Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Moto Edge+ Review: We Need to Talk!”.
Hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here and motorola is back in the flagship smartphone game. Do you realize how long it’s been and, to be honest, i kind of miss these. You know it wasn’t that long ago that i remember the moto x and the droid series being super competitive and unique and and just motorola in general, bringing a certain spice to the high-end flagship game before their absence. But then they didn’t make one for a couple years, so they did budget phones for a while and they dropped a folding phone, but now it’s 20 20 and they’re back with a flagship. So what do they pack in well? Snapdragon. 865. 12.
Gigs of ram 256 gigs of fast ufs, 3.0 storage and a 5 000 milliamp hour battery, there’s a triple camera on the back headlined by a 108 megapixel main shooter. This thing’s got 5g radios and it’s capped off with a 6.7 inch, 90 hertz oled display. That is massively curved around the sides, hence the name edge plus. So there’s a lot of good things here. But it’s far from perfect and there are some things that are frustrating, that sort of feel like come from: motorola being rusty, making flagship phones and we got to talk about the whole curve display thing. But, first of all, i mostly really like the way this phone is built.
You know it’s metal and glass like any other flagship, and it has some character with the curves in the top and bottom rails that i like and yes you’re, not seeing things. That is a headphone jack on a flagship phone in 2020. One of the last you’ll find speaker at the bottom.
That’S paired with the earpiece at the top to my ear, gets pretty loud and sounds really good, but what’s funny is even as thick as this phone is the camera bump on the back for those huge cameras still sticks out even more and since it’s off to The side – yes, it absolutely still rocks on a table classic, but the one thing i dislike, the most isn’t the camera bump or the fingerprint magnet. That is the back of this phone. But it’s because this display this waterfall display so dramatically. Curves over the edges, like the huawei mate 30 pro, it pushes the buttons on the side of the phone back from the center, so they’re, not in the middle anymore. They’Re, like pushed back even further from the middle, where they’d usually be, and also i usually like when the volume buttons are on the opposite side of the phone as the power button, but they’re all on one side here. But i guess that’s something you can pretty easily get used to. Oh you know what else i recently noticed when you shake this phone aside from turning on the flashlight. It makes this noise. You hear that so i thought that noise was coming from the buttons like rattling inside the phone, which is like. Oh that’s, not very good quality. That’S not very good feeling, but you still get that noise. When you hold the buttons down turns out that noise is coming from the giant camera and the optically image stabilized sensor inside the back of the phone here, i verified that, because the same sort of system in the galaxy s20 ultra also makes this rattling noise. So anyway, it’s not an actual fault of the phone. I just felt like pointing it out, because i noticed it um these sensors are getting huge. Also, don’t shake your phone that much.
I missed the motorola flagship software treatment like a lot. There’S not that many like it, but it’s really nice, it’s relatively clean, android 10 with motorola features added. That’S always what i loved about those previous motorola flagships. If you go back and watch those old reviews, this is almost the same thing. You have the motorola actions. The double chop to turn on the flashlight, the double twist to quickly open the camera app and all that stuff is still here. There’S also motorola’s couple widgets, including this time and weather one on the home screen with this weirdly low frame rate animation. But it’s still pretty much mostly what i would expect, but i guess they’ve gotten a bit rusty, because this verizon exclusive phone has more bloatware pre-installed than i’ve seen on any premium phone in a long time. I actually didn’t uninstall any of them yet so you can see them all here, but it came with all these games. Two different versions of candy crush um, the verizon cloud, app, a digital, secure, app, there’s disney, plus and then another game and then another game sheesh. I i didn’t know initially if this is a verizon thing or a motorola thing, probably a verizon thing uh but yeah. Of course you can just go through and uninstall them all one by one, but it just doesn’t feel premium when you have to go through that.
Also, one other little thing that doesn’t feel flagship quality on this phone is the vibration motor, something that’s underrated on a lot of those really good phones. This one has one that’s kind of rattly and doesn’t feel that great on par with, like 400 phones. I wish it was better, but the battery is one thing i can’t complain about, though five thousand milliamp hours is here, it’s a huge sell and that’s a trend. I’M happy to see continuing in these flagships and it’s translated. Well, i was getting regularly six plus hours of screen on time, which is awesome and it was lasting through the end of the day, with battery to spare, which is what matters, and i guess that makes perfect sense for a phone with a 1080p display and such A huge battery and there’s also wireless charging, and it comes with a decently fast charger in the box. The one thing i’d be hesitant about well not hesitant, really just just to keep in mind, is this is a 5g phone, that’s one of their main focuses of it on verizon, which cool great um, but i’m not in a 5g area. You might have seen my 5g explain video where i was testing verizon’s millimeter wave 5g, if not i’ll, leave it below the like button. But basically i live near new york city, which is one of those cities. That’S lighting up with 5g now, but that millimeter wave does not reach here from there. So i’ve been using this as a 4g phone. Basically since then, so that means someday in the theoretical future. They’Ll be lighting up 5g around here and then this phone will connect to that and it’ll start getting those better speeds, but also that will draw more battery life.
You know how much more we don’t know, but that’s why 5g phones have all had mostly bigger batteries. Um but generally 5000 million powers, i’m not complaining, and then this camera 108 megapixels now you might be thinking, wait. A second we’ve seen that number before and you’d be right.
Galaxy s20. Ultra me note 10. This is another 108 megapixel main camera and for the most part, it’s pretty similar to samsung’s camera matter.
Of fact, the colors are quite nice and the shots are very detailed as you’d expect. Dynamic range is nice, with auto hdr as well, and it’s spitting out 27 megapixel photos by default and basically, if you give it a little light, you get good shots, but it struggles again. I have to mention this with the sensor being so huge and the super shallow depth of field that comes with that, especially with closer up subjects. You’Ve heard me say this before, but you know sometimes a shallow depth of field looks cool i’ve raved about that in the past, but to a certain limit look at this photo.
I took of a sign it’s crazy. It looks normal at first, but the left side of the sign is sharp and in focus, but the right side is a little out of the plane of focus. So it’s blurry sheesh. Now you’ve probably heard me talk about this before, but the real problem here is motorola’s viewfinder in their camera, app sharpens the crap out of whatever you’re taking a photo of it looks it’s like cranked to a hundred like you know that lightroom clarity, filter or if You just turn sharpness all the way up.
It looks like an effect, so the sharpness is exaggerated, literally to a point where you can’t actually tell looking through the viewfinder. If you’re nailing focus or not, i took shots like this by pointing and shooting thinking focus was fine because it was sharp in the viewfinder. But then, when i looked at the picture closely – and i saw what happened, i had to take it again, and this happened. Multiple times, here’s a screenshot of the viewfinder of what i’m seeing and then the photo that i got and again when you zoom in a bit. You realize it’s a bit out of focus and you have to actually look at the photo to realize and take another picture. You can legitimately actually miss focus. If you don’t check motorola. Why are you sharpening the viewfinder this much? You have a good camera tone.
It down relax, but also, i feel like we could use that dual aperture feature again anyway, before i rant about this curved screen. Let’S cool down a bit with a message from this video sponsor honey, so we’re all doing a lot more of our shopping online nowadays. So, thanks to honey saving money during this process is now easier than ever, because honey is an online shopping tool that will find promo codes and apply them to your cart. So in just a few clicks, you install the honey plug-in and your browser of choice.
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When you get a notification, when your alarm clock goes off the whole side thing, they really love it uh. They also named the phone the edge plus, but can we stop? I hope the world can see now what’s really going on out here, because it’s getting ridiculous. It’S really ridiculous, like there was a day a few years ago, where every smartphone display was pretty much flat, but as we start to reach out towards those edges and shrink the bezels a bit samsung tried one of the sides rolling over the edge because hey there’s Samsung and they can try stuff tossed a news ticker and some stocks over there and some quirky features on the side, and suddenly it was a hit people loved it because it looked cool and next thing you know their next phone has both the sides flowing over The edges and we’re loving it and other companies are scrambling to figure out.
How can we get our displays to do that too? Meanwhile, accidental touches start to become a thing, but you know what it’s early they’ll iron that out, but that never really fully got ironed out. Now, don’t get me wrong, it still looks super cool. That’S the whole point it’s. This is prime form over function, but it turns out that curve over the edges. It doesn’t really seem to be worth the extra cost and the extra accidental touches. We still get no matter how much they’ve worked on this palm rejection software, and so now, if you look back at samsung’s newest flagships, the galaxy s20 is one of the first ones. Going back to flatter displays turns out it’s okay to roll back on some things. We had capacitive buttons at the bottom of phones for a long while before we just stopped that completely you don’t see it anymore. We’Ve had ring flashes, we’ve had branded bezels, we’ve had flaps over ports for better water resistance, but all of those things we slowly realized. There’S better ways to do that or this isn’t the best idea and now they’re gone it’s okay to roll back on things, and so this is my formal petition to realize that these curved over screens at least these extreme ones, these 90 degree waterfall edges.
We can work it back thanks for coming to my ted talk, also not to pile on, but this is the worst fingerprint reader i’ve ever seen under glass ever like. I really don’t know what happened here. I’Ve tried re-registering my fingerprint twice using a different finger, but this reader gives me the most failed attempts and the slowest average speed i have ever seen in an in-glass fingerprint reader. So couldn’t leave that out. So, to sum it all up i’ve liked using this phone, but i didn’t love it and when you start to shop around and compare it like the oneplus 8 pro that i just came from, has a higher resolution. A higher refresh rate screen, a better quality screen. Overall turns out about the same quality camera system, uh much faster charging, there’s the same specs, a better fingerprint reader, cleaner software, no bloatware fast software updates and less of a curve around the screen. So you know the smaller battery is maybe the only downside.
But what reason is there to buy the moto for 9.99? I just think it falls in that category of phones that you’d be okay with using if you got it, but there are other better phones to buy out there and i think someone’s got to say it. It’S really just time to be done with those curved displays and i don’t think motorola is done by any means with trying out flagships. I think they’ll be back at least i hope so either way, that’s been it thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace. .