Forget Iphone SE - Motorola's new phone packs 5G for underー500

Forget Iphone SE - Motorola's new phone packs 5G for underー500

Motorola is finally launching an affordable 5G phone. Today the company announced the Motorola One 5G. The handset will soon appear on AT&T and Verizon and will reportedly sell for under $500.

This is the only information Motorola can share about the price so far, and we don't know how far below $500 the Motorola One 5G will go. However, we do know that it will feature a Snapdragon 765 chipset, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and similar hardware to other relatively inexpensive 5G phones.

This 6.7-inch handset also features a 90Hz, HDR-certified Full HD display, but interestingly, it is an LCD panel, not an OLED panel. So it won't have the vibrant colors or perfect blacks we have come to expect from high-end smartphone displays, but it will certainly help with battery life and help keep the cost of this device down.

The quad-lens rear camera, in the form of a square patch in the upper left corner of the device, consists of a 48-megapixel primary sensor, an 8MP ultrawide camera, a 5MP dedicated macro camera, and a 2MP depth sensor. On the front, there are not one but two shooters, surrounded by double-hole punch cutouts in the screen.

The macro camera has a ring-shaped LED flash that surrounds the lens itself. This is supposedly to focus the light from the flash to the center of the subject. This is because, since the camera is shooting at an extremely close distance, a slight shift in the direction of the flash is likely to be more noticeable than in a normal photograph taken from a more distant vantage point. Macro cameras on cell phones are quite overhyped, so let's hope this is not just a gimmick.

For the most part otherwise, this is a run-of-the-mill Motorola One device that happens to support 5G connectivity. At first glance, though, the device's specs seem somewhat inferior to its rivals. [For example, the OnePlus Nord is not available in the U.S., but sells for roughly the equivalent of $480 in Europe and the U.K. The device has twice the RAM, Qualcomm's 765G chip (with a slightly more powerful GPU than the one found in Motorola phones), a 90Hz AMOLED screen, and twice the charging speed (30 watts). Samsung also offers a 5G model of the recently released Galaxy A51.

And if you don't need 5G yet (and judging by the underwhelming speeds so far, you probably don't), the new Google Pixel 4a and iPhone SE are more attractive at $349 and $399, respectively, for the Pixel 4a, same main lens as the flagship Pixel 4, but the iPhone SE beats the Pixel 4 and all other Android phones in performance, thanks to Apple's A13 Bionic silicon.

There is also a 5G version of the Pixel 4a, which has the same chip as the Motorola One 5G and appears to be priced about the same.

Motorola may surprise us and go well below $500. It will then be launched on Verizon's 5G millimeter wave network. We will bring you hands-on impressions and a review of the Motorola One 5G in a few weeks.

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