motorola launched the edge 70, the company’s latest smartphone in the edge 70 series, in India last week. The successor to last year’s edge 60 features faster processor, 5.99mm sleek design, light weight body. However, this has a slightly smaller battery, but comes with wireless charging. Is this the best sleek phone for the price?
| Box Contents |
| Camera |
| Battery Life |
| Conclusion |
Box Contents
- motorola edge 70 8GB + 256GB in PANTONE Gadget Grey colour
- 67W turbo charger
- USB Type-C to-C cable
- SIM Ejector tool
- User manual
Display, Hardware and Design
Starting with the display, the edge 70 features a large 6.7-inch 1.5K 120Hz flat AMOLED screen with a pixel resolution of 2712 x 1220 pixels, 20:9 aspect ratio and a pixel density of about 446 PPI. This looks better than the curved screen in the predecessor.
The display is bright, since it has up to 4500 nits peak brightness, and the sunlight legibility is good as well. The colours are vibrant as well since it has 100% DCI-P3 color gamut. The phone is Pantone Validated Colors and Pantone SkinTone Validated.
The 120Hz variable refresh rate display offers a fluid user experience since it can switch beteween 60Hz, 90Hz and 120Hz. It has 360Hz touch sampling rate in gaming mode. It also has HDR+ support, which works for YouTube, but not for Netflix. The phone has Corning Gorilla Glass 7i protection.
Under the display options there are different options to adjust colours from Natural, Radiant and Vivid colors. There is flicker prevention option in the settings. It doesn’t have notification LED, but there is Always on display.
It has a 50MP camera on the front. The earpiece is on the top edge that works as a secondary speaker. The phone has minimal bezels at the bottom of the screen.
The main highlight of the phone is its 5.99mm sleek design. It has an Aircraft-grade aluminum frame with matte finish that is premium in looks and feel that you rarely see in the price range, especially for the price, and is solid to hold.
The volume rockers and the power button are present on the right side. The dedicated AI key is present on the left side. The dual SIM slot, USB Type-C port and speaker grill are present on the right side. The secondary microphone is on the top, along with Dolby Atmos branding. You can see the antenna bands.
The phone comes with military-grade durability with MIL-810H standard certification and also has IP68 + IP69 ratings for dust and water resistance. All the models feature a textured finish on the back that feels smooth to touch and doesn’t attract fingerprints.
Even with a large screen, it has a 159g light weight body. In addition to grey, the phone also comes in PANTONE Lily Pad, and PANTONE Bronze Green colours.
Camera
- 50MP main camera with f/1.8 aperture, OIS
- 50MP 120º ultra-wide Auto Focus camera, f/2.0 aperture, macro option
- 50MP front camera, f/2.0 aperture
The camera UI is familiar with most Motorola smartphones that include a quick toggles between main camera, ultra-wide, and macro camera on the bottom, quick toggles for flash, timer, aspect ratio, and more.
Other camera features include Scan, Night Vision, Panorama, Ultra-Res, Photo Booth, Group Shot, Timelapse, and Dual Capture Video.
Coming to the image quality, daylight shots came out well with good dynamic range, thanks to Quad Pixel technology that gives you get 12.5MP output. HDR shots are better with improved dynamic range, and it is recommended to enable auto HDR. Low light camera performance is good, and it gets better with night mode.
The 50MP ultra-wide camera does and good job, and the macro option with the ultra-wide is good as well, since this is an autofocus camera. The edge detection in portrait shots is good as well. This drops the telephoto camera from the predecessor, so you only get up to 20x digital zoom, it is good till 5x zoom, and the quality varies after that. The 50MP front camera does a good job that also offers good edge detection. For the price, the camera performance is good.
Check out the camera samples.
The edge 70 offers 4K UHD video recording at 60 fps from all the camera. There is slow motion 120 fps at 1080p and 240 fps at 720p resolution. Video quality is decent and could have been better.
Software, UI and Apps
Coming to the software, the phone runs on Android 16 with November 2025 security patch, making it one of the first moto phones to run Android 16 out of the box. On the top of Android 16, it has Hello UI, which is stock with added moto features. The company has promised 3 OS update, and 4 years security updates for the phone, same as the predecessors.
There is nothing to mention regarding the software in specific, since it offers stock Android 16 experience with added features. There are gestures such as Quick capture, Fast flashlight, Three-finger screenshot, Sidebar, Double press power key, Press and hold power button.
AI Features and Moto AI With the dedicated AI key on the left, the edge 70 puts Artificial Intelligence front and center. By default, a single press launches the “Moto AI” assistant, which acts as a system-wide helper, but this key is customizable to launch Copilot, Gemini, or Perplexity, which comes pre-installed.
Moto AI features are deeply integrated into Hello UI. The Magic Canvas allows you to generate unique wallpapers from text prompts, while Style Sync uses AI to create themes that match your outfit by analyzing a photo. The phone also utilizes the NPU on the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 for on-device processing, enabling features like AI Notification Summaries which group and summarize long streams of alerts, and Smart Connect, which uses AI to predict and optimize connection strength between the phone and PC/tablet peripherals.
moto ai 2.0 can be accessed dedicated AI key offering
- Next Move contextual suggestions that understand what’s on your screen and offer the right actions in real time
- Creative tools like AI Image Studio, Sketch to Image, Style Sync, Text to Sticker, and avatar creation.
- Catch Me Up 2.0, Pay Attention live transcriptions, AI Playlist Studio, Global Search, Auto Screenshot Blur, and seamless cross-device task flow via This On That.
- Remember This and Recall act as a smart memory vault, while Perplexity integration enables instant exploration, planning, and contextual recommendations.
- Choose between motoAI, Copilot, Perplexity, and Google Gemini
Apart from the usual set of utility apps, Google apps, there are some apps such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Perplexity, Copilot, PhonePe, and Instagram, but you can install them easily. It has 8GB of LPDDR5X RAM, out of which 7.3GB of RAM is free. It also has a RAM booster option to add up to 16GB of virtual RAM, and the AI auto RAM boost option is enabled by default. Out of 256GB UFS 3.1 storage, 215.19GB is usable.
Fingerprint sensor
The phone has an in-display fingerprint sensor. It immediately unlocks the phone just by keeping your finger so that you don’t have to press it, and it is obviously faster than the in-display fingerprint scanner. You can add up to 5 fingerprints. You can also use the fingerprint for app local and payments in apps. The phone also has face unlock, but it is not as secure as fingerprint.
Music Player, and Multimedia
YouTube Music is the default music player. It also has Dolby Atmos. Audio through earphones, is good, but the stereo speaker quality is avearge and could have been better. It has Widevine L1 support, so you can play HD content on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and other streaming apps without any issues. HDR works for YouTube and Amazon Prime Video, but doesn’t work with Netflix.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
It has the usual set of connectivity features such as 5G with 16 (n1/2/3/5/7/8/20/26/28/38/40/41/66/75/77/78) bands. Jio and Airtel 5G work out of the box. It also has dual 4G VoLTE, 4G carrier aggregation or 4G+, Wi-Fi 6E 802.11 ax (2.4 + 5 + 6Ghz), Bluetooth 5.4 and GPS, A-GPS, LTEPP, SUPL, Glonass, Galileo and NFC.
The edge 70’s body SAR is 1.13W/Kg, and the head SAR is at 1.11W/Kg, well under the limit in India which is 1.6 W/kg (over 1 g).
Performance and Benchmarks
The phone is powered by Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 Mobile Platform, which is a considerable upgrade compared to the MediaTek Dimensity 7400 used in the edge 60. This has 1 x 2.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A720 prime core, 3 x A720 performance cores at up to 2.4 GHz, and 4 x Cortex-A520 efficiency cores at up to 1.84 GHz.
There is Adreno 722 GPU offers good gaming performance and promises 30% faster GPU graphic renderings, compared to the 7 Gen 3. The phone has VC Cooling System to help keep the phone cool that is rarely seen in phones witha sleek design. It can handle graphic-intensive games like COD, BGMI and Genshin Impact, but not in max graphics. In BGMI HDR and Extreme works.
In 3D Mark wild life stress test, it scored 64.5% which is decent fos a sleek phone. The temperature increased from 26 to 42 degrees, which is a steep increase. That said, check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
Battery life
Coming to the battery life, the phone packs a slightly smaller 5000mAh (typical) built-in battery compared to 5500mAh in the edge 60 mainly due to the sleek design. Thanks to the optimization, battery life is decent even with 5G and heavy multimedia use. I got over 5 hours of screen on time over a day of use mostly on Wi-Fi, and occasional 5G use in 120Hz, which is good enough.
It has 68W fast charging. It takes about 45 minutes to charge the phone fully using a bundled charger, and 50% charge takes around 15 minutes. The phone also has a 15W wireless charging, which the predecessor lacked. There is also reverse wireless charging.
Conclusion
The motorola edge 70 stands out as an engineering marvel in the mid-range segment. It is rare to find a device that balances such an incredibly slim 5.99mm profile with military-grade durability, metal frame and IP69 protection. While the edge 60 was good, the edge 70 feels like a more refined, “complete” product thanks to the brighter flat display, wireless charging support, and the performance bump, thanks to Snapdragon 7 Gen 4.
It isn’t perfect—the speaker output is average, the phone lacks a telephoto camera which the edge 60 had, and it gets warm under heavy load. However, for the majority of users looking for a phone that is stylish, lightweight, runs clean software, and captures great photos from all the cameras, the edge 70 is easily one of the best options for the price. It successfully answers the question posed at the start: yes, this is currently the best sleek phone for the price.
Alternatives
There is no direct competition if you are looking for a sleek phone with military-grade durability and IP69 ratings in the price range. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge is out of budget. We can expect more sleek phones in the future.
Pricing and availability
The motorola edge 70 is priced at Rs. 29,999 for the single 8GB + 256GB model. It will be available from Flipkart, motorola.in and offline stores starting from December 23rd.
Pros
- 120Hz AMOLED display is good
- Sleek design, lightweight body without compromise on build, IP68 + IP69 ratings
- Good cameras
- Clean UI
- Good battery life, fast charging
Cons
- Average speaker quality
- No telephoto camera