The Motorola Edge+ (2022) is a smartphone with a lot riding on it. Motorola’s smartphone focus has been positioned on the budget and mid-range space for the last few years. If you’re in the market for a phone that costs between $400 and $200, there’s a strong chance you’ll buy one with a Motorola logo on it. This is the niche Motorola has found the most commercial success in, and as a result, its interest in flagship smartphones has diminished significantly.
But that changed a couple of years ago. Motorola launched the first Edge+ in 2020 to mark its big re-entry into the flagship smartphone space. But that re-entry ended up being a mixed bag. The Edge+ (2020) was praised for its fast performance, huge battery, and clean software. However, along with all of that praise, it was mocked just as much for its lacking camera system, non-waterproof design, and disappointing update policy. The Edge+ (2020) was a valiant attempt from Motorola, even if it failed to make a lasting impression.
Fast forward to March 2022, and we now have the Edge+ (2022). The second-gen version of the Edge+ has many of the same qualities that made its predecessor so good: fast performance, excellent battery life, and a clean out-of-the-box software experience. It also retains most of the issues that plagued the Edge+ from two years ago. There’s a lot about the Edge+ (2022) that I’ve enjoyed during my past week of testing. But as a $1000 handset competing with the Galaxy S22+ and iPhone 13 Pro, Motorola still has some kinks to iron out with its flagship formula.
That sentiment is perfectly represented with the Edge+’s design. Aesthetically, the Edge+ doesn’t do anything to set itself apart from the myriad of other phones available today. It has a slick glass back, a triple-camera system in the top left corner, and a big display with a hole-punch cutout. It’s not an offensive or bad design, but it also feels like every other Android phone released in the last couple of years.
A bland design isn’t a huge offense in its own right, but those boring aesthetics are also paired with some odd hardware decisions. The Edge+ (2022) is available in Cosmic Blue and Stardust White colors. Motorola sent me the former of the two, and while it has eye-catching color shifts in certain lighting, the reflective nature is ruined by how many fingerprints the glass back attracts. No matter how often I try wiping off and cleaning the back, it’s littered with smudges and streaks in seconds. I’m also not a fan of the Edge+’s buttons. The power button and volume rocker are placed near the top of the right frame. The power button is easy enough to reach, but the volume rocker is so far up that I repeatedly hit the power button when trying to adjust the volume — even after over a week of daily use with the phone. The one upside is that the integrated fingerprint sensor in the power button has proved consistently fast and reliable. What’s not an upside, though, is the Edge+’s vibration motor. It feels weak, is annoyingly loud, and reminds me of vibration motors used in Motorola’s budget handsets.
But the design complaints don’t stop there. Motorola listened to people’s feedback and added waterproofing to the Edge+ (2022) — but only barely. The Edge+ ships with an IP52 rating. IP52 means the phone is mostly protected against dust and can survive spraying/dripping water (such as a rainstorm or splashes from a sink). But IP52 is much less comprehensive than the IP68 ratings found on most other flagship smartphones. The Edge+ (2022) is not fully dust-tight and cannot be submerged in any amount of water. It’s technically more durable than the Edge+ (2020), but it’s still a considerable step backward compared to virtually all of the competition.
Some people may look at those complaints and call them nitpicks. And that’s a fair point! If this were another mid-range Motorola phone that cost $300 or $400, I’d be OK with a boring design, awkward buttons, a lousy vibration motor, and disappointing water resistance. But for a smartphone Motorola’s trying to sell for $1000, those minor details are things it needed to get right. And, unfortunately, it didn’t.
Thankfully for Motorola, things take a more positive turn when looking at the display. The Edge+ (2022) touts a 6.7-inch OLED display with a 2400 x 1080 resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate — faster than the 120Hz setting on the S22, iPhone 13 Pro, and other handsets. Those specs all translate to an excellent display for the Edge+. Colors are vibrant, the text is plenty crisp, and that 144Hz panel lets everything move with incredible fluidity.
Like other phones, the Edge+ automatically scales the 144Hz refresh rate to lower settings when it isn’t needed. Watching a video or looking at a photo? The 144Hz is temporarily reduced to conserve battery life. It’s a necessary feature, but it needs more fine-tuning from Motorola. The 144Hz panel looks excellent when it works, but far too often, it gets tripped up and deactivates when it shouldn’t. In the Twitter app, for example, opening an image causes the app to run at 60Hz until you manually close and open it again. Videos in the Twitch app lower the refresh rate far too much, causing them to look jittery and laggy. I’ve also encountered issues where the home screen randomly starts moving at 60Hz for no apparent reason. You can technically avoid these hiccups by forcing the Edge+ (2022) to always run at 144Hz, but doing so decimates otherwise great battery.
Those are a lot of negatives for the Edge+, so let’s switch to something the phone excels at: performance. The Motorola Edge+ (2022) is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip and 12GB of RAM. Paired with the 144Hz refresh rate, this is a smartphone that moves with incredible speed. Navigating the UI feels fantastic, apps open quickly, and the Edge+ does an excellent job keeping multiple apps open and running in the background without force-closing them.
Just as impressive as the Edge+’s performance is its battery life. Inside the phone is a 4800 mAh battery. That’s slightly smaller than the 5000 mAh Motorola used in the Edge+ (2020), but it’s also larger than the 4500 mAh battery inside the Galaxy S22+. Those numbers aside, the important thing to know is that battery life on the Edge+ is great. At the end of a 9-hour day with over 4 hours of screen time (much of which was spent watching live Twitch streams), the Edge+ ended the day at 11:08 PM with 54 percent battery still remaining. It then made it to 10:58 PM the next day with 15 percent battery left in the tank. The Edge+ racked up nearly 6 hours of screen time between those two days — including almost 4 hours of live video streaming, lots of camera use, and more. Motorola advertises the Edge+ as a two-day smartphone, and that claim holds true.
What’s slightly less impressive are the Edge+’s charging options. The phone’s capable of 30W wired charging, 15W wireless charging, and 5W wireless power-sharing. Those are good numbers, but the 30W wired charging pales in comparison to the 45W and 80W numbers offered by some competitors. The upside, however, is that the Edge+ includes a 30W charging adapter in the box. This is something Apple, Samsung, Google, and many other companies no longer offer, so it’s nice to see Motorola bucking the trend here.
Then we have the camera system. While the Edge+ (2022) appears to have a triple-camera system like any other modern flagship, it pulls this off with a cheap trick. The Edge+ (2022) ships with a 50MP primary camera, a 50MP ultra-wide camera, and a 2MP depth camera. Depth cameras like this are usually reserved for budget and mid-range phones as a way to inflate their spec sheet. Any benefit the depth camera provides to the Edge+ (2022) is negligible at best, but it allows Motorola to tout it as a three-camera smartphone. This also means that the Edge+ doesn’t have a telephoto/periscope zoom camera. That’s been an expected feature of expensive flagships for a couple of years now, but it’s something the Edge+ totally omits.
As for the two 50MP cameras that you do have access to, they’re perfectly adequate and nothing more. The primary camera has an f/1.8 aperture, 1.0μm pixels, and optical image stabilization. Testing the Edge+ against the iPhone 13 Pro, there was never a situation in which I preferred the Edge+’s picture. Different shooting scenarios often caused unnatural colors, blown-out detail, etc. The above photo is a great example. The Edge+ took the photo on the left, while the iPhone 13 Pro took the picture on the right. Motorola’s phone really oversaturates the dog’s fur to the point where it looks like a bad Instagram filter was applied. The iPhone photo isn’t quite as punchy, but it’s much more accurate to real life.
The Edge+ (2022) also has a difficult time with direct sunlight. Above is a picture of my cat Polo sitting near my office window looking outside. The Edge+ picture on the left is blurry, loses a lot of the detail in the fur, and is tarnished with a weird light halo across Polo’s body.
This next picture isn’t much better. This was taken around 7:50 AM while the sun was still starting to rise. The Edge+ picture on the left brightens the scene too much and makes it look a bit hazy (all while struggling to preserve much detail in the grass in front of the pond). The iPhone 13 Pro retains much more detail, isn’t afraid to keep the image a bit darker (like it was in real life), and ends up being a much nicer photo to my eyes. While this isn’t the worst camera I’ve ever used on a smartphone, it also doesn’t feel like one that belongs on a $1000 device. The Edge+ (2022) is capable of taking decent-looking photos, but it just can’t compete with what other flagship phones are capable of. And since Motorola is positioning the Edge+ (2022) as a competitor to those other flagships, it makes these lackluster shots all the more disappointing.
Last but not least, there’s the Edge+’s software. The phone ships with Android 12 paired with Motorola’s ‘My UX’ interface. In reality, the software on the Edge+ is virtually identical to what you get on the Pixel 6. And that’s amazing. The Android 12 UI running on the Motorola Edge+ (2022) feels like it was plucked straight from Google’s hands. It has a colorful Quick Settings panel with big buttons, a simplified Settings app, and — most importantly — Android 12’s Material You theme engine.
This is further helped by Motorola’s restraint with unnecessary bloat. The extra features it does add (like Peek Display and gestures for opening the camera/enabling the flashlight) are legitimately useful additions on top of ‘stock’ Android. They’re also all neatly packaged into the built-in Moto app. Use them if you want, ignore them if you don’t care, and there’s nothing more to worry about. My Verizon model of the Edge+ (2022) did come with quite a few pre-installed games and Verizon-branded apps, but that shouldn’t be an issue for the unlocked variant. And if you do end up with the Verizon one, most of the apps are uninstallable if you don’t want them.
Unfortunately, Motorola has to put a bad spin on all of this with its lackluster update policy. The Edge+ (2022) is promised just two major Android updates and three years of security patches. That’s terrible support for a $1000 smartphone, and if you’ve followed Motorola at all over the last few years, you know that’s nothing new for the company. Motorola keeps trying to defend itself with the fact that it regularly updates its own apps from the Google Play Store. But that’s doesn’t cut it. It’s not a good excuse for a $300 Moto G phone, and sure as heck isn’t a good excuse for a $1000 Edge+.
But don’t just take my word for it. Look at what other Android manufacturers are doing. The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro are both promised three years of major Android updates and five years of security updates. Samsung’s even better in this regard — offering four years of Android updates and five years of security updates for the S22 series, the Z Fold 3/Z Flip 3, and even its new Galaxy A53 5G and A33 5G budget phones. There’s absolutely no reason Motorola should limit a $1000 flagship to just two updates, but alas, that’s what we have here.
What frustrates me so much about the Edge+ (2022) is that it’s on the cusp of being an excellent phone. It has a high-quality display, a great fingerprint sensor, blazing performance, outstanding battery life, and a software experience that I want to keep coming back to. But for all the things the Edge+ does well, it pairs them with something that makes the phone difficult to use. Whether it’s the inconsistent refresh rate, lacking camera system, or limited water resistance, there are areas where the Edge+ (2022) clearly loses to other flagships on the market.
Those shortcomings would be easy to forgive if the Edge+ was available for $600 or $700. But it’s not. Motorola’s promoting and selling the Edge+ (2022) as a $1000 smartphone that’s supposed to take on the iPhone 13 Pro, Pixel 6 Pro, and Galaxy S22+. And it’s just isn’t there. A few tweaks could have made the Edge+ (2022) one of the year’s best phones, but as it currently stands, it ends up being an interesting flagship that’s all but impossible to recommend over any of the other phones mentioned above.
That’s not because the Edge+ is bad. It’s actually a very good phone that I’ve quite enjoyed using. But if Motorola really wants to compete in the big leagues, it needs to create a phone that trounces the competition and brings something fresh and exciting to the table. That means bucking its poor update policy, creating a meaningful camera system, and actually putting R&D into its design. Until those things happen, it’s difficult to see where Motorola’s flagship ambitions go from here.
Source: Motorola