The midrange of the phone market is a strange place. In most countries, it's really busy right now: $300-$500 phones like the Honor series and the Pocophone F1 are racing up the charts, delivering maybe 75 percent of a premium phone's performance for half the price.

Motorola told me that in Latin America, about 30 percent of phones are now in that "mid-premium" segment. But here in the US, that midrange is a dead zone. The now-defunct Moto X line dared to tread there, as does the Pixel 3a, but phones priced like that historically haven't sold.

The culprit has always been the way phones are financed in the US. Most people take phones on monthly payment plans, which make a $500 phone a mere $20/month over two years; people who buy phones up front, on the other hand, tend to buy cheap or used devices.

So that's probably why the new $335 Motorola One Vision isn't coming to the US or Canada. It's a pity; this phone has some powerful features for a device in this price range, including a 25-megapixel selfie camera and a rare Samsung processor.

And the version of the phone sold in Latin America would work perfectly well in the US and Canada—it has LTE bands 2/4/5/7/12/17/66, which means if you find one, it'll do great on any Canadian carrier, or on AT&T, T-Mobile, Cricket, and Metro by T-Mobile. There's no technical barrier; Motorola just doesn't think Americans want another option for a great $350 cameraphone, so there's no point even trying to sell it here.

"We don't see a place for it in the US and Canada," a spokesman said.

Vision: It's About the Camera

The "vision" moniker is primarily about the phone's cameras. The main camera is a "48MP" Samsung sensor, which outputs 12MP images using four-pixel binning. (You can't make it build 48MP images.) There's also a secondary depth sensor on the back.

According to Motorola, this makes for really good low-light performance, especially when enhanced with an AI-powered low-light mode that combines eight shots into one better one. They showed me some sample images that really pulled details out of deep shadows—almost like Google's impressive Night Sight.

On the front, there's a 25MP selfie camera that actually takes 25MP selfies, if you want, but it'll probably more often be used to take 6-megapixel, low-light selfies with four-pixel binning.

The low-light mode isn't the camera's only trick. There's also a mode that crops and zooms your photos to re-compose them like they were taken by a professional photographer, and one that only takes photos when people are smiling.

The phone's 6.3-inch screen has 2,520-by-1,080 resolution at 432ppi. The screen is tall and narrow, keeping the phone only 2.8 inches wide, and the selfie camera is a "hole punch" in the corner.

All in all, the phone compares favorably to Motorola's $299.99 G7, sold here by various US carriers. The G7 has similar features all around, but the G7's cameras aren't quite up to the One Vision's levels.

Inside: An Unusual Samsung Chip

The Motorola One Vision runs Android Go 9.1 with a few Motorola extensions on a 2.2GHz Samsung Exynos 9609 processor. That's very unusual; until now, only Meizu, outside Samsung itself, has taken Samsung's chipsets. Motorola wouldn't tell me why it wants Samsung here rather than Qualcomm or MediaTek.

The use of a Samsung processor might be another reason why Motorola isn't selling this phone in the US. For years, Samsung had an unpublicized but well-known agreement with Qualcomm to not sell Exynos-based phones here in the US, so both Samsung and Motorola may have just decided not to poke Qualcomm over here for a phone in a price band that doesn't usually sell.

Other specs include 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot, and Bluetooth 5.0. The 3500mAh battery fast charges with a 15-watt adapter. The phone isn't waterproof and doesn't have wireless charging.

The Motorola One Vision will come out in mid-May in Brazil, Mexico, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, and roll out over the next few months to a wide range of countries that aren't the US and Canada—seemingly the only places in the world forbidden from receiving this smartphone option.