Motorola unveiled one of their largest new-device lineups last month, with the new edge 70 catching eyes with its thin and light design promising no compromise on battery life, durability, or performance.
Priced at an extremely low $599 on pre-order, the edge 70 will actually debut at $899 RRP when it officially goes on-sale tomorrow.
At just 5.9mm thin, and weighing just 159 grams it’s a phone that’s reminiscent of the likes of the iPhone air and Galaxy S25 Edge from last year.
The motorola edge 70 includes a solid array of hardware including a 6.67” AMOLED display, Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 256GB of storage, dual 50MP rear camera system and unlike the super-thin phones above, it also includes a massive 4,800mAh battery to get you through the day.
After using the edge 70 for a couple of weeks, here’s how it went:
Hardware
Design
The thin and light design is the first thing you notice when you pick the phone up. The textured back panel makes the phone delightfully easy to hold, adding grip and nice visual flair to the phone.
It comes in four colours selected through their ongoing partnership with Pantone, with PANTONE Lily Pad, Cloud Dancer, Gadget Grey and Bronze Green available.
Motorola have sent over the Gadget Grey model for review, which comes with a blue highlight on both the camera sensors and the Moto AI button on the left side of the phone.
The Moto AI button can be used as a long, or double press to activate either Moto AI, or use the ‘Pay Attention’ or ‘Catch Me Up’ feature to record meetings, or summarise your notifications.
Each of the phones come with a different, yet complementary colour splash on the camera sensor and Moto AI Key – as well as a very neat Pantone colour swatch on the rear of the phone.
The Lilypad coloured model includes a red highlight, the Bronze Green has a yellow highlight with Cloud Dancer the lone stand out, leaning into the silver of the device using a ‘button tufted’ look that goes well with the silver and white aesthetic.
While there’s great pains to make the phones look great in an array of on-trend colours and that super-thin design, they also come with an acrylic shell designed for protection which adds to the IP68/IP69 dust and water resistance, Gorilla Glass 7i on the display and military-grade durability – all of which makes this phone a real step up when it comes to the thin phone trend.
The rest of the phone is as you’d expect with a power button and volume rocker on the right, and the USB-C port, SIM Tray and speaker on the bottom.
Display and Audio
The borderless 6.67” display looks fantastic. It’s an AMOLED panel, offering excellent, though sometimes oversaturated HDR10+ colour reproduction – as well as a max peak brightness of 4500 nits making it a beast to use outdoors.
The display can ramp up to 120Hz so scrolling is smooth and a pleasant overall experience. You can set the refresh rate based on battery impact, with three options – Smart and Balanced, Hyper Smooth and Efficiency First which limits refresh to 60Hz.
After using the phone with all three, I really recommend just using Smart and Balanced, letting the phone work out when that extra refresh rate is actually needed.
On the audio front, motorola uses the same setup as most phones, pairing the downward firing speaker on the bottom with the earpiece to achieve stereo sound. The system has received Dolby Atmos tuning, with several profiles in the Atmos app to set a custom profile.
They’re not the greatest sounding speakers, without any real depth of sound to them – even after playing with the various EQ settings. The speakers work, but you’re far better off using headphones if available.
Performance and Connectivity
Using a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 processor with 256GB of on-board storage, motorola have included 8GB of RAM with the option to use their RAM Boost in settings to give the phone some headroom when under load, allowing it to use unused storage as memory.
The phone performs quite well out of the box, with the RAM Boost set to ‘AI Auto’ letting the system manage the memory. There’s very little skipping, though you will notice a slight ‘beat’ if you’re used to higher end phones, when it multi-tasks or launches a new app
Overall though, it’s a decently fast design with snappy performance for the most part.
As usual, I ran it through Geekbench and 3DMark to see how it stacks up.
Camera
The motorola edge 70 includes a triple 50MP camera system, but it’s spread across the front and rear cameras.
On the front you get a 50MP sensor embedded in the display, on the rear you get dual 50MP sensors, including an ultrawide with 120° field of view – and a ‘Dedicated 3-in-1 light sensor’.
What you notably are missing is the telephoto option. Motorola get around this by offering a 2x digital crop, with a 20x digital zoom possible – which isn’t particularly impressive when really zoomed in but it is there.
The 50MP rear sensors are fantastic for shots during the day, with excellent colour representation and capturing good detail.
At night, there’s also a very good quality shot if there’s enough ambient light around. I do find the software tends to blast out the brightness, which loses some quality when it lowers the contrast, but overall it’s a good night shot, and the ultrawide sensor picks up good details as well, though not capturing as much light.
The ultrawide does double duty as a macro camera if you’re interested in taking closer shots and it does a good job capturing detail in the foreground.
Battery and Charging
There’s a 4,800mAh battery inside the motorola edge 70, larger than some thinner phones on the market, and enabled by the adoption of Silicon-Carbon for the battery.
There’s been somewhat of a shift towards Silicon Carbon batteries of late, the Silicon Carbon batteries are denser, with the Carbon allowing better conductivity for faster flow, so faster charging on a battery that lasts longer.
All up it’s a solid battery life, and impressive on a device this thin. It lasted the full day, starting at 6am and finishing up around 10pm with the 10% charge warnings popping up.
I am fairly intense with usage on the phone, but if you do manage to wear it down, it supports 68W wired fast charging – though there’s no charger in the box.
If you have a power brick capable of 68W (I used a 100W PD Charger), you can get some impressive charging speeds, with the phone going from 0-100% in just under an hour.
If you don’t have a 68W TurboPower adapter, Motorola will sell you one via JB Hifi or Harvey Norman for $59.
Software
Android and Updates
Out of the box, the motorola edge 70 comes with Android 16 out of the box, with the February 2026 security update installed.
As far as updates go, Motorola has stepped it up this year, committing to four OS updates, as well as five years of Security Maintenance Releases (SMR) up to October 2030.
Motorola have been on a bi-monthly (updates every two months) for a while now, so a new update should be just around the corner.
It’s a step-up for Motorola on the OS update side, ramping up from the 3 OS/4 years SMR for last year’s motorola edge 60 Pro which is a nice bonus.
Motorola
Over the years, Motorola has scaled back their tweaks, dropping most of the visual changes and leaving a mostly stock Android look and feel.
That’s not to say there isn’t software baked in. There’s Moto AI baked in offering a Playlist Studio to create playlists, as well as more dedicated features like ‘Pay Attention’ or ‘Catch Me Up’, and even a dedicated key to launch it more easily.
There’s also my favourite features: Motorola’s gestures. A quick double twist of the wrist to open the camera, or a chop to launch the torch gesture is baked in at the OS level to make using the phone a lot easier.
Bloatware
It’s not all fun and games, with motorola responsible for pre-loading bloatware on the phone.
On the motorola edge 70 you get Adobe AI Scanner, TikTok, Perplexity’s Search app (thanks to it powering Moto AI) and the Microsoft CoPilot app, as well as LinkedIn and Booking.com, with a few extra Google apps like Wallet, Find Hub, Home and the Fitbit added post login.
Of the bloatware, I find the inability to turn off installing these apps (except Booking.com) as part of the setup to be frustrating. You can uninstall the other apps once you login, but you’re forced to take them at the start – seemingly hoping you’ll forget they’re there.
Final Thoughts
The moto edge 70 is a hard phone to go past when it comes to design, performance and build quality.
The thin and light design puts it into the same conversation as the thin and light phone offerings from Samsung and Apple, yet the $599 price tag (for pre-order) makes it an absolute steal.
The feel in-hand is excellent, and the camera system takes some great shots in almost any lighting conditions. The 4800mAh battery jammed into that tiny body lasts all-day, and charges blisteringly fast.
It’s not all sunshine, with the mid-range CPU not quite as fast as other models, and the audio could be better as well, but it handles well and makes for a compelling case for your next handset.
The only choice now is whether you grab it for $599 on pre-order, or pay the $899 premium after it officially launches.
Daniel has been talking about, learning about and using tech since he was able to toggle switches and push buttons. If it flashes, turns on or off or connects he wants to use it, talk about it and learn more about it. Like this article? Buy me a coffee!
