Motorola’s Edge phone for 2024 goes on sale Thursday, following its June 4 reveal, sporting tweaks from last year’s Edge like a larger battery, an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance and a new Quick Button for setting your own shortcuts. Motorola is launching it for $550 in the US, dropping the price of this year’s Edge by $50 over last year’s model.
On the outside, the phone keeps a 6.6-inch curved edge display similar to that of the 2023 Edge, which runs with a 144Hz refresh rate at 1080p resolution. It will also have the vegan leather material that Motorola brought to both last year’s Edge and this year’s Moto G line, coming in a Midnight Blue color. There’s a new Quick Button that’s placed on the upper-left side, and Motorola says that it can be used to launch apps or quickly do specific actions within an app. It sounds very much like the Action button seen on the iPhone 15 Pro, as well as the customizable side button on Samsung’s Galaxy phones. Android phones have a long history of incorporating hardware buttons for shortcuts.
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I liked how light last year’s Edge phone felt at 168 grams (5.9 ounces), and this year’s Edge gets a tiny bit heavier at 174g (6.1 ounces). This will still be noticeably lighter than Google’s comparably priced Pixel 8A, which checks in at 193g. At the same time, the Edge will get a bigger 5,000-mAh battery compared to last year’s 4,400-mAh one. It will also retain last year’s 68-watt charging speed and include 15W wireless charging.
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Inside the phone, the Edge will have a midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 7S Gen 2 processor, 256GB of space and 8GB of memory. The phone will also have a similar camera complement as last year’s, featuring a 50-megapixel main camera, a 13-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 32-megapixel front-facing camera.
Many of these specs sound decent for the $550 price, but with Motorola only pledging two years of major software updates and three years of security updates, this Edge phone falls behind what Google and OnePlus offer with their $500 phones. The Pixel 8A gets seven years of software and security updates, while the OnePlus 12R is set to get three years of software updates and four years of security updates. On the other hand, Motorola does have a history of deeply discounting its devices after release, so it’s possible that the value proposition could shift when this happens.
This US model has a lot of similarities to Motorola’s international Edge 50 Fusion, which has many of the same specs but a display that runs at a slightly lower 120Hz refresh rate. Unfortunately the Motorola Edge (2024) won’t include some of the higher-end specs or materials (such as wood) that we’re seeing on the Edge 50 Pro and Edge 50 Ultra. However Motorola also traditionally releases a higher-end Edge Plus model, and if one does indeed come to the US again perhaps we’ll see something with a higher-end processor or a wood finish.
