Motorola Edge 20
Worth considering if you love thin and light phones and want a zoom camera, but the Edge 20 has flaws
PRICE 128GB, £358 (£430 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com
The Motorola Edge 20 is what most other Motorola phones are not: slim. In fact, it’s positively skinny at 7mm. Even with its supplied silicone jacket on, it feels the same depth as a normal “naked” phone, and Motorola evidently wants you to use this case as the Edge 20 is already wearing it in the box. This makes sense, as without it the stick-out camera housing means the phone doesn’t sit flat on a table – risking damage to the lenses and the little rings of metal sitting around them. Chipping off their thin layer of black paint is a sure-fire way to make your Motorola Edge 20 look tatty.
A case also hides this phone’s plastic back. Motorola says the sides are aluminium, but as they’re covered in paint the end result is a phone that feels plastic – aside from the display glass, of course, which is Gorilla Glass 3. That’s far better than the cheaper, toughened glass that Motorola usually uses in its lower-end phones, but Gorilla Glass 3 is now nine years old.
The Edge 20’s screen is worth protecting. It’s a 6.7in OLED display with a 1,080 x 2,400 resolution, esolution, which is as sharp harp as you can hope for at t this price. The large surface urface area makes it a great reat canvas for YouTube videos. ideos. My one gripe is fixable: xable: fresh out of the box, ox, the Motorola Edge 20 is set to its Saturated colour olour mode, which exhibits xhibits overly vibrant reds eds and greens. I prefer the he tamed Natural mode, which also has a warmer colour olour temperature.
Then we come to what might seem like the screen’s creen’s most important feature, eature, a 144Hz refresh rate. ate. That is indeed higher than han the 120Hz of rival phones, but I didn’t find the extra 24Hz worthwhile. Besides, if you use the Auto refresh rate mode – and most people will, as it’s the default – the maximum refresh rate the screen uses is 120Hz. You’ll only see 144Hz if you manually choose it.
That uses more battery power, though, which the phone can’t afford. There’s only room for a 4,000mAh battery in the slim chassis, and while the Edge 20 always lasted a full day during my time with it, it never had much charge left by 11pm. Still, the supplied 30W charger took it from flat to 41% in 15 minutes, and to 76% in half an hour. A full charge takes 61 minutes.
With a Snapdragon 778G inside, the Edge 30 isn’t best suited to avid mobile gamers (its mono speaker doesn’t help, either). Fortnite will only play in its 30fps mode – the 60fps mode is only unlocked for select high-end phones – and even then there are occasional drops as big areas are revealed when you peek over a hill.
Synthetic benchmarks provide another good indication of the Edge’s strengths and weaknesses. The Edge 20 scored 2,745 points in Geekbench 5’s multicore test, only a few hundred points off the Snapdragon 888, but its graphics performance is only half that of Qualcomm’s high-end CPU: 3DMark Wild Life scored 2,502, while I would expect around 5,300 from a Snapdragon 888 phone.
The final noteworthy inclusion here is a triple camera system, including a 108MP primary unit, a 16MP ultra-wide camera and an 8MP telephoto lens with a 3x optical zoom. A zoom camera is a standout feature at this price. That doesn’t mean it’s a top-end sensor, unfortunately, and while it’s allegedly optically stabilised I had to hold the Edge 20 very still to avoid soft or, more often, fuzzy-looking detail.
There are other weaknesses, too, with the Edge’s handling of colour, contrast and shadowfilled areas not in the same league as the Google Pixel family. All my overcast images had a notable magenta cast, and the foreground routinely looked too dim. This is where the Edge 20’s HDR/ contrast is lacking. It knows what to do when the sun is in view, but flounders when the light level across the image is more typically British. And night images simply aren’t that good.
Video is a different story. It offers stabilised 4K video at 30fps and looks great in reasonable lighting. If you drop down to 1080p/30fps you can also switch between the main camera, ultra-wide and 3x zoom while shooting, and it does so smoothly (I can forgive the lenses refocusing each time I switched). Then there’s the solid 32MP selfie camera. It uses pixel binning to improve retention of detail in lower light, and if you let it use the screen as a makeshift flash you can even capture passable selfies in a dark room.
Overall, it’s a mixed report card for the Edge
20. There are reasons to buy it: the slim design, the optical zoom, the large colourful screen. But there are also obvious reasons not to buy, from its lack of stamina to its variable photo quality. Its lack of gaming performance also feels like an own goal with that expanse of display. Ultimately, it doesn’t have the edge to push it ahead of the mid-range competition.
SPECIFICATIONS
8-core 2.4GHz/1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 778 5G 8GB RAM Adreno 642L graphics 6.7in 144Hz AMOLED screen, 1,080 x 2,400 resolution 128GB/256GB storage 108MP/8MP/16MP rear cameras 32MP front camera Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.2
NFC USB-C connector 4,000mAh battery Android 11 76 x 7 x 163mm (WDH) 163g 2yr warranty via John Lewis
“There are reasons to buy it: the slim design, the optical zoom, the large colourful screen. But there are also reasons not to buy”