BlackBerry Motion - All You Know
Back in the old days, when BlackBerry was the
premier smartphone maker, you could count on its devices to feature two things:
a physical keyboard and long battery life. Things have changed a lot since
then, but part of that legacy lives on in the BlackBerry Motion. It might lack that classic keyboard, but it
makes up for that with one of the biggest smartphone batteries I've used all
year. That should keep some hardcore devotees happy, right? We're not exactly
sure when (or even if) the Motion will land in the US, but that's just as well:
It's a fine phone but overpriced for what it is.
Hardware
Unlike
the last two all-touch BlackBerrys, the Motion is more than just a clone of an existing device. In fact, I'd argue the Motion is the best
touchscreen BlackBerry in years. It's conservative in that way BlackBerrys
always are, but the Motion's body is a handsome blend of glass, aluminum and
soft-touch plastic that's made to look like carbon fiber. In an effort to give
the Motion some extra character, BlackBerry Mobile rounded the phone's top edge
while leaving the bottom one flat. It's a neat touch, but it's hard to
appreciate unless you look closely. Still, the fact that BlackBerry Mobile is
trying to give a glass-and-metal slab any personality at all is a reassuring
change of pace.
Honestly,
there isn't a whole lot to say about the Motion's 5.5-inch LCD screen. It runs
at 1080p, as you'd expect from a phone in this price range, and it's generally
nice looking. Colors are pleasant, if not exactly exciting, and the viewing
angles are quite good; you'd have to look from a pretty extreme angle to see
the colors distort. The Motion's screen lacks the punchy hues and deep blacks
you'd get from an AMOLED panel (like, say, the one on the DTEK60), but I'm not
sure anyone expected otherwise. All told, it's a perfectly serviceable display
and nothing more. For a brand whose core mission is to fuel productivity,
though, that's not necessarily a dealbreaker.
Despite
some charming new design flourishes, the stuff inside is basically the same as
what you'll find in the KEYone. BlackBerry Mobile once again opted to use a
Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset with an Adreno 506 GPU and a relatively paltry
32GB of storage. (Thankfully, you can slip a microSD card onto the SIM tray and
go nuts with the movies and photos.) The Motion packs 4GB of RAM compared to
the KEYone's 3GB, but the biggest deviation from the KEYone formula is the
Motion's massive, 4,000mAh battery. That's one of the largest we've tested this
year, and it's a clear callback to the days when BlackBerrys were the kings of
smartphone battery life.
BlackBerry was never
really interested in fighting spec wars with the rest of the industry. Indeed,
the Motion isn't some flagship beast meant to get power users rallying under
the BlackBerry banner. With its Snapdragon 625 chipset and 4GB of RAM, the
Motion is decidedly mid-range, but that doesn't mean it left me lacking. There
was more than enough horsepower here for me to flit between Slack, Spotify,
Gmail and Trello with ease. All told, I noticed very few hiccups during my
daily routine. Productivity is a BlackBerry priority, and for what most people
probably have to accomplish in a given day, the Motion seems like more than
enough.
It shouldn't surprise you to hear the Motion isn't terribly well-suited
to gaming, but it's not awful at it either. I ran into some lag while taking a
pirate's ship out into the open seas in Tempest, but the
game never felt unplayable. Ditto for graphically intense games like Modern
Combat 5 and Asphalt: The Motion dropped some frames and stuttered now and
again, but it held up better than you might expect.
More
importantly, it's clear the Motion was designed with longevity in mind.
Qualcomm's power-sipping chipset and 1080p display pair nicely with the
enormous 4,000mAh battery wedged inside and, as a result, the Motion routinely
lasted two full days before needing to be recharged. To be clear, that's two
full days of me checking my email like a maniac, furiously Google searching and
binging on YouTube videos. Over quiet weekends, I could stretch the Motion's
battery life to nearly two and a half days before plugging it in. Not bad at
all. There were times when it seemed possible I could get it to hang in for
almost three days, a prospect that made me giddier than I care to admit. While
I'm far from sold on some of the Motion's attributes, I'm seriously considering
bringing it to CES with me next month just to make sure I have a phone that
won't go dark in the middle of a press conference.
The
BlackBerry Motion is a strong follow-up to a phone I liked more than I expected
to, and in general, it gets more right than wrong. More importantly, I get the
impression that the folks at BlackBerry Mobile/TCL are focusing on the things
that really matter to its core fans. With all that said, it's hard to recommend
the BlackBerry Motion to anyone who hasn't already pledged allegiance to the
brand. It's just such a niche device, and what you get for the money doesn't
quite feel like enough considering how strong the competition is. Unless you're
absolutely obsessed with security or want to pay to keep your beloved phone
brand alive, the BlackBerry Motion is ultimately a good phone that doubles as a
bad deal.
Source
Page: https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/20/blackberry-motion-review-its-all-about-the-battery-life/
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