In all my years of testing smartphones, I can hardly remember a time I asked myself, "Wait, when did I charge this again?"
That's what Motorola's latest, the One 5G, will make you think. It's a heavy and thick phone, stuffed with a 5,000-mAh battery cell. But I can take some bulk for a phone I don't have to plug in every night.
The One 5G is also an example of why you don't need to spend $1,000 to get a good phone. It joins a wave of sub-$500 devices that offer almost everything you need without stuttery performance or terrible cameras (the two most common flaws on cheap phones). There are still some compromises here, but if you want a phone that lasts well more than a day, you'll be hard-pressed to find something better.
From the back, the Motorola One 5G resembles the iPhone 11 Pro. Motorola mimics Apple's camera setup, but instead of three cameras, there are four, giving it a more symmetrical design. It looks cluttered, especially with the micro-pattern on the shiny, smudge-attracting plastic back. It's good to see Motorola using plastic—it doesn't feel cheap, and you don't have to worry about it shattering after an accidental drop.
The beefy battery makes it chunky, but the narrow form makes it easy to hold, like a TV remote. Even if you have large hands like me, you'll still have trouble reaching the top of the 6.7-inch LCD screen. It's tall and narrow because it has a "cinematic" aspect ratio: If you lay it horizontally, it's wide enough that you won't see black bars above and below most movies. TV shows, however, aren't shot as wide, so do expect to see black bars on the left and right.
Speaking of the screen, it's sharp and gets bright enough to see clearly outdoors, but colors aren't too vibrant, and you don't get the inky blacks of the OLED display in Google's $350 Pixel 4A. It still looks modern with two floating, punchhole selfie cameras at the top left and slim edges all around.
This phone's ace in the hole is support for a 90-Hz refresh rate. The display can flip through 90 images per second, so everything looks smoother and more fluid than the 60-Hz screens on many phones.
The real spotlight is the 5,000-mAh battery. I almost always recharge test phones at the end of the night so I can continue my doomscrolling the next morning. I didn't bother to do that with the One 5G because it usually had more than 60 percent at the end of the day. At near midnight on the second day, I had around 30 percent in the tank—that's when I plugged in the USB-C charger. These results are with average use, and I easily hit around six and a half hours of screen-on-time. You should get more than a day out of this phone under almost any circumstances.
It's fast too. Inside is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 765G, the same chip powering the likes of the LG Velvet and OnePlus Nord. It's not as smooth as the Nord, but it's not as stuttery as the Velvet. If it had a little more than 4 gigabytes of RAM, that might speed it up—most Android phones utilize 6 gigabytes nowadays, including the cheaper Pixel 4A. A few small stutters here and there are not a big deal.