Motorola Edge 70 Pro review

Display

Motorola did make some changes in the display department from last year's Edge 60 Pro model. The panel on the Edge 70 Pro is not as tall, with a much more popular 19.5:9 aspect ratio, instead of 20:9. Though the difference isn't particularly easy to notice in practice. The display is technically a tad bigger this year at 6.78 inches. The resolution is still FullHD+ or more specifically 1272 x 2772 pixels, which works out to a very sharp 450 ppi, or so.

Another subtle but noteworthy change for this year is the switch from P-OLED to AMOLED. Without delving too deeply into OLED technology and the admittedly confusing acronyms being used here, let's say that this does not necessarily hint at any significant change in the actual materials of construction of the panel itself. The "P" in P-OLED stands for plastic, which is meant to differentiate plastic substrate OLEDs from glass substrate OLEDs. In practice, most modern OLEDs use way more advanced materials that are kind of beyond a simple plastic vs glass comparison. As for the "A" in AMOLED, it stands for Active Matrix, and that is pretty much present in any modern smartphone OLED. What these acronyms have morphed into is mostly manufacturer-preferred names for their products: Samsung tends to call its products AMOLED, while LG tends to use P-OLED, but even then, it is not a set-in-stone difference. Bottom line then? Well, it is quite likely that Motorola switched panel vendors for the Edge 70 Pro, though even that is not confirmed.

In any case, the display on the Edge 70 Pro is being marketed as much brighter, with a peak brightness of 5,200 nits. We did our standardized measurements and got quite impressive results. In our usual 75% window test, the Edge 70 Pro managed almost 2,000 nits, which is quite impressive, and the 10% window peak was comfortably over 3,000 nits. Not too shabby at all and markedly brighter than last year.

Refresh rate

The Edge 70 Pro can refresh at up to 144Hz, though that top refresh rate number is only accessible through the Gametime overlay inside games. In practice, you get up to 120 Hz by switching down to 90Hz and 60Hz. Unfortunately, the phone can't drop down to anything lower than that.

The Edge 70 Pro uses basic LTPS display tech, so don't expect any actual dynamic refresh rate switching. In practice, you get a choice between three refresh rate modes. Efficiency first is the easy one - it just locks the refresh rate to 60Hz, no more, no less. Then there are "Smart and balanced" and "Hyper smooth". Both can go up to 120Hz and drop down to 60Hz. The only real practical difference is that "Smart and balanced" tends to stick to 90Hz more frequently than 120Hz and "Hyper smooth" does the opposite. That's about it. Other than that, you still get some nifty automatic switching based on what you are doing like dropping down to 60Hz for video playback.

Streaming and HDR

The Edge 70 Pro has hardware HDR video support. Unfortunately, we aren't quite sure what standard it was certified against, since Motorola just gives a blanket "HDR" in its specs sheet. From a decoder standpoint, there is support for HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG (no Dolby Vision).

On a more positive note, the phone has Google Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing apps like Netflix to offer up Full HD streams.

Battery life

The Edge 70 Pro has a 6,500 mAh battery, which is 500 mAh bigger than last year's model, despite the fact that the Edge 70 Pro is thinner and lighter. Modern Si/C chemistry advancements are pretty impressive.

The Edge 60 Pro last year already delivered pretty impressive battery life, but the Edge 70 Pro totally leaves it in the dust with roughly 19 hours of Active Use Score. That's beside the fact that the Edge 70 Pro has a surprisingly mediocre call endurance.

Charging speed

The Edge 70 Pro is capable of up to 90W fast charging. It does that using Motorola's TurboCharge/TurboPower technology. Thankfully, it is not as proprietary as it sounds and you can get the full charging speed with a good PD 3.0 + PPS adapter with enough wattage.

We did our standardized charging testing and admittedly got a bit slower charging than we would expect from Motorola's 90W tech, but not unreasonably so. Fifteen minutes on the charger resulted in around 40% charge and thirty minutes resulted in 73%. A full charge took 49 minutes. That's not amazing, but definitely more than serviceable.

As for battery protection features, there is a basic implementation that allows you to set a charging cap. You can either do that manually or let the system try to decide when to stop charging at 80% and then continue for a full top-up only an hour before you actually unplug the phone. Of course, this works best if you are on a fairly regular charging schedule.

Speakers - loudness and quality

The Edge 70 Pro has a stereo speaker setup. These are not two symmetrical speakers. One is a dedicated bottom-firing speaker, while the other is front-facing and pulls double duty as an earpiece. This inevitably leads to some imbalance in output, but it's not too bad in practice.

The Edge 70 Pro gets pretty loud - louder than its predecessor. It earned a VERY GOOD score on our scale, so there is still some room for improvement, but we were not left disappointed. The actual sound quality is pretty good with clean mids and crisp highs with very little distortion even at max volume.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.

The Edge 70 Pro doesn't really have all that many fancy audio features to play around with, but you do still get a full Dolby Atmos implementation, including modes, smart mode and a full equalizer.

Connectivity

The Edge 70 Pro exists as a single physical Nano-SIM device + eSIM in some markets (our review unit is set up in this way); in others, it has two physical Nano-SIM slots (probably the Indian one). As far as we can tell, the models with two physical SIM slots don't support eSIM. We can't be more specific as information on the matter is scarce and conflicting. In any case, whether through physical SIM cards or eSIM or a combination, you can only have two simultaneous 5G SA/NSA Sub-6 connections active at the same time.

Location services include GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS and NavIC. Loal connectivity has been upgraded a bit since last year's model, particularly the Wi-Fi. You now get Wi-Fi 7, instead of 6e. Unfortunately, there is still no support for the 6GHz band. Bluetooth is version 5.4 with LE support. There is NFC on board. No FM radio and no 3.5mm audio jack, though.

The Type-C port on the Edge 70 Pro is backed up by a simple USB 2.0 data connection. That means a theoretical maximum throughput of up to 480 Mbps. There is USB Host/OTG support, but nothing fancier like video output over USB Alt Mode. You can still connect to an HDTV, but you need to use Miracast wirelessly.

There is a good set of onboard sensors, including a tdk icm45621 accelerometer and gyroscope combo, a qst qmc6308 magnetometer and compass combo and a sensortek stk3bfx light and hardware proximity sensor combo. There is no barometer on board.