is a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.
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I’ve been as much of a thin phone skeptic as anyone. Why would I give up on camera specs and battery life just to shave a couple of millimeters off a phone’s waistline? I asked pretty much exactly that when I first saw Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge earlier this year.
But the Motorola Edge 70 may have made me a convert. It’s a cheaper take on the S25 Edge or iPhone Air, out now in the UK and Europe for £699 / €799 (around $920), but it “will not be a US device,” according to Nicole Hagen, Motorola’s head of global product marketing.
It’s just a third of a millimeter thicker than the Air — an all but imperceptible difference — but meets some of that phone’s failings head-on by offering a bigger battery and more durable design. It introduces a few new flaws of its own, but as a blueprint for where thin phones go next, this makes more sense to me than Apple’s and Samsung’s offerings.
We are truly in silicon-carbon battery season, because this is the second time in as many weeks that I’ve found myself praising a manufacturer for fitting a high-capacity battery into a small space. While the Oppo Find X9 Pro uses the novel battery tech to cram an unusually large 7,500mAh cell into a regular-sized phone, Motorola has instead employed it to fit a regular-sized battery into an unusually thin phone.
The Edge 70’s 4,800mAh battery is as big as many flagships’, breezing past the iPhone Air’s “all-day battery life” to last well into a second day. It won’t last a full two days unless you use it lightly, but heavier users will struggle to run the phone dry in a single day.
The silicon-carbon battery fixes the single biggest fear most prospective buyers have about this year’s wave of thin phones, comfortably outclassing the 3,149mAh battery in Apple’s Air or the 3,900mAh cell in Samsung’s Edge. Those phones force buyers to give up battery life. Motorola’s does not.
The Edge 70 tops up quickly with 68W wired charging, and 15W Qi wireless is also available. There isn’t Qi2 support, though Motorola includes a magnetic plastic case with the phone in EMEA if you’re jealous of the Qi2-enabled Pixel 10 phones.
The camera bump isn’t too thick, and I like the way it slopes out of the body. It’s six credit cards thick, if that helps any. That blue button is a shortcut for (you guessed it!) AI stuff.
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