I tested Motorola's cheaper iPhone Air alternative, but it still didn't win me over to team thin-phone

Motorola Edge 70 two-minute review

The Edge series from Motorola has been one of the most consistently interesting lines of Android phones for cost-conscious buyers; they’re not always the best smartphones around, but they look classy and get you unrivaled value for money in the Android world. But I’m not so sure about the Motorola Edge 70, which has fallen in with the wrong crowd by trying to follow the new thin-phone ‘trend’.

Super-thin smartphones are starting to feel like a new bandwagon that tech companies are leaping on, apparently after having noticed the huge lack of interest buyers had in the last bandwagon: AI. This bandwagon’s turning out no better: we didn’t love the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, and the iPhone Air was lambasted online, and so the Motorola Edge 70 has a lot to prove.

Before testing the Edge 70, I thought Moto would be preaching to the choir; I gave the Edge 60 a glowing review (I think it's my favorite phone of the year), and was fond of the Edge 60 Pro too. Perhaps it should have been telling that the previous generation of Edge mobiles came out only six months prior, because this new Edge is nothing to write home about.

Yes, it’s thin, and yes, it’s light, but it’s still just as wide and tall as your average Android smartphone, so these two tweaked specs don’t exactly amount to a revolutionary redesign.

Beyond its chassis, this is another solid mid-range Android phone. There’s a decent processor and enough RAM to blast through games, a good-looking screen, a classy color scheme, and a competent camera array (albeit with a few downgrades from the Edge 60 Pro in certain areas).

However, the huge price jump up from the Edge 60 – and the solid increase on the Edge 60 Pro too – throws my ‘mid-range’ argument into disarray; this is an expensive mobile which doesn’t go nearly far enough in justifying that price.

Bear in mind the number of downgrades from the still-very-fresh Edge 60 line: the new Edge 70 loses a camera from the 60 and 60 Pro, and also misses out on the fast charging and strong performance of the latter. And remember: the 60 Pro is a cheaper phone.

That’s doubly painful when you consider how much bloatware there is on this newer device; it's a symptom of a cheap phone that feels out of place when you’re buying a phone that’s only a little less pricey than the Samsung Galaxy S25 or iPhone 17.

Generally speaking, the Edge 70 runs smoothly, and there are a few things to like. I like how the Water Touch feature makes the phone easy to use when your hands are wet, the screen looks good, and the amount of on-board storage and RAM is great. And there's no denying that the Edge 70 is cheaper than its thin-phone rivals, even if that's simply because they're even more ludicrously priced.

A slightly-thinner-than-average body doesn’t make the price make sense, though, especially when the Motorola Edge 60 is basically half the price. Even though it’s a solid phone all around, the cost makes it hard to recommend the Edge 70 over its six-month senior.

Motorola Edge 70 review: price and availability

• Released in November 2025
• £699.98 (roughly $920, AU$1,400)
• No US release expected; AU possibly

Motorola announced the Edge 70 on November 5, 2025, and put it on sale shortly afterwards.

You can buy the Motorola Edge 70 for £699.98 (roughly $920, AU$1,400). The phone won’t be released in the US, as Moto has a different Edge strategy there, but I’m expecting it to come out in Australia at some point in the near future based on precedent.

That’s a massive price increase from the £379 (roughly $520, AU$700) asking price of the Edge 60, but also more than the £599 (around $800, AU$1,250) of the Edge 60 Pro.

The Edge is, at least, cheaper than its rivals: the Galaxy Edge (Samsung’s phone, not the Star Wars theme park) begins at $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$1,849, while the iPhone Air goes for $999 / £999 / AU$1,799. Yikes.

Motorola Edge 70 review: specs

Motorola Edge 70 review: design

• Thin (5.9mm) and light (159g)
• Comes in three Pantone colors
• Military-grade protections

I spent the introduction to this review comparing the Moto Edge 70 to its thin-phone contemporaries; it’s 5.9mm thick, and you can feel how svelte it is just by picking it up. It's so thin, in fact, that I felt duty-bound to protect it with the rigid plastic in-box case, thereby mitigating the benefits of a slender mobile in the first place.

The rest of the dimensions are more in line with your standard smartphone: it's 74mm wide and 159.4mm long. Mind you, in weighing 159g, it feels lighter in the hand than the average mobile.

Color company Pantone continues its quest to paint all the Edge phones in various distinct hues; this time around, we’ve got Gadget Grey (a mostly-boring grey but with some blue highlights), Lily Pad (olive green with some orange highlights), and the one I used, Bronze Green (dark green with lighter-green highlights – there’s no bronze to speak of).

As always, the use of some interesting colors immediately makes this Moto one of my favorite-looking phones of the year, and the textured back just adds something to the panache. I do wish that Motorola had given the Edge 70 a curved-edge screen like in some of the past generations, but presumably, this wouldn’t work with the thin body. The lack of it means that, visually speaking, the Edge 70 is ‘one of’ my favorites, but the Edge 60 family pips it to the post.

Let’s talk about ports and buttons. There’s a USB-C port on the bottom edge (no 3.5mm jack for audio), a power button and volume rocker on the right edge, and, right out of reach on the left, the AI button.

The Edge 70 is IP68/69 protected against dust and water submersion, and is also compliant with the military MIL-STD-810H standard, which means it’s tough against the knocks and bumps that a military-grade piece of kit would need to be.

If you decide to use the in-box case to protect the phone, you're not making a bad decision because it's nice and solid (not a cheapie silicon thing that many phone makers put in the box). But it's also incredibly hard to get onto the phone, and nearly as hard to remove, so you're going to need some good luck and brute strength. If you're buying this phone for your grandma, you should stick around to help her get the thing on!

• Design score: 4 / 5

Motorola Edge 70 review: display

• 6.7 inches, 2712 x 1220 resolution
• 120Hz refresh rate, 20:9 aspect ratio
• Water Touch adds some extra usability

The Motorola Edge 70 has a 6.7-inch screen, which is roughly the average size for an Android smartphone. The resolution (2712 x 1200) is also what you’d expect from such a mobile.

A few other specs and features help the phone’s display stand out, though. It has a nice high max brightness of 4,500 nits, a 120Hz refresh rate, support for HDR 10+, and some optimizations from Pantone.

A feature I really appreciate is Water Touch, which basically just means the screen will pick up your touches better if you’ve got wet hands or if the display has droplets on it. No longer does bathtime prohibit the use of screens.

Breaking up the display at the top is a punch-hole cut-out for the front camera, but it’s so small and unobtrusive that you’ll easily forget it was there.

• Display score: 4 / 5

Motorola Edge 70 review: software

• Android 16 with four guaranteed updates
• Bloatware (pre-installed apps) abounds
• Moto's AI app has yet to prove itself

While Motorola phones have long used stock Android as their operating system, the company has slowly been tweaking the formula in myriad ways over successive generations of Edge. So, while the Edge 70 technically has stock Android 16, it’s not exactly the same as the stock Android software you’d see on Pixel phones – mostly for the worse.

The worst is that, at least on first start-up, Motorola has opted to copy some cheap Chinese phone makers in plastering its devices with bloatware. When you first boot up the Edge 70, it’s already full of apps like Amazon Music, TikTok, and Booking.com, and while you can delete them all, it doesn’t help but make it feel like your own mobile is one walking billboard.

Most of these apps are innocuous, at least, but some raise eyebrows. Perplexity is one – an AI search engine with myriad active lawsuits and accusations against it – and controversy-laden e-retailer Temu is another. It bears repeating that this phone isn’t that different in price from the iPhone 17 – seeing pre-installed apps at all, especially ones of this caliber, leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Motorola’s also pushing harder into its own AI tools than most other companies, mostly with its Moto AI, an assistant that’s slowly gaining skills and tools with each new Moto phone I test.

However, its feature list is still quite eclectic (note-taking, playlist generation, and file organization seem to be its main tools, according to Moto’s website), and none of them really solve problems I’d otherwise have on my smartphone. I used Moto AI when I was testing the Edge 70, but I no doubt would have ignored it if I were using the phone normally.

Not all the changes to stock Android are terrible, and I’ve long liked Motorola’s customization and navigation features. And if you ignore the AI and delete the bloatware, the phone runs decently well. It’s set to get four years of security updates (presumably up to Android 20), and five years of security updates.

• Software score: 3 / 5

Motorola Edge 70 review: cameras

• 50MP main and 50MP ultra-wide cameras
• 50MP front-facing
• Some odd over-brightening issues

Motorola’s marketing materials make a point of how the Edge 70 has three 50MP cameras; this is technically true, but don’t imagine for a moment that the Edge 70 has three rear cameras like the Edge 60 members did. Instead, it only has two, with that third high-res snapper being the one on the front, and I’m disappointed that Moto opted to drop the telephoto lens that made the last generation surprisingly solid camera phones.

On the back, then, we’ve got a 50MP main snapper with OIS and a 50MP ultra-wide with a 120-degree field of view. Nope, no telephoto lens.

I've previously been quite negative about the cameras on Motorola phones, as the optimization software doesn't match that on rival mobiles, making pictures look a little dull. Usually, the low price of the phone justifies these shortcomings, but that's obviously not the case here. Thankfully, I wasn't too put out by the snaps either.

With sufficient lighting, pictures have a fair amount of color and detail, and autofocus was fairly quick to find objects. Manual focus was a bit of an issue, though; usually, I find tapping on an object in the viewfinder does the job, but when I tried it in the Edge 70's camera app, it also changed the brightness of the shot... quite dramatically.

Look at the two snaps of cookies in the camera sample section; the first one is default, the second is when I pressed on the snack. I like a bright picture as much as the next guy, but it's a little too much in that particular case.

I took quite a few low-light photos with the camera; it's that period of the year where we have about three minutes of sunlight, after all. The camera held up well, presumably thanks to a solid sensor that takes in lots of light.

Around the front, the selfie camera uses pixel binning to ensure snaps have enough light; you can see the results on a pretty gray day below.

Taking a stroll through the rest of the phone app, you'll find most of the standard options you've come to expect on a smartphone: night vision, panorama, portrait photography, slow-mo and time-lapse videography, and so on.

You can record video at 4K at 30fps or FHD at 60fps, and slow-mo switches between 120fps at FHD or 240fps at HD.

• Camera score: 3.5 / 5

Motorola Edge 70 camera samples

Image 1 of 11

Motorola Edge 70 review: performance and audio

• Mid-range Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset
• 12GB RAM and 512GB Storage
• Dolby Atmos-tuned stereo speakers

Looking under the hood, the Motorola Edge 70 has a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset, which is a mid-range piece of kit we’ve seen in a handful of Androids, including the Realme 15 Pro and Vivo V60. While seeing ‘mid-range’ may cause you to be wary, let me win you back over: there’s 12GB RAM and a hearty 512GB storage. Now those are specs I like to see!

I took the Edge for a whirl (well, many whirls over two weeks) playing Call of Duty: Mobile and Northgard, and was impressed by how close the performance was to that of phones with top-end chipsets or more RAM. Playing hectic online games, I never felt like I was lagging or dropping behind in a way that affected my performance, and the phone seemed fine to render loads of assets or enemies at once.

When I put the Edge 70 through the Geekbench 6 multi-core benchmark test, it returned an average score of 4,115 (though, notably, with a bigger variation in results than I normally see with this test). That reflects the mid-range status of the mobile, with Snapdragon 8 Gen chipsets scoring in the 5,000-6,000 range (or even higher), though it is a little way behind the Edge 60 Pro, which used a top-end chipset from a different company.

Honestly, though, when you get to a certain point, these numbers are just numbers. I never felt that the Edge 70 lacked performance when I was gaming, and that’s what matters.

Audio-wise, the Edge 70 has dual stereo speakers, which were tuned with some Dolby Atmos magic. Otherwise, for listening to music, you can use the Bluetooth 5.4 to connect wirelessly, or via a wired connection if you can find an adaptor to plug your cans into the USB-C port (there’s no headphone jack).

• Performance score: 4 / 5

Motorola Edge 70 review: battery life

• 4,800mAh battery
• 68W wired charging
• 15W wireless powering

Despite being a thin smartphone, the Edge 70 has a battery that’s roughly average in capacity: 4,800mAh, which a few years ago we’d have called positively huge.

I’m not going to pretend it grants the Edge a miraculously long battery life, as it’s powering a pretty big display, but it ensures the handset will easily last a full day of use. During my testing, the Edge 70 reliably waltzed through half of day two before needing to be powered up.

Charging is done at 68W, which is the same as most past Moto Edge phones, and 15W wireless charging has been thrown in for good measure. You’re getting from empty to full in about 40 minutes if you charge with a compatible cable.

• Battery score: 3.5 / 5

Motorola Edge 70 review: value

Thin phones are, unfortunately, exceedingly expensive devices. When you consider that, in the Edge 70, you’re getting one for substantially less than the iPhone Air, perhaps you can convince yourself that you’re getting a good deal.

But if you look at the Motorola Edge 70 as the sum of its parts, it’s hard to deny that it doesn’t offer great value for money. Its specs are mostly all mid-ranged, with much cheaper alternatives from various rivals beating it six ways from Sunday.

So, if you absolutely need a smartphone that’s a few millimeters thinner than your current one, no matter the price, at least this is getting you better value than the iPhone or Samsung. But if you’re happy to consider all your options, no matter their thickness, skipping the Edge 70 is a no-brainer.

• Value score: 3 / 5

Should you buy the Motorola Edge 70?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Motorola Edge 70 review: Also consider

Let's take a proper look at those phones I've been comparing the Motorola Edge 70 to:

How I tested the Motorola Edge 70

• Review test period = 2 weeks
• Testing included = Everyday usage, including web browsing, social media, photography, video calling, gaming, streaming video, music playback
• Tools used = Geekbench 6, Geekbench ML, GFXBench, native Android stats

I used the Motorola Edge 70 for two weeks in order to write this review. That's the usual TechRadar test period, and a figure I use as an absolute minimum in order to ensure I've given every gadget a fair shake.

In that time, I used the Edge 70 as my normal smartphone for tasks like social media, photography, and gaming. Outside of full testing, I also took it for a few camera tests to collect more samples for the gallery. Alongside experiential use, I used a few lab tests to gauge certain metrics of the phone.

I've been reviewing mobiles at TechRadar for over six years now. I tested both members of the Edge 60 family, and have used most previous Moto Edge devices, as well as countless other handsets made by the company (and, of course, non-Moto phones too!).

Read more about how we test

First reviewed November 2025