FOR all the technological progress made by the smartphone industry, there’s one problem that mobile phones have yet to solve: portrait mode. When you hold your phone upright when taking a photo, the portrait-format shot will often end up showing with large, black bars either side of the photo for anyone using a device in landscape mode. But Motorola’s new smartphone One Action wants to help the Instagram and Tik Tok generation with a little trick to make shooting in landscape format easier. With Motorola’s new One Action smartphone, you don’t have to turn your phone sideways to take photos or film in landscape format.
That’s because this midrange phone has a picture-stabilised wide-angle video camera with a 117-degree shooting angle that has been mounted sideways. In other words, it will take pictures in a landscape format when you’re holding the phone upright, meaning you don’t need to hold it sideways with two hands to get wide angles.
This, paired with electronic video stabilisation for smoother footage, helps Motorola sell this device as a new kind of action camera phone. And yet the One Action is still just a phone and it can’t quite compete with proper action cameras like a GoPro.
While it is protected against dust and splashes of water, it doesn’t have the robustness of a real action cam to make it suitable for use when biking, surfing or climbing. Technically, the One Action is a slightly reduced version of the Motorola One Vision with lower resolution cameras and plastic instead of glass on the back. The camera array is made up of a main 12MP lens and a 5-MP sensor for depth effects, while there’s 128 GB of memory.
Motorola is hoping to appeal to younger customers with its One series, and it helps that most of these phones come in a modern design with minimal bezels around screens in a 21:9 format. By participating in Google’s Android One program, they will be provided with new software and security updates for at least two years. – dpa
