Motorola Goes ‘Hyper’ With 64MP Camera-Focused Smartphone
By The One Hyper is the latest in Motorola’s midrange One line, a series of phones that each have some special camera capability. This one has a lot of megapixels.
We don’t see a lot of super-high-megapixel camera phones here in the US, but the Motorola One Hyper is bringing a 64MP main camera to Americans for a mere $399.
The One Hyper is the latest in Motorola’s midrange One line, a series of phones that each have some special camera capability, like an extreme macro mode or a rotated action camera. This one has a lot of megapixels.
“We’re going for that consumer that typically, they shop on Amazon for something that is great looking with great specs, and this will be the device for them,” said Motorola head of product operations Doug Michau. “There’s no carrier pre-loaded apps; it’s very clean Android.”
You probably aren’t going to want to actually use 64MP images; they’re huge. Rather, you’d use the high native resolution as a lossless digital zoom, or use the Hyper’s “quad pixel” binning to take 16MP images with better low-light performance. There’s also an 8MP, 118-degree wide angle camera on the back, as well as a 32MP selfie camera that has an additional 8MP quad-pixel low-light mode.
You’ll look at your photos on a grand, expansive 19:9 6.5-inch LCD display, at 2,340-by-1,080 resolution. It was bright, and at 395ppi, it’s sharp.
The fingerprint scanner on the back has a neat little trick to it; there’s a colored light ring around the sensor that lights up when you get calls or have notifications. (That’s programmable.)
Inside, there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot. The phone has a big 4,000mAh battery and works with up to 45-watt USB-C PD chargers, although it’s going to come with an 18W charger. It does not support wireless charging and it’s not technically water-resistant, although it’s splash-repellent.
The phone has a traditional headphone jack and a single, bottom-ported speaker. It supports Bluetooth 5, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, and NFC.
I spent a few minutes with the One Hyper, and like other phones in the One series, it’s a well-made midrange phone with one special feature. In this case, the feature is very high-megapixel cameras, which I couldn’t test properly in my quick hands on. The body is a hard, glossy resin; at 3.01 inches wide, it feels like a pretty big phone. The fingerprint sensor, two-thirds of the way up the back of the phone, is pretty well-placed.
The front-facing camera is a pop-up, a lot like the one on the OnePlus 7 Pro; twist your wrist in the traditional Motorola way, and it pops up. Motorola said that also like on the OnePlus 7 Pro, it retracts if you drop the phone. That wasn’t entirely my experience, though: I dropped the phone from waist height several times, and sometimes the camera retracted, but sometimes it hit the floor before the camera pulled in completely. The OnePlus 7 Pro was more prompt.
The Hyper doesn’t look like it was designed for the US, and it isn’t a core part of Motorola’s US strategy. It looks more like a Latin American or European phone that Motorola decided to sell here because, well, why not? With LTE bands 1/2/3/4/5/6/8/12/17/28/66, it lacks Sprint and Verizon support, and won’t get AT&T’s maximum speeds or T-Mobile’s best coverage.
It’s only being sold through Motorola.com, not through any retailers or US carriers. The phone will initially come in dark blue in the US, will later come in dark red, and will come in “fresh orchid” in other countries.
Michau said devices like the One Hyper are coming to the US because of popular demand. “Consumers wrote us asking for these devices,” he said. “They see the hype, read the different tech blog reviews, and we want to offer that option.”
That said, Motorola’s primary strategy in the US is elsewhere: in the successful G series, in the upcoming new Razr for Verizon, and potentially in the Snapdragon 765- and 865-based 5G phones that Motorola President Sergio Buniac said were coming early in 2020.
The Motorola One Hyper goes on sale today, and we hope to review it soon.
