First Look: Motorola Edge and Edge Plus have all the 5G specs

I'm here at Motorola headquarters in Chicago, and I have the brand new Motorola Edge Plus it's got five V, it's got 12 gigabytes of RAM. It's got Snapdragon 865 processor, it's got a 90 hertz refresh rate screen. It's got all the specs. Let's take a look [MUSIC] After getting to spend some time with the Edge Plus at Motorola, I'm back here at CNET. Hey, it's me again. So all the video that you've been watching was filmed in February, and a lot has changed since then. One of those things is that Motorola is now releasing two new phones, the Motorola Edge Plus which pretty much the rest of this video is all about. And then lower price they haven't announced what the price is phone called the Motorola edge. Now think of it kind of like how Samsung has the Galaxy S 20. And that's 20 Plus or the one plus eight or one plus Pro. Not exactly. It's not different sizes or anything like that, but conceptually you get the The idea so look for me at the end of this video and I'll walk you through a little bit more about the Motorola Edge and how it compares to the Edge Plus. Now, it's been a while since Motorola's had a truly flagship device, and the egg plus looks really impressive. Okay, wait, hang on. So this couple weeks ago, I got to review the Motorola Razor and one of the most common questions I get Was worse the specs, this thing cost $1500 way off the specs [UNKNOWN], they are all in th Motorola Edge plus. This thing is spec'd out and we realised it only costs $1000, that amazing, especially you see some of the phone it would compare to. Hey so, you're Motorola and it's 2020 and you go the design, a flagship device What do you do? Well here's the recipe they shared with us. A person but all they wanted was wow factor. They wanted to sing the walk and be impressive and really use this thing looks outstanding,it looks powerful,it looks like I can handle almost anything you throw at it. And that was it with the couple hours we had to spend with it. So next thing you need a 5G and in 2020, we're gonna see a bunch of 5G phones, but this is not Motorola's first 5G phone. In fact, they had the Moto Z3 and the Moto Z4 which you could add a 5G Mod on to, but this phone is nothing like this too. In fact, this phone was designed from the get-go with 5G in mind. You don't have to add a mod to it. It's all in a slick, beautiful package. So it's pretty exciting to me Motorola today. And the last part of this equation is you the consumer, Motorola wanted to make sure that you were getting everything you could possibly hope for this phone. And from the get go, it looks like they may have accomplished that it has really outstanding specs. It says if Motorola went to the spec grocery store And bought all the specs and put them into their spec shopping cart and then checked out at the spec cash register and went home and made a spec build phone. So a lot of specs. It's one thing to have All the specs but it's another to be able to bring them all together in an attractive design and, well, I think the x plus looks pretty magnificent in the hand. It feels robust, it is attractively chunky and when I say chunky. I know it's chalky because on the inside it has a whopping 5,000 milliamp hour batter and that makes me a very happy Patrick. But let's talk about the name of the device, Edge Plus. It refers to the fact that the edges of the screen wrap around the device. Now, this is obviously not the first phone to have an edge wrapped around screen, but it looks outstanding. What are you using those edges for? Well You can use them to light up when you're charging your battery, when you get a notification or set an alarm. Now, if you're worried about accidentally touching the edges of the screen while you're using the phone, Motorola's built in some grip and touch suppression to make that not happen. And if the edges are too much for you, you can actually go into the settings, And decide which apps use the edges and which don't. When the edges are off the turn black and it looks just like a normal display. In the couple hours I had with a phone, I could not see if there was a master on off switch for the Edge Lighting. However. I did notice that there is an on screen side button that you can tap to toggle on and off the edge display. You can also set that side button to go back to the last app. So that's something one place the edges are well used is in motos, new gametime mode which allows you to create virtual Shoulder buttons on the sides of the phone, which is great for gameplay. By the way, you can also use gametime to move the onscreen buttons to better positions. I'm not sure exactly how useful the screen will be in everyday use. Obviously, it's reminiscent of Samsung Galaxy phones and their displays but it's the gaming functionality that is really curious because those virtual Shoulder buttons on the Edge Plus push the phone towards gaming phones like the ASUS ROG phone to the red magic three and their functionality without obviously the glowing logos on the back. Speaking of gaming phones The Edge Plus has a 6.7 inch OLED screen with a 90 hertz variable refresh rate. So that's gonna be great for making animations look smoother, making your text and images look a little crisper, as well as providing a more immersive gaming experience, especially for games that have a high refresh rate built into them. So with the variable refresh rate, that means actually the phone's deciding when it's at 90 hertz per second or when it's going to 60 hertz per second, and kinda switching them up depending on what's on the screen. You can override that and choose to be in 60 hertz per second all the time or 90 hertz and that's up to you. That's a really cool option to have. The screen ratio is 21:9 which is a trend received across a lot of phones a Motorola razor, the Samsung Galaxy Z flip phones, Sony's xperia one to five. Now what's great about this, especially for movies is you can watch them. The original aspect ratio so you go out something like dark night and it takes up the full screen. However, I watched a lot of YouTube videos and almost all of them are in a 16 nine aspect ratio. So when I'm watching them on that phone, it's gonna have giant black bars on either side To overcome this Motorola dusky the option to zoom in on a 16 by nine video basically pushes it on the middle of the screen to take advantage of that full screen. So that's something the screen also has is an optical fingerprint reader. Now when I reviewed the Moto Z for last year, it also had an in screen optical Fingerprint reader and it took a little bit of time for me to warm up to it and to be honest for it to warm up to me because it's AI based. However, in the time I had with the Moto Edge Plus, at least the demo time, it seemed to work really well. It was very fast and responsive. As I mentioned before, this is a 5 G phone and has built in antennas for both sub sticks and millimeter wave technology. That being said, Motorola claims its optimizations will make it the, quote fastest ever quote 5 G phone. They claim speeds of up to five gigabits per second, which is pretty impressive actually. We'll have to test those claims out but to whet our appetite and show the prowess of how fast 5g is on this phone, Motorola brought us into a lab where there was a 5g node inside the lab now they had the phone connected to it and the Edge Plus created a local hotspot Which had a handful of laptops, I think three or four laptops. There might have been more or less, can't remember. A couple tablets and a gaming computer. And across the devices they were streaming 19 different YouTube videos at full quality, as well as a Netflix 4K movie at full quality, and on top of it, two of the guys in the lab had a video chat. Now I'm sure exactly when or why I would need to stream 19 videos at the same time, but it was impressive. One of the other big features are the cameras which get some cred from Motorola One's line of phones. The main camera has a 108 megapixel sensor Which combines four pixels together to produce a 27 megapixel image. The sensor itself is really large, especially for a phone, Motorola claims it's almost three times larger than a regular 12 megapixel sensor that we might see on other phones. Then there's the optical image stabilization which is found both on the main camera. But also the eight megapixel tele photo camera that has a three times optical zoom. And rounding out the cameras in the back is a 16 megapixel ultra wide angle, macro camera that when in macro mode can get as close as two centimeters from your subject The macro camera was really impressive at one point I had the camera basically inside the flower. Pass the pedals I could not believe how much detail and sharpness there was. I am really excited to test out the edge plusses cameras especially more in depth. They seem to have a lot of promise The handful of photos I took at the demo looks really good on the edges screen. So let's talk about video. The Edge Plus can shoot six K video. The Edge Plus does have a Snapdragon 865 processor, which actually does allow for 8k video, but the reason Motorola did not include 8k is a felt the 6k Better match the sensor now I really honestly respect this decision not having 8k video. It's absolutely fine. There's a lot of other camera and video features but a couple that popped out to us was video portrait mode which will blur out the background of the video and keep your subject isolated. Kinda like photo portrait mode. There's also a new long exposure mode which allows the shutter to stay open 32 seconds to capture long exposure photography. And the other one of interest is night vision which literal has had on other phones, but I think optimized with all the ram in this thing as well as optimizers that 865 processor It's gonna be really impressive. It basically takes eight photos and combines them together to produce a better sharper nighttime photo. Around the front is a 25 megapixel selfie camera. It's housed inside a hole punch display, also reminiscent of a Samsung phone. Alright some other interesting features on the Edge Plus include 15 watt turbo charging Wireless charging. There's also five watt wireless charging hearing, so I could power up a pair of bluetooth headphones in the back if it was conductive. There's also stereo speakers which little law claiming is the loudest ever on a phone. We'll have to test that out for ourselves and It runs in android 10. Motorola's timing with the launch of the Edge plus is outstanding, at a $1000, the Edge plus cost the same as a Galaxy S20. It has the same size screen as the S20 plus and it has the same, Honkin old battery as the much more expensive Galaxy S 20 Ultra. The Motorola Edge Plus comes in two colors Thunder gray, which was my nickname and karaoke and smoky sangria which was what people called me after I had been kicked out of my last book club. The AED plus will be available in the US on Verizon as an exclusive Hi, as promised, I'm back. So let's talk about the Motorola edge. Fundamentally, it's pretty much the same phone as the Edge Plus, for example has the same size screen, but the body is just slightly more spelt. It's On the inside we see the biggest differences. It does have 5G, but it's only sub six as opposed to having a Snapdragon 865 processor. It has a 765 processor as opposed to having a 5000 milliamp hour battery. It has a 4500 milliamp hour battery as opposed to having 108 megapixel camera. It has a 64 megapixel one But the biggest difference is gonna be price. Now we know the Motorola Edge Plus is $999. And while we don't know the price of the edge, it will likely you can surmise, it's going to be cheaper. The other big deal is the red plus isn't Verizon exclusive at least in the US. Whereas the edge won't be, it'll be unlocked and the edge will likely come out this summer.