Hands on: Motorola Edge review
EARLY VERDICT
The Motorola Edge seems to be a mid-range phone imitating a premium one; it doesn’t do a flawless job at that, with a few rough edges like its fingerprint sensor which isn’t too easy to use, and cameras which take pictures that seem worse off than the specs would suggest. However this is still far from your average mid-range phone, as it feels great and looks good.
FOR
- Feels great in the hand
- Battery life better than expected
AGAINST
- Cameras only seem okay
- Fingerprint sensor temperamental
In most phone series the ‘Pro’, ‘Plus’ or ‘Max’ model is only a small step up over the base model, but the Motorola Edge occupies a whole different segment of the market to its premium Motorola Edge Plus sibling - it’s decidedly a mid-range phone, in terms of price and features.
The Motorola Edge series is Moto’s first flagship line in many years, after the scantly-available Moto Z series sunk from premium specs with the original to mid-range mediocrity with the Moto Z4 - it’s a chance for a company typically associated with budget phones to prove it can make more than that (not including the foldable Motorola Razr, which is arguably not a phone intended for mass consumer purchasing).
With a sleek build, camera array fronted by a 64MP main snapper and pretty large battery, the Motorola Edge certainly resembles similar mid-range phones that are imitating premium devices - the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 and certain OnePlus phones also fit into this mould. However after using it briefly, there are a few rough edges on the Edge.
Motorola Edge price and availability
It means the Edge is roughly twice the price of the firm’s affordable Moto G series in most regions, but around half the cost of its big sibling, the Motorola Edge Plus. In other words, it slots perfectly into Motorola’s line-up.
For context, the Edge’s closest competitors are the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 (£459, roughly $565, AU$850) and OnePlus 8 ($699 / £599, about AU$1,100) so it sits at the same price point as some pretty impressive rivals.
Design and display
The Motorola Edge is sleek, both when you’re looking at it and when you’re holding it, and this is mainly thanks to its curved screen. This isn’t the slight taper of the Samsung Galaxy S20 either, but a full 90-degree slope to the sides that really justifies the phone’s name. Because of this curved display, the phone’s volume rocker and power button are set quite far back on the right edge.
Mainly as a result of the screen, we found the Motorola Edge great to hold, and since it’s quite a long, thin device, it wasn’t too hard to reach the side buttons, although those with smaller hands might have trouble with the higher volume rocker.
The streamlined design continues to the back of the handset, as the camera array barely pokes out from the rear of the device at all. The ‘bump’ they’re housed in actually dips into the phone’s body, although the lenses bulge from the dip, so they seem almost flush with the back of the device.
The other important design aspect is that, along with the USB-C port, there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack here, which not all mid-range phones have.
We tested the black version of the Motorola Edge - the only color variant that’s available in the UK - although some regions will also get a magenta version.
The Motorola Edge screen is a 6.7-inch OLED panel with a 1080 x 2340 resolution. It has a 90Hz refresh rate and HDR10 (one of the differences from the HDR10+ Edge Plus), and is broken up only by a ‘punch-hole’ cut-out for the front-facing camera in the top right. The display is bright by default, with a good amount of detail and color.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this sort of functionality on a smartphone - Samsung introduced us to the edge screen concept back in 2014 with the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge - but over the years its dropped the feature from its handsets.
It’s interesting to see Motorola bring it back, but during our initial time with the phone we didn’t find these functions as natural to use as the pre-existing ways you can do the same thing. Perhaps over time the way we use the Motorola Edge will change as a result, but you’ll have to wait for our full review to find out if this is the case
Camera and battery life
The Motorola Edge has three rear cameras; a 64MP main sensor, 8MP telephoto (for 2x optical, 10x digital zoom) and 16MP ultra-wide snapper. There’s also a 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) sensor for improved background blur.
We haven’t managed to test the camera in a range of settings yet, but we did take plenty of outdoor pictures on a sunny day, and the results actually seemed a little dim. There’s a fair amount of detail in snaps, but colors were far less vibrant than they’d be on a different phone like the Huawei P40 or iPhone 11.
This seems to be the result of the Motorola Edge having post-processing software that doesn’t quite reach the levels of Apple, Huawei and Samsung. It’s possible that future software updates will change this in time for our full review.
It’s worth pointing out that, despite the 64MP main camera, you can’t actually take 64MP snaps, as the phone only takes 16MP snaps via pixel binning. Most phones with high-res sensors give the option of utilizing the resolution or opting for pixel binning, and the lack of that option was missed here.
There’s 4K video recording up to 30fps on the Edge, and a slow-mo mode that’s actually twice as slow as similar modes on most handsets, at 1920fps instead of the ‘average’ 960fps.
Moving to the front of the phone you’ll find a 25MP camera, and we actually found pictures taken on this seemed more vibrant and bright than the rear snappers, so selfies actually looked fairly good.
The Motorola Edge has a 4,500mAh camera, which is a fairly average size for a mid-range phone, and we expected this to be enough to power the phone for a full day - it does more than that, though, and we found the Edge generally ran a fair way through a second day before needing topping up.
There’s 18W fast charging here, which isn’t especially snappy, especially given some phones at this price point reach 50W. Motorola doesn’t have any official stats on how long this will take to power up the battery, but it took at least an hour in our experience. Unlike the Motorola Edge Plus, there’s no wireless charging here.
Features and specs
Arguably the biggest difference between the Motorola Edge and Edge Plus, other than a different camera array, is the chipset - while the Plus has the top-end Snapdragon 865 processor, the Edge has a more mid-range Snapdragon 765G.
While the Edge might miss some of the highlights of the 865, like 4K 60fps video recording, in practice we didn’t notice a huge difference between this phone and one with the top-end chipset. Gaming felt fluid, navigating the user interface was snappy and apps loaded quickly.
That user interface is stock Android 10, but Motorola has introduced ‘My UX’ which lets you customize font, interface color, app icon shapes and a few other things. We tested this out, but failed to create anything that looked any better than the default setting so ended up just sticking to the basics.
A navigation issue we had is that the in-screen fingerprint sensor felt quite hard to use - it frequently didn’t pick up our thumb on our first attempt, and even on successful attempts it was slow to use. We also set up facial unlocking but didn’t find this worked much of the time either.
Early verdict
With its premium build and advanced specs, the Motorola Edge has waged war on top-end expensive phones. It may have won some small victories, but the overall result is a stalemate. In some ways, the phone makes its pricey contemporaries redundant, but it has a few issues too which means it fails to totally upset its rivals.
The design and general feel of the Motorola Edge are great - the way it sits in your hand, and the ease at which you can navigate it and go about your daily functions, will make you forget it’s only a mid-range phone.
Pictures taken on the camera have us longing for better image processing tech, though, and it quickly got frustrating trying to unlock the phone with ease. Faster charging wouldn’t hurt either.
Of course, some of these issues might seem negligible by the time we’ve used the phone long enough to do a full review; similarly, other problems might rear their head. Generally, though, it seems the Motorola Edge is an accomplished mid-ranged phone.
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