Motorola has re-joined the flagship game after a few year absence, and went all in with their new Motorola Edge+.
I’ve been using the Motorola Edge+ for the past 2 weeks or so as my daily driver, and this is what I think about it.
There is a lot to like about the Motorola Edge+, from design, to performance and it’s doing a great Job going head to head with the likes of the Galaxy S20 series. The phone’s performance is amazing in every aspect, with a super impressive battery life, and the software…well Moto always won me over with their near stock Android implementations.
Design & Display
The overall design of the Motorola Edge+ is really nice and certainly attractive. The version I’m trying out is the Thunder Grey, and the color is an absolute delight, even photos won’t do it justice. On the back, and depending on the angle of light, the glass reflects light beautifully. The 3 cameras are on positioned vertically as well.
The Moto Edge+ screen itself is a 6.7-inch OLED panel, with an aspect ratio of 19.5:9 and 2340 x 1080-pixel resolution, which makes it taller than usual (took a bit of time to get used to in my case), but very comfortable in the hand. It’s nicely proportioned.
The front display has a 90Hz refresh rate and is super smooth, and contains an in-display fingerprint sensor, which is fast and very accurate. As for brightness and color, the Moto Edge+ is bright, and has vivid colors reproduction.
Software
The Edge+ runs on Android 10 out of the box, and as I mentioned earlier, one of the things I personally love about Motorola since they started, was the fact that they ditched the Android skinned interfaces, and went with near stock experience instead. The UI is clean, and the launcher is almost identical to the one shipped with Pixel devices. Moto also went with their Moto Display, which isn’t always-on, but close. A quick motion of your hand toward the screen of the Edge+ will wake its display to show you time, notifications, battery, and other info.
The phone’s curved edge display is not only for esthetics, it has also some cool tricks allowing you to use the edge with features such as virtual buttons for gaming, Moto Edge Touch for app shortcuts, and Edge lights for notification and alerts.
the Motorola Edge+ comes preloaded with the Moto app which includes Gametime mode. The mode blocks calls during games, disable auto-brightness, and enhance audio. The Moto app also handles Display settings, Action settings, and other personalization settings.
Moto also added an option to navigate the tall screen with what they call Action Bar, a floating button positioned over the display’s Edge that you can swipe up or down to navigate.
Performance
The Motorola Edge+ packs the Snapdragon 865 chipset combined with 12GB RAM and 256GB of storage (expandable). Thanks to those internals, the phone is butter smooth and very powerful. There’s absolutely no lag when switching between apps and even with multitasking at long periods of times.
Gaming is no different, the phones handles games perfectly and combined with the Moto Gametime feature everything worked flawlessly, quick loading and no drops during play time. I tested the device with multiple games such as PUBG and Asphalt 9.
Battery life
This is one of the areas where the phone shines! The 5000mAh battery is just superb and I actually was bale to sustain around 2 days in use (yes, sitting at home night consume less these days, but the amount of work done was enough to put it to the test). On multiple days the screen on time exceeded the 6.5-hour mark. The Motorola Edge+ supports fast wired and wireless charging and power sharing.
Camera
The camera setup for the Motorola Edge+ is a 108MP main shooter at f/1.8 (with OIS). This is also paired with a 16MP ultra-wide (117° FOV, f/2.2) and 8MP telephoto lenses (3x optical zoom, f/2.4). The phone is capable of shooting video in 6K. To manage all these, Motorola uses its own camera app which provides lots of options, modes and controls. The camera is super at at showcasing striking colors and depth in photos during outdoor shooting, but somewhat “ok” quality during low light scenarios.
Overall, the camera doesn’t oversaturate colors, nor does it try too hard to make your photos look good with aggressive processing. Here are samples taken with the phone.
Verdict
The Motorola Edge+ is simply great, and a pleasant surprise for 2020. Using it for the past 2 weeks was an absolutely amazing, and will even be considering to switch to it completely. From performance all the way to battery and UI, there’s nothing really to complain about. Do I recommend it ? Of course, it’s worth it.
