms of UI logic.

Realme X • Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 • Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Pro

The Verdict

The Motorola One Vision has what it takes to be a good mid-ranger and thanks to the cinematic screen and its punch-hole selfie shooter - the Vision can stand out in a crowd. Digging deeper, we found also the optical image stabilization helps the Vision to deliver one of the best low-light photos in this class, too.

Unfortunately, the battery life is below average, while punch-hole's size is both an eyesore and on occasion an obstacle to the cinematic immersion. With those two the purchasing decision becomes much harder and very depended on how keen you are on stock Android.

If you are into that then the camera alone can easily make you pick the One Vision over the HMD alternatives. If it's not a big deal to you then all boils down to which competitor is the cheapest in your market.

Pros

• Ultrawide 21:9 cinematic screen
• Excellent build and design
• Dependable performance across the board
• Excellent all-round camera, day and night, photo and video
• Good selfies
• Vanilla Android OS, part of Android One program

Cons

• Selfie camera hole seems too big and interferes with content in some apps- a notch would have likely been better
• Underwhelming battery life
• Snapping selfies in 25MP takes forever