Motorola’s first smartphone designed for the enterprise, the Edge, is launching in 2021. The phone will cost $1,099 and be available exclusively through Verizon.
The Motorola Edge 5G is a phone that will be released in 2021. It has a 5G modem, and it will cost $1,000.
CNN —
Motorola has found a sweet spot with cheap and midrange smartphones in recent years. However, the firm has yet to replicate its success in the luxury smartphone market, much alone the folding phone industry (pour one out for the original Razr). With the new Motorola Edge, the company is attempting to correct this.
The Motorola Edge replaces two smartphones in one: the Verizon-exclusive $999 Edge+ and the unlocked $699 Edge, with additional camera features, a quicker CPU, and a larger display, which seems to be the trend for 2021. Motorola’s newest gadget is now available for presale through Amazon and Motorola directly for $499.
Who this phone is for: The new Motorola Edge is most likely for someone looking for a large-screen Android phone with a stunning display.
What you should know: Motorola’s newest Edge doesn’t alter much, so owners of the Edge or Edge+ are unlikely to need to update. It has a 6.8-inch display with a 144 Hz refresh rate, three cameras, Motorola’s Android 11 operating system, and a good midrange CPU. It also has mmWave and Sub-6 5G capability.
How this stacks up: With a 144 Hz refresh rate on a 6.8-inch display, the display is most certainly the star. It’s a big phone by any measure, and Motorola packed a 5,000mAh battery inside. We don’t know how well the three cameras will perform, but we don’t anticipate them to be the best shooters on the market. For many people, the Pixel 5a with 5G, as well as a slew of other gadgets, may be preferable. With two lenses, the 5a delivers best-in-class camera performance across all shooting modes. For the $449 smartphone, Google is also promising three years of Android upgrades.
Preorders for the new Motorola Edge, which will be released on September 2nd as an unlocked smartphone, are now available. And, as is usual with Motorola, a bargain is available right away. For a limited time, the Edge is available for $499.99, after which it will revert to its regular price of $699.99. That’s a very fantastic bargain, but it’s up against a lot of competition, so let’s have a look at the Edge.
MOTOROLA
The new Edge’s upgrades begin with the 6.8-inch Max Vision display, which, despite its marketing titles, performed well in our tests last year. With vivid colors and crisp blacks from the LCD screen panel, we’d anticipate that to be the case.
Motorola is staying with a Full HD+ resolution, but it’s upping the refresh rate from 90 to 144 Hz, which is considerably faster than the iPhone’s 60 Hz and the Galaxy S21’s 120 Hz screens. When viewing material and using the gadget on a daily basis, this should provide a highly realistic experience. The refresh rate refers to how many times the screen can update itself in a second, and the claimed pace is brisk to say the least. It should make gaming on a cloud service like Stadia or on a device relatively responsive.
However, since the display needs more power to operate, this fast refresh rate raises battery issues. Motorola is known for its battery performance, with prior models delivering more than a day of use. A 5,000mAh battery powers the Edge, which supports 30-watt fast charging through a brick and wireless charging via any Qi-capable pad or dock. It should be plenty to get you through the day, but we’d want to double-check with some practical experience.
The phone is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G CPU and either 6GB or 8GB of RAM. This isn’t necessarily a flagship CPU, like the newly launched Pixel 5a with 5G. It’s worth noting that the Snapdragon 888G drives the Galaxy S21, the Z Flip 3, and even the Z Fold 3. We anticipate Motorola to make some efficiency tweaks here, but we don’t know whether performance will be on par with high-end devices. In addition, the Edge supports both mmWave and Sub-6 5G networks, which are the most widely used in the United States.
The new Edge will ship with Android 11 pre-installed with a Motorola user interface, and we expect this CPU to suffice for a normal day of multitasking. However, intense gaming or creative activities, as well as extensive 5G use, may cause difficulties. Motorola claims that it would process data up to 55 percent quicker than the previous Edge model. It performed well in our tests for daily usage, although there were some slowdowns while gaming. It did, however, beat out several other midrange smartphones at the same $499 price point (it had the same limited-time deal).
It will also include Moto Actions for simple gesture instructions, much like any other current Motorola smartphone.
MOTOROLA
A 32-megapixel front-facing camera is built into the top of the display, Motorola claims, resulting in clear selfies. It doesn’t have a dedicated night mode for selfies, but it can swap modes in real time to assist you obtain a better picture. With the cameras, Motorola’s overriding idea is that the phone should do the hard work. Let’s take a look at the main lenses on the rear.
- 108-megapixel wide-angle lens: Motorola is sticking with a bigger main camera, and its 108-megapixel lens is designed to take photos with a lot of information. It won’t shoot at 108 megapixels by default, like the previous Edge phones and the S21 Ultra, but will combine pixels to produce a clear picture that takes up less space.
- 8-megapixel ultrawide lens: With this 8-megapixel ultrawide lens, you can catch a lot more in a picture without having to move your camera. Despite the fact that it is a full 100 megapixels lesser than the primary sensor, Motorola enables it to shoot in two modes. With a 5x Zoom, it may be ultrawide or serve as a telephoto. We’d expect the latter to outperform the former because to the bigger main sensor, but it’s really combining a digital and optical lens to get a crisper zoom. We’re excited to put this to the test.
- 2-megapixel depth: As with other depth lenses, this is there to assist the other two lenses in producing bokeh-effect images (aka Portrait Mode on the iPhone or Pixel). For these pictures, it will be the most important source of depth measurement.
On paper, it seems to be a good set of lenses for capturing a variety of pictures. Still, being a higher-end smartphone, a real telephoto lens would have been great to see, particularly since the previous Edge and Edge+ had one. And, at $499, it has a lot to prove versus cheaper phones like the Pixel 5a with 5G, which has one of the finest camera setups we’ve ever seen.
The Edge comes in just one color, Nebula Blue, which has a holographic appearance. The actual hue of the gadget may vary depending on how the light strikes it. It’s similar to Aura Glow on the Note 10+, but this time it’s simply different hues of blue. The design also has an IP52 water resistance certification, which is great news.
The new Motorola Edge isn’t a reimagining of the brand’s premium smartphone, but rather a consolidation of features into a single gadget. The 6.8-inch display with the 144 Hz refresh rate has piqued our interest, and we’re eager to see how it affects the user experience.
While we haven’t tried the gadget, it seems to be a good value at $499. However, given the competition at and below that price, it’s a bit of a tough sell at $699. On paper, it seems to be a little quicker than the Pixel 5a with 5G, but we’re not sure how the camera will perform in practice. However, Motorola gets the nod for integrating all 5G bands (mmWave and Sub-6) within.
The Motorola Edge is now available for presale if you like the aesthetics, the slick screen, or the trio of cameras. It’s just $499 for a short time, then it’ll go up to $699 in the future. We expect this to happen closer to Sept. 2, when the gadget will begin shipping.
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