Motorola One Vision

The One Vision's 21:9 screen defines its design, since the unconventional aspect ratio translates into an elongated chassis that could end up feeling a tad strange when you first hold the phone in your hand. While it does make the phone tall, the good thing is that the narrow form factor is easy to hold in the hand. One-handed usage could be an issue, especially if you have small hands, but the fact that the notifications panel can be accessed by swiping downwards anywhere on the screen helps. The other design highlight of the phone, also related to the display, is the punch hole placed on the top left. It does help in shaving off the bezel, though the phone still has noticeable borders, especially on the top and bottom of the screen. Inexplicably, the punch hole (which houses the front shooter) has a noticeably wide black border encircling it, which makes it look abnormally large. On the positive side, the One Vision stands out with its glass-encased design, looking every bit as premium as one of the high-end smartphones from Motorola and those from other brands. The gradient-based hues look quite classy, especially the blue one. However, I have the bronze one with me, and that looks even better… which is strange coming from me since I like all colours as long as they're blue.

Cameras on smartphones have evolved by leaps and bounds in recent times, and one of the trends in this sector is the adoption of 48-megapixel sensors. The One Vision also joins the bandwagon, and offers a 48MP camera sensor at the rear, accompanied by a 5MP depth sensor. Hiding inside the punch hole on the front is a 25MP shooter for selfies. The 48MP rear shooter uses Samsung's GM1 sensor, which is the same as the one found in the likes of the Vivo V15 Pro (review) and the Xiaomi Redmi 7s. The sensor uses quad pixel tech to combine four pixels into one, and outputs 12MP shots. In fact there's no way to force the camera to shoot in 48MP, even in Manual mode. The latter does allow you to shoot in RAW if you wish, and allows you to control various parameters like focus, white balance, ISO, and exposure. The camera features include optical image stabilisation, Auto HDR, AI-based smart composition and shot optimisation, auto smile capture, and Google Lens integration.

Since the Motorola One Vision carries the Android One branding, you know exactly what to expect. The phone's loaded with the vanilla iteration of Android 9 Pie, along with the latest security patch and zero bloatware. You do however, get a couple of signature Motorola features in the form of Moto Display and Moto Actions. The former throws up notifications on the screen when the display is off, and those can be interacted with too. There's an Attentive Display feature that keeps the screen on while you're looking at it. Moto Actions include Quick Capture (double twist the phone to launch the camera), Fast Flashlight (double chop of the wrist to toggle the torch), touching the screen with three fingers to capture a screenshot, and One Button Nav for gesture-based navigation. Sure, you don't get any of the fancy features usually offered by custom Android builds (such as MIUI or ColorOS), but then, the Android One platform has its own advantages in terms of getting guaranteed and timely updates and security patches.

As mentioned earlier, the One Vision is the first Motorola phone to utilise Samsung's Exynos chipset, and the SoC in use here is the Exynos 9609 octa-core chip clocked at 2.2GHz and mates to Mali G72 MP3 graphics. There's 4 gigs of RAM to support it long with 128GB storage. Performance wise, I really don't have many complaints, since the phone handled almost everything with aplomb. I did notice slight jitter while menu navigation and scrolling, though that's just nitpicking, really. Even PUBG ran at high settings reasonably well, though you'd be able to get better frame rates at lower settings. There was some overheating evident too, after a few minutes of playing PUBG. Battery life is good, with the 3,500mAh pack delivering a full day's use with ease (with medium usage). The One Vision isn't really a two-day phone by any means, but you should be able to stay away from the charger for a full working day comfortably. The phone lasted 12 hours and 41 minutes in the PCMark battery test, which is a strong performance. And when the time comes to charge it up, the bundled 15W charger can juice up the battery pretty quickly, taking just about a couple of hours for a full charge. Again, both in terms of real-world usage and benchmarks, the One Vision stays behind the Redmi Note 7 Pro though.