Motorola made its big comeback to the flagship smartphone market this week with the Edge Plus. Unfortunately, if you read the piece I wrote about it, you know that the phone won’t be sold outside of Verizon. That’s a bummer, but Motorola’s trying to make up for that with the standard Edge by selling it unlocked and through multiple different retailers.
The differences between the Edge and Edge Plus aren’t immediately evident if you simply look at their designs. In fact, they’re pretty much identical. Both the standard Edge and Edge Plus come with a 6.7-inch Full HD+ OLED 90Hz display with a 21:9 aspect ratio. They each include those nearly 90-degree curved edges on the left and right, and the regular Edge has all the edge-specific software features as the Edge Plus like shoulder buttons for games and a double-tap gesture to hide the edges.
Both phones are covered in glass, come with USB-C ports, have dual stereo speakers powered by Waves, and headphones jacks. It’s on the inside and the rear of the standard Edge where you start noticing real differences.
The Edge Plus has a full flagship spec sheet including a Snapdragon 865, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 5,000mAh battery. Meanwhile, the regular Edge takes things a few notches down. It ships with a Snapdragon 765G chipset, 128GB of storage, and a 4,500mAh battery. What’s both weird and really disappointing is the face the Edge only comes with 4GB of RAM. In a world where even Apple has started shipping some of its phones with 6GB of random access memory, I can’t quite figure out why Motorola decided 4GB was enough, especially when it’s shipping its top-tier flagship with three times the amount.
The cameras also see a downgrade compared to the Edge Plus. The Motorola Edge gets a main 64MP shooter (compared to 108MP on the Edge Plus), an 8MP telephoto lens, and a 16MP ultra-wide. Those cameras along with the 25MP selfie shooter should remain identical between the devices, but when taking normal photos with the main camera, you’ll likely see some type of difference.
The regular Edge loses 6K video capture compared to the Edge Plus, and you can only shoot in up to 4K at 30 frames per second. Speaking of losing things, the Edge doesn’t come with wireless charging either which is bewildering to say the least. You also don’t get mmWave 5G, with the regular Edge sticking with sub-6GHz spectrums.
Oddly enough though, the Edge has a microSD card slot while the Edge Plus does not.
While Motorola made some questionable decisions with this phone (4GB of RAM? Really?), the standard Edge looks like a pretty solid offering. I don’t have a price or release date for the device yet, but that’s supposed to come this summer so stay tuned.
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