The Motorola Edge 70 is an impressive entry into the company’s Edge series of phones. This new model marks a big improvement to camera performance and strikes an incredibly thin profile.
Rounded out with a reliable processor and a long lasting battery, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a high-end flagship device.
Coming in at a hair under 6 millimeters, the Edge 70 is remarkably thin. Other contemporary thin phones come in at nearly double the price, and the Edge 70 doesn’t have the usual sacrifices.
Overall Rating: 4 / 5
Pros
- Incredibly thin profile
- Premium feeling materials
- Attractive design and finish
Cons
- Preinstalled bloatware
- Digital zoom gives poor results
- Chipset slightly underperforms
Price: $899 ($1099 for Swarovski Edition) | For thin phone enthusiasts looking for a stylish new device
Setup & First Impressions
Unboxing the Edge 70, the phone immediately impresses with its thin profile and lightweight chassis. Just picking it up is enough to notice a difference compared to other phones.
Included in the box is a flimsy plastic case, documentation, a SIM tool and a fairly premium-feeling USB-C cable.
The Edge 70’s box is lightly perfumed with Motorola’s signature scent, and at the time of writing the box still hasn’t completely aired out.
Setup is an easy process – just follow the prompts to connect your accounts and optionally bring across your apps and files from another phone.
There are a set of preinstalled apps that you can’t opt out of, but they can be uninstalled after setup.
Design & Aesthetics
Design is at the forefront of the Edge 70’s priority list. The slimline chassis, premium material, and Pantone colours make this a super stylish phone.
At under 6 millimetres the Edge 70 isn’t the thinnest phone on the market, but it’s really not far off. As a practical comparison, the Edge 70 comes in about a full millimeter thinner than your average pencil.
The rear is a tough material to nail down – it feels like fabric but Motorola calls it a nylon-inspired silicone finish. In any case, it’s a nice design touch that sets this phone apart from the rest of the market.
Thanks to this textured material, the phone feels grippy and secure in the hand. That’s an important feature to have on a phone this thin.
The phone features a flat screen on the front for easy installation of a screen protector. The camera island features four circles ringed in an accent colour – two camera lenses, a light sensor and a flash.
It’s available in three Pantone colours; Lily Pad pale green, Bronze Green dark green, and Gadget Grey as a near-black colour. There is additionally a Swarovski Edition in Pantone Cloud Dancer white with embedded Swarovski crystals and a quilted texture.
Life With Motorola Edge 70
After three weeks with the Motorola Edge 70, I’ve been impressed with the experience overall. The phone disappears into your pocket and performs great in day-to-day usage.
Positives
As you’d expect, the biggest highlight here is the thinness. Coming in at 6 millimetres and 159 grams, from time to time I’d have to double-check it was still in my pocket.
The flat pOLED display is vivid, colourful and bright enough to remain visible outdoors. With a high resolution and fast refresh rate, the Edge 70 is a great phone for watching content on the go.
Battery life is a genuine surprise. After unboxing the phone and feeling how thin it is, I figured that battery life would be the obvious compromise. That’s not the case. The Edge 70 lasts through the day fairly reliably with mixed use.
The camera holds up well for regular shooting. In daylight it’s quick to focus and snap, while low light performance holds up fairly well too. We’ll elaborate on the camera suite in the next section.
Negatives
Bloatware is by far my biggest complaint about the Edge 70. There’s third-party app installs that are annoying, and the stock weather app pushes advertisements in the main screen. Once you’ve customised the phone to your liking and swiped away all the tutorial notifications, this complaint mostly disappears.
The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 is capable for everyday tasks, but occasionally I noticed some hitching or slower performance. For example, it does take slightly longer to open the camera app or switch between heavier apps – and it doesn’t really hold up well in 3D mobile gaming.
The speakers are a bit of a let-down. When listening to music, they sound noticeably mid-heavy compared to other phones, with minimal bass response. They’re great for voice calling and podcasts, but the experience falls apart with music or movies.
Camera
The camera array features two 50-megapixel sensors paired with a standard lens and an ultrawide lens, covering the majority of shooting scenarios everyday people use a phone for.
In daylight, the camera provides sharp detail and quick focus. The ultrawide holds up fairly well too, focusing extremely close to pull double duty as a macro lens. However, some photos can look a bit oversaturated and unrealistic. These shots pop when scrolling through a feed, but you may have to experiment with post-processing if you’re looking for true-to-life colours.
Low-light performance is great if you can hold the phone fairly still, but it’s prone to blur that makes keeper shots a bit tougher to achieve reliably. Indoor lighting performance is great, but if you’re outdoors at nighttime with few light sources, results are spotty.
Although there’s four circles on the rear, the two remaining ones house the flash and a light sensor that helps with automatic exposure adjustments. Prior models had a telephoto lens as well, but the Edge 70 omits it.
For my regular usage, I don’t miss the telephoto lens, but the digital zoom is a poor replacement. It doesn’t take long for quality to fall apart when zooming in – beyond about 3x zoom there’s a very noticeable decrease in sharpness.
Here are a few camera samples:
Performance & Reliability
The Edge 70 uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, which is fast enough to keep up with day-to-day performance, but falls down a bit when drawing comparisons to other phones on the market.
It’s possible that Motorola opted for this processor because of its favourable thermal profile, helping to keep the processor cool despite the thin chassis. The newer Snapdragon 8 series runs a bit hotter, meaning thermal throttling would be more of an issue.
Motorola’s silicon carbon battery chemistry suggests great reliability and longevity here, ensuring the phone holds up over the coming years.
Practical Considerations
A key point to consider before you buy is that the phone does not have expandable storage. You’ll want to carefully choose between the 256GB and 512GB models, because you can’t add more to it after purchase.
Motorola unfortunately continues its trend of short support tails with the Edge 70. The device comes with four years of Android updates through 2029 and six years of security updates through to 2031.
This update schedule is below the current market standard, and brands like Honor, Samsung and Google are offering longer tails at lower prices.
Value & Alternatives
The Edge 70 Fusion is the obvious comparison with the standard Edge 70. It comes in a bit cheaper with a larger battery, but the chassis is thicker and the processor is slightly worse.
The Motorola Signature is another worthy comparison. It’s similarly thin, but provides a much faster processor, a slightly better camera array, and much improved software support tail. If you’re intending to keep your phone for more than four years, I would consider this option.
Would I Buy It With My Own Money?
Yes. The Edge 70 exudes cool, performs well for day-to-day tasks, and it’s impressively thin without too many compromises. Unless you’re planning on heavy mobile gaming or multitasking, this phone is up to the job.
Comments