Motorola One Zoom Review: Super phone, super price

Motorola does it again – One Zoom is a teriffic phone for the price and in some cases matches the best phones on the market even though it’s way cheaper. See our test with pros, cons and price + a guide to three great alternatives.

Motorola One Zoom review

Motorola One Zoom delivers high quality on most functions for the third of the price compared to other popular models. It’s great looking, have a nice screen, good camera, fine navigation speed, decent battery life and I could continue the list.

I have testet hundreds of phones during the years and this is probably the best bargain so far. It’s not 100 percent perfect – but it’s a great deal.

Design

First of all – its the best looking phone I have seen for years. The brushed steel look on the back looks awesome and its neat how the colur goes from dark to metallic grey and back to dark. A nice thing is the 3D Satin glass – it makse sure you can not see your greasey fingerprints on the back. The batwing logo – Motorola call it that themself – is pretty much in your face on the back but it has a function – it can light up when there are new notifications for example.

The phone is slippery so you might want to use the silicone cover that is in the box.

User friendliness & Navigation speed

The user interface (UI) is as stock Android as possible with only a few, small but handy stuff from Motorola – for example the possibility to activate the flash by shaking your hand.

The navigation speed is from start fine – it is not as fast as the most powerfull phones but you can speed up the navigation. Go into Settings > Accessibility. scroll down to remove animations. Animations slow down the navigation speed when you scroll from window to window on you phone – by removing animations it is simply much speedier.

By the way: Its called One Zoom indicating it’s a Android One phone – but it’s actually so you are not guaranteed to big Android updates and three years of security updates – just one big Android update and to years of security updates.

Camera

The camera on the back contains 4 lenses – pretty unsual for this pricelevel. Now – lots of lenses does not guarantee great picturequality by it self but the camera sure does takes nice pictures.

The camera delivers great in most situations with great picture quality: nice colors, fine sharpness. In some cases it’s even on par with the best camera phones for example with the 3 times optical zoom and pictures taken in dark are actually also really good – just don’t use the night mode – it messes the picture quality up.

Battery

The batterycapacity is great with 4.000 milli amp hours and depending on how hard core a phone user you are it should last for two days for most users.

There’s a 18 Watt charger in the box which Motorola describes as fast charger. It’s not fast but it’s not iPhone slow as well. 30 minutes gives about 35 percent battery life and it takes almost two hours for a full charge.

Price

The price for One Zoom starts from 450 dollars or 380 euros. With a phone that is as great as this phone that is an impressive price. And its a phone that have only a few drawbacks.

Cons

• The antenna quliaty is not as great as on say Moto G7 Plus – the sar value is a bit to the high side.
• The back is very slippery so you better use a cover which is a shame on a great looking phone
• Not the fastest fast charging
• No IP-certification
• The fingerprint scanner under the screen is working – but its to slow.

Alternatives

If you don’t dig Motorola phones or this phone there are many good alternatives

• OnePlus 7
• Huawei P30 lite
• Samsung Galaxy A70

Conslusion

Motorola One Zoom is the culmination of phones from the company. Designwise it’s the best looking phone ever from Motorola and the best looking phone for years in general.

It’s performing great on design of course and on screen,camera, battery, user friendliness and navigation speed. For the price it’s one of the very best phones you can buy right now.