Motorola One Hyper hands-on: 64MP camera, 45W charging, and pop-up selfies

Motorola has just announced the Motorola One Hyper, a new mid-ranged option for those who value high-resolution imaging and fast charging. Is it any better than other mid-ranged devices? Stick with us.

What makes it ‘Hyper’?

The Motorola One Hyper is named so because of its “Hyper Charging.” The phone accepts 45W charging into its 4,000mAh cell, and Motorola says you can get a day’s worth of power in 10 minutes.

Annoyingly, a 45W charger is not actually included with the device. In the box, you’ll find an 18W charger. Motorola says this is because most people won’t need 45W charging, but that does seem to defeat the purpose of the device.

As for processing prowess, Moto has stuck a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 and 4GB of RAM. For storage though, you’re getting 128GB baseline with MicroSD card expansion available.

There’s also a headphone jack, which makes it pretty hyper in my opinion.

High-res cameras

Not to be left out of the resolution race, the Motorola One Hyper boasts a large 64MP main camera, with a decently wide f/1.9 aperture. Although most of the time you’ll be shooting with the phone’s pixel binned 16MP image size. The main sensor also boasts phase detection autofocus and a laser autofocus time of flight sensor for super-fast focusing.

Read more: The best Motorola phones you can buy

The main camera is backed up with an 8MP wide-angle lens, clocking in at 118 degrees. On the front, the Hyper boasts a 32MP pop-up selfie camera, complete with a satisfying whirring sound. Although again, this Quad Pixel camera will spend most of its time shooting at 8MP.

Motorola has packed the usual selection of camera software modes in as well. There’s a Night Vision mode for shooting in low light, manual mode and RAW output to tweak the perfect shot, and Best shot to pick out the best looking picture. The Motorola One Hyper can also capture 4K video at 30fps and 1080p video at 60fps.

An interesting design

The Motorola One Hyper sports a strange bulged design, mostly due to the camera sensor size. The main 64MP sensor is physically larger than the popular 48MP IMX 586 from Sony, and the bigger the sensor the bigger the distance between the sensor and lens needs to be.

This caused Motorola to create a bump for the camera, but they decided to make it a major part of the design instead. Now, you’ve got dotted strip down the phone under the camera lens, and I actually think it looks quite good.

The extra thickness added also allowed for a bigger battery and headphone jack, so Motorola didn’t have to skimp on components. Personally, I would go for the thicker phone any day.

The Moto One hyper is using a bezel-less 6.5-inch 1080p IPS LCD panel, so no OLED is here, but it looked pretty fine in my briefing. The capacitive fingerprint sensor on the back also has a ring light around it, which lights up for notifications.

Moto’s first Android 10 phone

The Motorola One Hyper is the company’s first phone with Android 10 installed out of the box. Motorola’s flavour of Android has always been very close to stock, so bloat and unnecessary features are kept to a minimum with the Hyper.

Related: When should you expect to receive Android 10?

As the name suggests, the software is actually based on Google’s Android One skin. A stock approach also hopefully means speedier updates when it comes to monthly security patches. Speaking of which, Motorola promises security updates every two months for the One Hyper. There’s also a commitment to 12 months of major security updates, and 24 months of minor updates. That’s really not too bad for an affordable device.

Pricing and availability

The Motorola One Hyper will be available from Motorola.com starting today for $399.99. It will be available in Deep Sea Blue at launch with Amber coming later this month. The Fresh Orchid color will only be available globally.

What do you think of the Motorola One Hyper? Let us know.