Motorola One 5G ACE: Lots of good stuff, but is it enough for you? By Reviews.org

(upbeat techno music) - Motorola has a loyal following for its budget conscious phones, as evidenced by your feedback here on the channel. And why shouldn't they? They produce solid handsets which offer a mix of excellent battery life and features. And while not everything they put out comes up all aces, One of their latest handsets may just hold enough cards to win a spot in your hand. Let's get into my review of the Moto One Ace 5G. (upbeat music) If any of these reviews, these videos, these service comparisons, these educational videos, helped you, please consider hitting us with that thumbs up, clicking that subscribe button, and clicking that notification bell, so you'll be notified when we upload the latest, awesome content. Up top I wanna mention that in the last Moto device review, the 2021 Moto G Stylus, I mentioned that I'd have some thoughts on Republic Wireless 5G network.

They provided the review unit for this video, and I hadn't tried them out yet. Stick around to the end from my real-world experiences, and insight on their network. It was really positive. So let's take a look at the hardware. The One Ace 5G is a thick little number, but feels good in hand.

It has a large 6.7 inch LTPS HDR10, 1080 by 2400 LCD display. You'll notice that it does have some visible bezels around the edges, though they're thinish. You'll also notice the center hole punch, 16 megapixel camera in the upper edge of the display. Watching the Witcher on this display is a wonderful experience. It's light and bright with solid color reproduction.

Like I've shown previously, some displays don't handle the show all too well often being a bit dark for enjoyment. I should mention, that the speaker, although mono, does definitely get loud enough, and it sounds really good. And there are effects you can turn on that make it sound even better. And getting back to that hole punch, the camera also captures images which are bright and vivid in the right light. Honestly, the low light and night vision images captured with this front-facing camera, they're not bad.

They're definitely soft, but overall I didn't hate them. Portrait mode is okay with regard to the front face. You can see how it handles softening images around the focal point of the image here as it blurs my jacket, but does manage to keep my beard in focus. Looking at the rest of the phone, you get your SIM tray on the left side, with expandable storage. Bottom of the phone, you'll get a mono speaker, which as I previously stated, gets plenty loud and a three and a half millimeter audio port.

Right side of the phone is where you'll find the power button and volume rocker. In dimly lit rooms, it looks black. But the One Ace 5G actually has a purple hue on the rear, which is also where you'll find the fingerprint scanner and those cameras. You'll get a 48 megapixel sensor for the wide angle lens, eight megapixel ultra wide, and two megapixel macro. If we take a look through the photos the 48 megapixel camera takes in ideal conditions outdoors, you'll see that they're great looking captures.

Colors are vivid but natural, images are fairly sharp. The default setting for the camera is actually 12 megapixels, it uses quad pixel binning unless you hit the settings and choose high resolution. As you can see in these photos here, one of the cons to the camera is that it has a tendency to go hard on the contrast, and produce some aggressively contrasting images. The ultra wide angle lens, will get you some distortion at the edges of the image but I didn't notice any fringing or vignetting. You can also see that distortion in this image here where I was walking under some construction scaffold.

I reached up to take a picture of the lights hanging from that scaffolding, and here's that same image from the main camera. So you can see what it looks like without the distortion around the edges. The macro lens is okay if you're in good light, though don't go blowing that image up, because at two megapixels,, you're going to see a degraded image fast. As you can see in this pick with the keyboards, things can get a bit noisy in less than ideal light. Overall, the cameras are fine in the right light.

Just know they'll struggle a bit in lower light settings. The night mode images are noisy in the blacks. And just to give you an idea of what that looks like ideally, here's a night mode image from the Ace, next to one from the iPhone 12 Pro Max. To be clear, this is not an apples to apples comparison as there's much more expensive hardware in the iPhone. But to give you an idea of what I mean by noise in the photos, it's that graininess you see in the dark areas of the photo which are black in the iPhone photos.

The issue here is that other phones in this price point like Google's Pixel 4A, will also get you better nighttime captures without all that graininess as well. Getting to the rest of the experience, you're going to get your fingerprint sensor which worked quite well in my use. And under that plastic body, you'll find a beastly 5,000 million amp hour battery. And that is actually one of the strongest points of this phone. It truly has all-day battery life, and for many people, multi-day battery life.

I couldn't kill it in a day personally. At the end of my days, it still had 40% power left on heaviest use. And that was with screen brightness all the way up, and all the features I wanted running full steam, like peak display. And speaking of peak display, that was one of my favorite things when talking about Motorola's phones is the Moto features, like Moto gestures and Moto display which augment core functionality on top of Android without adding a bunch of unnecessary bloatware. (upbeat music) The phone isn't bad at all.

It's a thick one, but it's a nice phone for sure. Phone calls are solid, as I mentioned at the beginning of this review. Using Republic wireless for this phone was a delight. They're an NVMO, a mobile virtual network operator. We have a whole thing on that here.

Juan did it masterfully, using T-Mobile's network, that's what they're on. And I have to say that the speeds I was getting were pretty awesome. It varies by location, of course, but in many cases, I was getting over 200 megabits per second. That was around parts of Los Angeles and Santa Monica. But in the San Fernando valley, it went down, and could vary anywhere between 20 megabits per second and 80.

With that said, there are definitely some things you should know about using Republic wireless service plans, which offer great customization for however much data you want to use, as long as it isn't unlimited data. They don't currently offer that. But you can get all of those details on the site at reviews. org, where our research team has done a great job of putting together a thorough look at all that is on offer with this carrier. In terms of recent Motorola phones I've really enjoyed, I'd placed this one somewhere in the middle of the pack.

I like the, well actually loved, the 2020 Moto G Stylus over this, but that one is not 5g enabled. Do you need 5g right now? This phone is also slated to get only one update of the Android OS, and currently ships with Android 10 out the box. So if you're someone who keeps a phone longer than two years, that could be problematic, especially especially considering some competing phones will see up to three years of updates. And potential downside to that massive 5,000 million amp hour battery is that it only comes with a 10 watt charger in the box. So it's going to take you some time to charge all 5,000 million hours at 10 watts.

Now it does support Motorola's turbo power quick charge. But again, you're not getting that in the box. So you'd have to buy a third-party charger, or buy an aftermarket Motorola turbo power charger in order to get the full recharging speeds. So I'm Tshaka Armstrong for reviews. org.

Any questions I didn't answer, please leave them in the comments below. I'll get to them. We don't take it lightly that you spent your time watching here with us. I'll catch you on the next video.

Source : Reviews.org