Motorola launches two 5G phones to give itself the Edge

Motorola has released plenty of low to mid-range phones recently, but every manufacturer needs a ‘halo’ phone for the others to hang off, and last night, Motorola unveiled two new models in its flagship 5G range.

The new Edge and Edge+ each come with curved edge displays with a tiny punch-hole selfie camera, and both have 5G. The key difference is the Edge+ comes with Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 865 chipset, while the standard Edge gets the next level down Snapdragon 765G chipset.

I’ve not seen or used a device with a Snapdragon 765G chipset yet, but I have used the Reno 2 and other devices powered by last year’s Snapdragon 730G chip and the balance between good battery life and performance was excellent, hopefully making the 765G an excellent choice for people with more modest requirements and a desire to save money.

All things considered, Motorola has done well to offer two different options, but sadly us Brits won’t currently get the option to make a choice because it has been made for us; only the Edge is coming to our shores for now.

I’ll highlight below what each model offers, but bear this in mind for when the Edge arrives in the UK later this year, with a suggested retail price of £549 SIM-free.

It will be available from O2, John Lewis, Amazon and Argos.

Motorola Edge+

The Edge+ comes with a 6.7-inch 90-degree ‘Endless Edge’ Full HD+ display, with 90Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ certification. It is accompanied by dual stereo speakers with audio tuning from Waves, with the claim of it being the loudest and most powerful audio on a smartphone.

Camera wise, the Edge+ comes with a 108-megapixel primary camera, with a 8-megapixel telephoto camera, 16-megapixel ultra-wide camera with macro facility, plus a Time-of-Flight camera.

On the front in the small punch-hole top left is a 25-megapixel selfie camera.

Powering the phone is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC with X55 modem and support for both Sub6 and mmWave 5G, plus 12GB of DDR5 RAM and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity. There’s 256GB of UFS 3.0 internal storage.

Power comes from a large 5,000mAh battery with 18W wired charging and 5W Qi wireless charging. There’s an IP-rating too, although not as high as comparable phones at the top-end of the market.

Motorola Edge

The differences on the standard Edge aren’t as great as you might think, and the screen remains the same size, resolution and 90Hz refresh rate, but without HDR10+. It also retains the dual stereo sound.

This time the processing power is down to Snapdragon 765G with Sub6 5G (not an issue as we don’t have mmWave 5G in the UK), and a 4,500mAh battery with 18W wired charging but no wireless charging support.

Connectivity is also limited to Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and there’s less internal storage, but you can expand via memory cards so this isn’t that big a deal.

On the camera side, the resolution of the primary camera drops from 108-megapixels to a still respectable 64-megapixels. The telephoto camera drops from 3x to 2x.

If you didn’t know the Edge+ existed, you’d likely still be impressed with the Edge and for all intents and purposes in the UK and most of Europe, the Edge+ doesn’t exist!

More info: Motorola UK