Motorola Signature review: A sleek, powerful flagship that punches above its weight

Motorola Signature is the company’s first attempt at a candybar-style flagship device. I have been using the phone on and off for around 20 days, and here’s my detailed review of how it fares in terms of real-world experience.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the real-world camera performance of the Motorola flagship.

I have loved clicking pictures from the Motorola Signature. The primary shooter takes eye-pleasing pictures in daylight, with close-to-natural colours, decent dynamic range, and reliable exposure. The camera by default takes images in the ‘Natural’ colour style, but Motorola also gives the option of switching to the ‘Signature’ colour style, which, to be completely honest, can be a hit or a miss.

Now let’s talk about portraits. Motorola has also done a great job with the portrait lens, with support for 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm focal lengths. In my experience, the phone delivers accurate edge detection and natural skin tones while avoiding artificial blur.

I also loved the expansive telephoto zoom capabilities that Motorola has brought to this phone. You can easily capture some good-looking shots at even as high as 60x or 70x zoom. Now, obviously, Motorola is taking advantage of AI to improve detail and sharpness in images, but frankly, I really like the implementation Motorola has gone with.

Even the selfies on the Motorola Signature didn’t leave much to be desired, with the phone delivering natural skin tones and good detail without the aggressive smoothening you often see with Chinese smartphone makers.

What Motorola still needs to work on is the low-light performance of the phone. While on most occasions the phone captures usable images, there are occasions when it really struggles, especially with artificial lights turned on, where details tend to soften and noise inevitably creeps in.

You can check out the detailed camera samples below:

Here are the Geekbench and 3DMark results of the Motorola Signature:

3DMark Extreme Stress Test: Best loop score 5527, lowest loop score 3807, stability 68.9%

Geekbench 6 CPU: Single-core score 2932; multi-core score 9526

In terms of real-time performance, I’m not a big-time gamer, but during my short gaming sessions of BGMI and Call of Duty Mobile, the phone did get a little warm. That said, it cooled down easily once I switched back to normal usage. I must commend Motorola for managing the thermals well on this phone, especially considering its slim 6.99mm profile.

In an interaction with Mint, Motorola’s Shivam Ranjan, Head of Marketing – Asia Pacific, said: “Our commitment when it comes to OS and security patches has been upgraded, and an absolutely clean software experience is a given”

Ranjan also added that the brand is working on the ‘timeliness of software updates’ and Signature series will be getting the priority in terms of latest software updates.

In terms of battery life, like I said in my first impressions, the standby time of the Motorola Signature is excellent. It easily lasted me over four days inside my backpack without being connected to the internet. In terms of day-to-day usage, I got a screen-on time of around six hours on a usual day of taking some pictures, watching a few YouTube videos, and listening to songs.

Let me put it this way: if you are a power user, you may need to charge the phone more than once a day. For moderate users, a charge at night should last you half the next day. The good thing, though, is that Motorola has paired the phone with a 90W charger, which is sneakily small and will easily fit inside your backpack, charging the device fully in around 30 to 40 minutes.

Motorola still needs to improve its night-time image handling, and the 5,200mAh battery does leave something to be desired. But it is 2026, memory chip shortages are pushing up prices across the board, and in that context, the Motorola Signature stands out as a very honourable attempt at delivering a flagship-level experience within its class