Unboxing the Motorola One Hyper

In my opinion, when it comes to getting the best bang and build quality for the buck on an Android phone, check out Motorola’s phones. Lenovo — the same company who took Right now, they’ve got discounts on many of their mobiles, including $100 off any of the Motorola One family — the Action, the Zoom, and the one I got: the Hyper.

With the discount, the unlocked Hyper goes for US$299 when purchased directly from Motorola. That’s a pretty good price for an Android phone with mid-level specs.

Released on January 22, 2020, the Hyper features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 chipset, which was released in October 2018. This chipset features 8 cores:

• 2 high-performance 2 GHz Kryo 460 Gold cores
• 6 high-efficiency 1.8 GHz Kryo 460 Silver cores

Its GPU is the Adreno 612, and it has an X12 LTE modem with category 13 uplink and category 15 downlink.

Here’s a quick video review of this chipset from Android Authority’s Gary Sims:

As a point of reference, this chipset is also used in Samsung’s Galaxy A70, A60, and M40, and LG’s Q70.

This chipset puts the Moto One Hyper firmly in the middle of the road of current Android offerings, making it a reasonably representative device for an indie Android developer/article author like Yours Truly.

The phone’s “Hyper” name is a reference to its “hyper charging” — high-speed charging thanks to its ability to take a higher level of power during the charging process. It comes with an 18 watt charger (the same level of power provided by the current iPad Pro and iPhone 11 chargers), but if you have a 45 watt charger handy, the phone’s 4,000 mAh battery will charge in just over 10 minutes.

The phone also comes with the usual literature and SIM extraction pin:

There is one additional goodie that I didn’t expect: a clear, flexible, rubber-like plastic case. It’s nothing fancy, but it was still a nice surprise.

I’ll post more details about the phone as I use it and start doing development work (native stuff in Kotlin, as well as some cross-platform work in Flutter, and maybe even Kivy).