Motorola is best known these days for churning out respectable smartphones for people on a budget. Motorola One Action, which per the name looks to stand out from the crowd by offering action-camera-like video quality on a smartphone.
The “Action” in the name refers to the third rear camera a dedicated ultra-wide video camera with a 117-degree field of view that’s designed to shoot video just like a GoPro. Motorola is doing a few things here to make the Action different from regular cellphone video, starting with the lens itself.
According to Motorola’s market research, many people too many, perhaps — shoot most of their videos while their phones are held upright. Sure, that means these people don’t have to two-hand their mobile cameras when some interesting is happening in front of them. Unfortunately, that also means the videos in question don’t actually look very good when you try to view them in landscape mode or on external displays. To address that, Motorola stuck this video camera into the phone rotated 90 degrees to the right, so that videos shot while the One Action is being held vertically fill the entire screen when you review them later. And the weird stuff doesn’t end there.
Motorola is also pushing this third, video-only sensor as an action camera — hence the name. That’s largely because of the electronic video stabilization Motorola built in here, which to their credit, did seem to do a good job reducing shake and jittering in the test footage we shot. The demo space Motorola set up was pretty dark, too, so it helped that the One Action effectively treats clusters of 4 pixels on that sensor as one for improved brightness. I sort of doubt it would fare as well as, say, the super-steady video mode found in premium Samsung phones, but based on a little hands-on time, the feature fares more respectably than you might think at first. Not bad for a phone that’ll only cost €259 (about $287) when it goes on sale this week.
This is exactly the kind of weird camera stuff Motorola has been leaning into lately, so the video gimmick here almost doesn’t register as a surprise. I guarantee people who use that video camera for the first time will be surprised, though, because they’ll see that wide-angle view bounded by lots of dead space above and below. Even though I knew exactly what to expect when I started to test the camera, I still got the immediate impression that I was doing something wrong or that the phone was acting up.
The Motorola One Action is powered by a Samsung Exynos 9609 processor, not one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets. Rounding things out is 4GB of RAM, 128GB of onboard storage, a USB-C port and a headphone jack, and a 3,500mAh battery
The software side is also seeing some changes. Despite the “One” branding in the name, the One Action will only ship with Android One internationally the North American version set to go on sale in the US and Canada sometime in October will have regular Android 9 Pie, and it won’t have the guarantee of future OS updates that Android One phones do.
The Motorola One Action will be available starting today in Brazil, Mexico, and “various European countries” starting at €259 (roughly $288), followed by launches in Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. It’ll also be heading to the US and Canada sometime in early October, although the price in North America has yet to be announced.
