Motorola One Action Review: A Deal Of An Android One Phone
As you can see in the video above, the only game that presented much of a challenge was CSR2. This drag racing title from Natural Motion has some pretty high-end graphics, and even though the frame rate wasn't completely fluid, it was still completely playable with the fastest cars in the game. Pokémon Go, Asphalt 9 Legends, and Mario Kart Tour all had rock-solid, smooth frame rates, and great playability, too. Overall, this isn't a gaming phone like the ASUS ROG Phone II we looked at recently, but if you're not a hardcore gamer who's just looking to pass some time with your phone on occasion, the Motorola One Action seems up to the task.
Next up we'll focus on 3D performance using GFXBench and UL's 3DMark Sling Shot benchmarks. Since modern Android phones come with displays of all shapes and sizes, we level the playing field by looking at off-screen rendering performance. While that doesn't draw full-sized images to the screen and makes the benchmarks a little less fun to watch in the process, this does ensure that every phone gets the exact same task. These tests are a bit more challenging than most 3D games on Google Play, since most developers want their games to be playable for the vast majority of phones.
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GFXBench has several scenes built in. The most well-known batteries are the T-Rex test and Manhattan. These are good choices for our lower-end phone, since it doesn't have big, beefy graphics built in.

Well, we knew that the Motorola One Action would be closer to the bottom of our chart, but we didn't anticipate that the Google Pixel 3a XL would be nearly 50% faster. Let's see how the more complex Manhattan scene plays out.

Let's see if 3DMark fares any better.
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UL's 3DMark has been a staple 3D graphics benchmark at HotHardware across all mobile and desktop platforms alike. It seems that UL has retired Ice Storm, as that benchmark no longer appears in the application. However, we still have results for Sling Shot Extreme, which uses 1920x1080 off-screen rendering to test performance in its scene.


The Motorola One Action isn't a hardcore gaming phone, but it does have respectable CPU performance. Still, as our video above shows, the One Action is perfectly capable of playing mainstream games with decent frame rates. We wouldn't let the poor Sling Shot showing scare you off, because that's a test with its eyes on the future. For non-gamers, the One Action also looks like it'll hold up just fine, but only if the battery life can hold up as well. Let's check that out next.
Motorola One Action Battery Life Testing

We also used the One Action as our primary mobile device for a couple of days, and battery life was solid throughout. I'm not personally a big phone user, but we still made the One Action play around 90 minutes of music and had the screen on for a couple of hours a day over a weekend (I'm trying to finish Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and needed something to look up boss strategies). Between web surfing, email, Words with Friends, Twitter, and Instagram, the One Action held up throughout. Each night when it was bedtime, the battery still had between 55 and 60 percent remaining each day. We were around Wi-Fi most of the time, though. Heavier users or folks without as good of coverage might see less.
Time to sum up everything we've learned and render our final verdict...