Motorola Edge Plus Review – Hello Moto!

Back in 2016, Motorola yanked the headphone jack out of their mobile phones before Apple made it popular. That was the last time it made a high-end Android phone. The Motorola Edge Plus is their first honest attempt to contend with the flood of $1,000 + smartphones on the market. The company is bringing back the 3.5 mm audio jack that it previously cast aside.

The new phone will be exclusive to Verizon Wireless beginning May 14. It will pack all the features you’d hope to find, from outstanding battery life to a silky-smooth display. But 2020 has rapidly turned into the pandemic year, and with more than 26 million Americans unemployed, another $1,000+ phone is hard to handle.

The Edge Plus isn’t free of bugs, either, given its high price.

Features

The Edge Plus’ greatest component is its huge 5,000-mAh pack. It will last two full days, morning till night and not struggle. And that’s with me watching a lot of Dracula on Netflix, taking cute pictures of my dog , playing a couple of games and catching up on all my partner’s TikTok footage. The battery capacity makes it a chunky phone. Although, I didn’t have a hard time using it one-handed because it’s very small.

Housing the latest Snapdragon 865 processor from Qualcomm, which is the same chip powering competing phones like the Samsung Galaxy S20. Even with a speedy 90 Hz screen, the processor keeps the system running smoothly. It means that the screen refreshes 90 times a second, making it significantly more fluid to click and switch through the operating system than a standard 60 Hz monitor.

On sunny days, the screen gets bright enough to see outside, the stereo speakers are very loud. The front in-display fingerprint sensor didn’t give me much trouble either. You do get 256 GB of internal storage (there is no MicroSD card slot), it’s also nice to see the jack on the headphone making a comeback for those who prefer the cable. Edge Plus is also water-resistant, but, like other flagships, it does not have an IP68 rating. Motorola hasn’t bothered to pay for the ranking, but it says the spec suits its own tests.

Specs And Performance

The Edge+ is powered by an 865 Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset, along with 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Onboard is 256 GB of UFS3.1 storage, 241 GB of which is available from the box. Like you would expect from its top-of-the-line specifications, the Edge+ can handle tonnes of open-ended applications at the same time with ease, and just about any picture or video editing tasks, you throw at it.

Gaming is impressive with the Motorola Edge Plus as well, thanks in part to the display’s 90Hz refresh rate and the Moto Gametime feature. Playing away for nearly two hours with a variety of games like Asphalt 9 and PUBG: Mobile. Everything loaded quickly, and we never experienced any dropped frames.

The Edge+ scored 11,721 on PCMark Work 2.0, a series of tests that simulate typical smartphone tasks. That’s far behind the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra (12,842), but you won’t find much difference in daily use. And the Edge+ has actually pulled on GeekBench 5 ahead of the S20 Ultra, an app that tests the performance of raw processors. It won an impressive 914 and 3,372 for single and multicore, against the Ultra’s 910.5 and 2,270.

Battery

Motorola promises a battery life of several days, even while using mmWave 5G. We couldn’t check the phone on 5 G but were still impressed by its huge 5,000mAh battery. It supports 18W TurboPower charging, as well as wireless charging when you consider the Edge+ running weak. This also supports 5W wireless power-sharing, enabling you to recharge other devices using the phone’s battery.

Capable Cameras

Many modern smartphones have two camera trends: a triple-camera setup, and a large number of megapixels. Both of these are present in the Edge Plus, with a 108-megapixel main sensor. This is supported by an ultrawide angle camera with 16 megapixels and an 8-megapixel zoom camera. The video quality is 27 megapixels by design since the sensor fuses four pixels into one to capture more light. It means better low-light shots, but you can also take pictures of 108 megapixels to capture as much detail as you can.

The findings are impressive. In good lighting, my only misgivings are that certain pictures look a little over-sharp, lacking in contrast and that the efficiency of the cameras is inconsistent. Motorola’s Night mode comes in handy as the sun sets. You’ll want to use it as standard low-light images aren’t great. For a better-exposed shot, it merges several exposures together, and it manages to retain a good deal of detail (although it is much less tolerant to any camera shake than other night modes). Though, it’s not quite as good as the Night Sight of the Pixel 4 the images of the Edge Plus still look like they’ve been trained in color.

Conclusion

The Moto Edge+ is a sleek flagship with the highest quality hardware available. Look no further if you are searching for a phone with class-leading battery life and global 5G. If you’re looking for a longer-lasting smartphone with better camera quality, you can wait for Verizon’s Galaxy S20 5 G model due soon, or spend $200 more on the Galaxy S20 +, which will also give you a sharper display. The OnePlus 8, meanwhile, provides no major advantages over the Motorola Edge Plus, but it costs less than $200.