The Motorola Edge S is a semi-premium smartphone cheaper than its higher-end stablemate, the Moto Edge Plus. While its big brother doesn’t feature the same camera and processor, it still delivers excellent performance and solid battery life.
If you’re looking for a smartphone with an outstanding display, the Motorola Edge S is one of the best options. Its 6.6’’ 1080p OLED panel is bright and vibrant and offers excellent picture quality for watching movies and gaming.
Display
The 6.6-inch 1080p OLED display of the Edge S makes for terrific image quality. Its 144Hz refresh rate makes games, and other media-heavy apps feel fluid and smooth, offering a nice boost to UI speed.
Motorola’s design for this phone isn’t as bold as the Edge Plus, but it does look great in hand and gives the device a unique style that feels like it belongs beyond its mid-tier price point. It’s also slimmer than most competitors thanks to the 19.5:9 aspect ratio screen, removing the taller, narrower bezels standard on larger smartphones.
Under the hood, it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G processor that’s not as powerful as the 2020 flagships – but it performs well enough for most users. It’s paired with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage that can be expandable via microSD cards.
Camera
The camera of the Motorola Edge S is a bit of a mixed bag. Its primary sensor is high resolution and can offer short zoom functionality, while its tele-camera provides 3x optical zoom.
Generally, the video is excellent, with a pleasant texture and accurate skin tones indoors and outdoors. However, the camera’s low-light performance is poor, with frequent unnecessary refocusing and a tendency to blow out skies and the brightest highlights.
It’s also challenging to understand the Edge+’s noise level in videos, but it’s shallow in bright light. Spatial noise, measured for individual video frames, is at or below levels seen on reference phones, including the Samsung Note 10+ 5G and Sony Xperia XZ2 Premium.
The Edge+’s exposure score has taken a hit under our more rigorous tests and analysis, but it still broadly captures target exposures accurately in portraits. Dynamic range is pretty low, though it does manage to suppress the occasional hue shift artifact.
Battery
The 5,000mAh battery on the Motorola Edge S is one of the biggest this year. It’s not quite the massive 7,000mAh cell on 2020’s Galaxy S20 Ultra, but it’s a big battery.
The Edge is also a very light phone, at 170 grams, which makes it easy to slip into a pocket. It doesn’t feel tiresome to hold on to the edges of your pinky finger, and it’s a pleasure to use with its bright screen and high-refresh-rate display.
The Edge runs on a mid-range processor, but it’s no slouch when tested. It’s not fast enough to keep up with the latest flagships from Apple and Samsung, but it performs well enough for daily tasks.
Performance
The Motorola Edge S is one of the best-value flagships on the market. At a starting price of CNY 1999 (US$309), it’s an excellent value for anyone looking for a powerful device that doesn’t break the bank.
The Edge S is a 6.7-inch smartphone with plenty of features for its price tag. It sports a 5,000mAh battery with 20W fast charging support and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 octa-core processor integrated with 6GB of RAM and UFS3.1 storage.
The Edge S also includes a 144Hz high-refresh-rate screen, higher than many other screens in the same class. That quick refresh rate gives you a more intuitive and refreshing experience when watching videos or browsing the web.
