After years mainly spent in the midrange phone market, Motorola burst back into the spotlight with a flagship.
The Motorola Edge Plus is the most genuine flagship that Motorola has released in years, with top-tier specs, display, and 5G connectivity. It’s also the priciest phone released by the brand, meaning the competition is even stiffer between the Edge Plus and rival flagships.
Motorola Edge Plus
Motorola Edge Plus has everything it needs to compete with the best phones out there right now. The reality, however, is a little different. Motorola’s first flagship in years offers first-rate performance and some truly excellent battery life.
If not for the Motorola logo on the back, it’d be easy to imagine the Motorola Edge Plus as another Samsung S20 variant. The specs are similarly on a par with the best of Android today, with a Snapdragon 865 processor, Qualcomm’s best and fastest processor for phones.
Combined with 12GB of RAM, it’s hard to find a task that challenges the Edge Plus.
There’s an in-display optical fingerprint sensor, which is both fast and reliable, wireless charging (for the phone itself and reverse charging for other devices), and even a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is especially welcome to see on a 2020 phone.
The stereo speakers are also excellent. They’re loud and clear, even at high volumes.
Motorola Edge Plus does have a few compromises on the hardware side: the fast refresh rate screen is 90Hz, not 120Hz like Samsung’s S20 lineup or the OnePlus 8 Pro, and the resolution is a more modest 2340 x 1080 than the QHD+ displays.
Motorola says that the Motorola Edge Plus has a “water repellent design” for the occasional splash, but it lacks any sort of IP rating. Every other phone in this price class has IP68 water and dust repellent rating.
Unfortunately, the phone’s marquee feature is its spacious Endless Edge display, feels like an example of style over substance, and could make the phone difficult for some to use.
It’s a 6.7-inch OLED screen that would feel pretty unwieldy if its aspect ratio was any wider than its 19.5:9. Instead, it’s one of the more comfortable big phones. It’ll still give people with small hands some trouble, but at least they won’t struggle as much to get their mitts around the phone.
If the display is one-half of Motorola’s declaration that it should be taken seriously again in the high-end phone space, the new cameras are the other half of the equation.
The Motorola Edge Plus has a total of four cameras (along with a time-of-flight sensor on the back used for depth sensing): a 108-megapixel main sensor, a 16-megapixel ultrawide sensor that also shoots macro shots, and an 8-megapixel telephoto sensor that offers 3x optical zoom.
Motorola Edge Plus is a fun and enjoyable smartphone to shoot with. If you’ve got good lighting, the shots from the main camera look great, with crisp details and accurately balanced colors.
Edge Plus can technically shoot at the full 108-megapixels, which is a cool trick, it’s not really worth using the mode. Nearly every shot took at the quad-pixel 27-megapixel setting came out better than its full-resolution counterpart, with richer colors, brighter lighting, and deeper shadows.