Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: Taking care of business and working overtime

Despite the implications of the numbering, the Motorola ThinkPhone 25 is only the second entry in the ThinkPhone range. It’s a business-focused smartphone and represents something of a do-over for the brand, taking the general approach of the first ThinkPhone and repackaging it at a lower price point.

The smartphone market’s mid-range is certainly easier to break into than the highly contested flagship ranks, but that doesn’t mean the ThinkPhone 25 is without fierce competition. With several rivals offering top quality phones at around this price, Motorola will need a unique hook to make the ThinkPhone 25 stand out – so what is it bringing to the table?

Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: What you need to know

The ThinkPhone 25 is a mid-range phone and, as such, it comes with mid-range specifications. So, instead of the flagship Snapdragon chip of its forebear, the ThinkPhone 25 comes with a more modest 2.5GHz MediaTek Dimensity 7300, backed up by 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. 

The 6.36in P-OLED display is smaller than the first ThinkPhone and has a lower refresh rate than before (120Hz, down from 144Hz), although the resolution is slightly sharper, now 2,670 x 1,220. The battery is a smaller 4,310mAh cell, too, although charging speeds are at least the same as before, with 68W wired and 15W wireless and the 32-megapixel selfie camera, housed in a hole-punch notch at the top of the display, is the same, too.

Over on the rear, meanwhile, are three cameras. The 50-megapixel f/1.8 main camera and the 13-megapixel f/2.2 ultrawide lens are the same as before, but they’re joined by a 10-megapixel f/2, 3x telephoto camera this time around, which is a rarity at this price.

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Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: Price and competition

The most notable generational change is that the ThinkPhone 25 is launching at half the price of its predecessor.

It’s £450 SIM free, which is prime territory for mid-range phones, with the biggest threat being Google’s Pixel 8a, which currently costs £409 for the 256GB model. This phone delivers performance that far exceeds anything else in this price bracket and a massive seven years of software support.

Motorola’s own Edge 50 Fusion is another mid-range favourite of mine, offering similar performance and battery life to the ThinkPhone 25, while costing considerably less. You can currently pick one up for just £279.

Finally – as I said, there’s no shortage of competition in this price range – we have the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G, which starts at £439 and the Nothing Phone (2a) at £263. Both are strong options. The former is faster than the ThinkPhone 25 while the latter has the edge on affordability.

Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: Design and key features

For me, the decision to shrink down the ThinkPhone 25’s proportions is a smart one. Big screens are all well and good but a work phone is at its best when it doesn’t get in the way. The compact frame now measures 71 x 8.1 x 154mm and weighs a relatively airy 174g.

It’s still nice and robust, however, with Gorilla Glass 7i covering the display for scratch protection and it has an IP68 dust and water resistance rating. The frame has been downgraded from aluminium to plastic but that’s not necessarily a problem. The rear is manufactured from aramid fibre, a synthetic material with high-tensile strength that’s found in bulletproof vests and aerospace applications, so that certainly bodes well for the drop resistance. 

As this is a work phone, it isn’t available in any flashy colour varieties, only black, but it’s attractive enough and that aramid rear is luxuriously soft to the touch. My only criticism is that it’s quite vulnerable to greasy fingerprint smudges.

Speaking of which, both under-display fingerprint sensor and face-unlock were nice and responsive during my testing.

That’s about it for physical features, however. The first ThinkPhone’s customisable red key has been dropped here, which is disappointing as the quick-launch access it provided to apps and security features was a handy inclusion. It also means one fewer thing to separate the ThinkPhone 25 from the bulk of mid-range phones.

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Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: Display

Although the ThinkPhone 25 has a slightly less fluid 120Hz display than the original’s 144Hz’s screen, this is no great loss; the phone still feels comfortably fluid when scrolling and jumping between apps.

The brightness was decent in my testing, too. With autobrightness switched off, I measured a peak luminance of 461cd/m2, while switching to adaptive mode and shining a torch on the light sensor pushed the ceiling up to an impressive 1,098cd/m2. Not bad for a phone this cheap.

As with most Moto mid-rangers lately, the ThinkPhone 25 has three colour profiles. Vivid and Radiant both target the DCI-P3 colour space, the former slightly cooler in tone and the latter slightly warmer.

Natural, meanwhile, aims for authentic reproduction of the sRGB gamut. In this mode, I recorded a total gamut coverage of 100%, with a volume of 104.6%. The average Delta E colour variance score came back at 1.48, which is a little higher than we’d like to see but is close enough to ideal for no colours to look out of place during use.

Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: Performance and battery life

I’d have thought that Motorola would put the bulk of resources into ensuring that the ThinkPhone 25 is a smooth operator for its price, to better facilitate efficiency at work. The MediaTek Dimensity 7300 chipset isn’t slow by any means but it isn’t notably better than the competition, either.

In the single-core component of the Geekbench 6 benchmarks, it matches most of its main competitors, but the Samsung Galaxy A55 5G pulls ahead by 14% in multi-core. The Google Pixel 8a goes even further, with massive leads over the ThinkPhone 25 of 64% in the single-core portion and 45% in the multi-core. 

The Motorola ThinkPhone 25 isn’t exactly marketed as a gaming phone but it performs well enough in the GFXBench tests, with similar scores to its main competitors, again with the exception of the Google Pixel 8a.

In practical terms, this means it can run Genshin: Impact reasonably smoothly at medium graphical settings, while simple fare like Candy Crush and Solitaire is no problem for it at all, so you should be fine squeezing in the odd game on lunch breaks.

The 4,310mAh battery is rather puny by modern standards but the Mediatek Dimensity 9300 chipset proved impressively power efficient, and helped the Motorola ThinkPhone 25 to last an impressive 28hrs 33mins in our local video playback test.

Also above average for this price is the 68W fast charging. Using the provided charger, I was able to bring the ThinkPhone from empty to 50% in 17 minutes and on to full in a mere 42 minutes. That’s roughly the same as the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion, which also supports 68W charging.

Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: Software 

The Motorola ThinkPhone 25 launched late last year with Android 14 and has since been upgraded to Android 15. Motorola is committing to five years of support for both OS updates and security patches, bringing the ThinkPhone 25 up to August 2029. That’s above-average at this price, with only the Google Pixel 8a stretching further, with seven years of support nudging it into the 2030s.

Speaking of Pixels, Motorola’s take on Android is just about my favourite implementation of the software outside of Google’s own handsets, with unintrusive icons, simple layouts and very few unwanted apps preinstalled on the phone.

What few apps are waiting for you upon boot are designed to bolster the ThinkPhone 25’s credentials as a business phone. Moto Secure is your one-stop-shop for all your security details, scanning for threats with Motorola’s AI-powered Thinkshield or setting up a secure folder that can be disguised on the homescreen to make it even more inconspicuous.

There’s also Smart Connect, which allows you to easily transfer files between your phone, laptop and tablet, stream apps from your phone to a bigger screen, mirror your handset to your laptop and even use the ThinkPhone 25 as a webcam for meetings. It’s all very fluid and seamless, and makes working across multiple devices a breeze.

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Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: Cameras

I’m not sure that I follow the thinking in adding a telephoto camera to a business-focused phone but it’s certainly no bad thing. The 10-megapixel f/2.0 lens captures 3x optical zoom shots that are packed with strong contrast and punchy colours.

The 10x hybrid zoom isn’t bad, either, but going any further than that (up to a maximum of 30x) sees quality dip a fair bit, producing grainy, smudged and generally unusable shots.

Things pick back up with the 50-megapixel (f/1.8) main sensor, however. The dynamic range produced here is fantastic, with well-handled highlights and plenty of detail in the shadowy areas. If it’s a particularly bright day, the colours can get a little oversaturated but not to the point where shots look dramatically artificial.

I wasn’t particularly blown away by the night photography mode. It brightens scenes reasonably well but I found the resulting images flooded with visual noise and details to be rather fuzzy.

And you definitely feel the pixel count drop with the 13-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide camera, with a notable drop off in detail, particularly towards the edges. 

Video has been downgraded since the first ThinkPhone, thanks to the Mediatek chip. It now only shoots 4K at up to 30fps – if you want to film at 60fps, you’ll have to make do with 1080p. Footage still looks solid enough but the stabilisation is only electronic, so there’s a bit of noticeable sway here and there.

Motorola ThinkPhone 25 review: Verdict

I see what Motorola is going for with the ThinkPhone 25; since the downfall of Blackberry, there hasn’t really been a go-to “work phone” for suits to identify with.

What the brand saw as a gap in the market, however, may in fact have just been the industry moving on. Regular smartphones have long since caught up in the productivity and software arenas, to the point where I’m not convinced that dedicated work phones are a necessity anymore.

Compared to the best mid-range phones around, the ThinkPhone 25 stands out in a couple of key areas: battery life is fantastic and both the durable build and telephoto camera are rare finds at this price. As an all-rounder, however, the ThinkPhone 25 sits firmly in the shade of the Google Pixel 8a. With much better performance, longer software support and superior cameras, the Pixel offers a fair bit more bang for your buck, and it’s also cheaper than the ThinkPhone, at time of writing.