Motorola Think Phone Review: A New High-End Smartphone Inspired by Lenovo’s ThinkPad Laptops
Introduction
Motorola has introduced a new high-end smartphone, the Think Phone, inspired by Lenovo’s ThinkPad laptops. This phone is specifically designed for the business crowd, featuring a durable ThinkPad-inspired design, extra security features, and a powerful chipset.
Build
Body
The back of the phone is made of aramid fiber, giving it a textured pattern that’s unmistakably a ThinkPad. The aluminum frame is flat, but the phone is curved, making it very durable, even certified to survive drops onto concrete. The Think Phone is also IP68 rated for protection against water and dust, with Gorilla Glass protecting the screen.
Display
The Think Phone has a 6.6-inch POLED display with a 1080p resolution and an extra-fast 144Hz refresh rate. The display is plenty sharp, quite contrasty, and supports 10-bit color and HDR10+. The color accuracy is also very good, with flagship-grade brightness of around 510 nits with a manual brightness slider, and up to 1070 nits in auto mode when out in the sun.
Audio
The Think Phone also has a pair of stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos support. The loudness is excellent, and the sound quality is good, with nice vocals and some bass.
Storage
The phone has an optical under-display fingerprint reader for biometrics that works quite well, and it’s available in 128, 256, or 512GB storage options, though it isn’t expandable through microSD.
The Think Phone’s hardware button is quite handy, allowing for a single click to launch an app, play and pause music, or open the voice or screen recorder. Double-clicking the button is always linked to actions within Moto’s Ready4 app.
Software
Besides that, the software experience of the Think Phone is pretty much what you’d get on other Motorola phones: a very clean and near-stock Android 13 with a few Moto features on top, organized within the Moto app, and including things like personalization options, gestures, and the peak display function.
Chipset
Powering all of these features is a flagship-grade Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset, which was last year’s top Qualcomm silicon. It doesn’t provide the benefits you’ll find in this year’s new Snapdragon HN2, like advanced memory tech, and in benchmarks, the Think Phone falls behind other new flagships. Still, you get plenty of power under the hood, more than enough for smooth multitasking and heavy gaming.
Battery
The Think Phone has a large 5,000mAh battery, with quite good battery life, earning an endurance rating of 116 hours in our tests. With the bundled 68-watt charger, the charging speed is quite speedy, charging the Think Phone from 0 to 86% in half an hour.
Camera
On the back, the Think Phone has a 50-megapixel main camera, a 13-megapixel ultra-wide, which has autofocus, and a depth sensor. During the day, photos from the main cam have a good amount of detail, nice-looking true-to-life colors, and plenty of contrast. The finer details are a bit soft when looked at too closely, though, and some textures and foliage look quite artificial.
There is some visible noise, and the dynamic range could be wider. Portraits are always taken with the main cam, but you have the choice of three different zoom levels. They look good in general, with nice subject separation and good-looking background blur. Skin textures can come out a bit too smooth, though.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the Think Phone is a no-nonsense high-end phone oriented towards the business crowd, with a powerful chipset