Motorola ThinkPhone MSRP $699.00 Score Details “The Motorola ThinkPhone can't escape its business phone origins. W while its nostalgic design is fun and it has two-day battery life, it fails to excite where it matters.” Pros Cons The Motorola ThinkPhone, or the “ThinkPhone by Motorola” as it’s also known, was launched as a business phone at CES 2023. At the time, there was no intention to sell it to the general public.
The flat screen eschews the frivolousness of a curved screen that we expect to see on a flagship device. This is built for spreadsheets and important calls — not Fortnite and tweeting, remember. It comes in one color, Carbon Black. No, and in fact, if I didn’t know about the ThinkPhone’s business aspirations, I’d never have guessed. It operates and works like any other Motorola Android phone and the business-oriented features that are there are never pushed.
I don’t like the annoying favorites app that appears in the dock, which cycles through previously used apps and needlessly takes up space, but worst of all is the lack of an always-on display. There’s no excuse for not providing this as an option when the hardware supports it, but there’s no such feature on the ThinkPhone. It’s very frustrating when even the iPhone provides an informative always-on screen today.
I’ve not had any performance issues with the ThinkPhone, and consider the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 an extremely capable processor, but it has been superseded by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 as Qualcomm’s top chip. This presents a problem for the ThinkPhone, as the far more consumer-friendly, interesting, and similarly priced OnePlus 11 uses the Gen 2, as does the Galaxy S23.
Motorola ThinkPhone: camera The Motorola ThinkPhone has a 50-megapixel main camera with optical image stabilization , a 13MP wide-angle camera, and a depth sensor. That’s it, no attention-grabbing industry partnerships like the OnePlus 11 or Xiaomi 13 Pro, and it doesn’t have an optical zoom like the iPhone 14 Pro and Galaxy S23. If you shoot video, it will do so at up to 8K resolution, plus there’s a 32MP selfie camera at the top center of the screen.