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When I bought the Motorola Edge 2026, I wasn’t expecting much. These mediocre offerings are generally forgettable—and I mean it Edge 2024 and Edge 2025 reviews. Boring design, middle-of-the-road features and almost zero exciting features are the hallmarks of this price segment. But there’s something different about the Motorola Edge 2026.
I already had a good feeling about it just from the looks Motorola’s first announcementand the moment I unboxed the phone, I knew my intuition was right. It’s not just the great design and build quality that makes this phone special, though. Motorola has improved my gripes with the Edge series over the past few years with this release, and it’s more than just deep changes.
This year has proven to be an incredible boon for the mid-range market, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Now even Motorola is offering a great entry into the price range they’ve historically struggled with.
The difficulty is not in deciding if The $500-$600 price range is the right segment to buy this year, however which the company is great mid-range phone to choose and the Motorola Edge 2026, Moto offers many compelling reasons to say hello.
The Motorola Edge 2024 and 2025 both retailed for $549.99 at their respective launches, and neither phone was worth that price. Despite the price bump of $50 to $599.99, the Motorola Edge 2026 feels like a much more worthy phone for that price tag.
Edge 2026 is available unlocked Best Buy and Motorola.com, while AT&T, Verizon, Cricket Wireless, Spectrum Wireless and Xfinity Mobile will carry the phone at a lower price than the unlocked version.
The phone comes in a single Pantone Martini Olive color with a beautiful textile-like texture on the back, complete with beautiful complementary metallic accents on the camera island and around the bezel.
|
Specification |
Motorola Edge 2025 |
|---|---|
|
Screen |
6.3-inch Extreme AMOLED, 2640 x 1216 resolution (460 ppi), 120 Hz refresh rate, 10-bit, 5200 nits |
|
CPU |
MediaTek Dimensity 7450 |
|
RAM |
8 GB LPDDR4X |
|
Storage |
128 GB |
|
Rear camera 1 |
50MP, Sony Lytia 710, f/1.8, 1.0μm pixel size, 2.0μm to 12MP quad, quad PDAF, OIS |
|
Rear camera 2 |
50MP, ultra-wide + macro, 122-degree FoV, f/2.0, 0.64μm pixel size, 1.28μm to 12MP quad, PDAF |
|
Rear camera 3 |
10MP, telephoto, 3x optical zoom, f/2.0, 1.0μm, OIS |
|
Front camera |
50MP, f/1.95, 0.64μm pixel size, 1.28μm quad 12MP, PDAF, OIS |
|
Protection |
IP68/IP69, MIL-STD-810H, Gorilla Glass 7i |
|
OS |
Android 16 |
|
Promise of renewal |
2 Android OS versions, 3 years of bimonthly security updates |
|
Battery |
5000mAh |
|
Filling up |
60W wired (not included in the box), 15W wireless |
|
Audio |
Dolby Atmos, dual stereo speakers, Bluetooth 5.4 |
|
Connection |
5G, Wi-Fi 6E |
|
Dimensions |
152.3mm x 71.98mm x 7.22mm |
|
Weight |
160.5 g |
|
Colors |
PANTONE Martini Olive (Textile Back) |
Leading edge
Motorola’s design team has grown leaps and bounds over the past three years. The Edge 2024 features smoother curves for the camera shell and upgraded vegan leather materials, while the Edge 2025 improves things further with an IP69 rating and better overall build quality. But both of these phones suffered from poor performance, mediocre cameras, and a lack of long-term software updates. Moreover, some people he hated it curved glass on the front.
All but one of these problems have been fixed on the Motorola Edge 2026. The main advantage of this experience is the processor and camera improvements that make me enjoy using the phone.
Not only that, the Edge 2026 is significantly shorter and smaller than the Edge 2025 and all of them the difference in the world. About 10mm shorter and 2mm narrower, with wider curved corners and semi-curved sides that gracefully melt into the back, this phone unbelievable catch Motorola has officially figured out something that almost every other phone maker has missed, and it makes me never want to put this phone down.
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You’ll never feel its weight in your pocket, which isn’t something I can say about many phones these days. The 160-gram phone feels like unearthing a lost treasure from a forgotten past, and that, along with its fantastic overall design, makes it the best-designed slate phone of 2026. Yes, that means even over any other company’s extremely expensive flagship models.
Despite the small size and weight, the battery of this phone is like a giant Galaxy S26 Ultrathough it easily lasts about two days per charge and charges even faster. It’s not quite OnePlus charging speed, but it beats most other companies in this price range, especially Samsung. You’ll easily get a day and a half out of it with heavy use, and lighter use will certainly give you 2 days of use per charge. Just make sure you enable Charge Boost in battery settings.
There is also this fantastic The OLED display, which is completely flat (you can find a good tempered glass screen protector), has Motorola’s excellent anti-shake setting to disable. PWM dimmingand sports true 10-bit colors (which means no temporary hesitation). The biggest difference between this and the flagship display is the brightness. Motorola advertises this as a 5,200-nit display, but I measured actual peak brightness at just 700 nits, even with sunlight mode enabled.
Clean, bloatware-free app experience
It starts with the Motorola Edge 2026 Android 16 and doesn’t include the level of bloatware we saw on last year’s phone. I don’t like the 1Weather service that the stock weather widget uses because it’s full of ads and annoying notifications about things that meet strict requirements. no it’s weather related, but it’s easy enough to swap out for something else.
Even some of the expected bloat options, like the Glance lock screen, aren’t enabled by default, and this phone feels fresh and snappy from the get-go. Motorola’s software has always been one of my favorite flavors of Android, thanks to its excellent gesture capabilities and clean interface, making this phone feel like a great middle ground between featureless entry-level phones and almost feature-rich flagships.
For example, many other vendors ship their phones with duplicate apps. Google Photos and a native Gallery app, several different AI assistant apps, multiple Files apps, and more. Motorola doesn’t, and it makes the experience better (and less confusing for a lot of people).
Even Moto AI and the Moto AI key has gone to this phone, which also supports using other AI agents like Perplexity and Copilot besides Motorola itself.
The only Moto AI feature I used regularly was Pay Attention, which I set to double-click. Moto AI key. It starts recording and transcribing right away, which is something I use regularly in my work, but can also be very useful for people who regularly attend meetings.
Solid camera performance
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If I compare its camera with Nothing Phone 4a Pro — My current favorite in this price segment — The Motorola Edge 2026 consistently produces better dynamic range, and I like its color science a little better than nothing. The best examples of this are the image of the orange trampoline park, where Motorola’s LED strips above the trampoline net paint the right color, and the table hockey shot, where Motorola’s shot really captures the attention-grabbing details of the table’s design.
I also love the shallow depth of field on the 3x telephoto camera, which allows me to get great shots of food, flowers, and distant mist-shrouded mountains. But I found that the Motorola’s processing tended to make everything sharper than the Nothing, and comparing detail in each image proved that the Nothing had a distinct advantage.
The built-in auto macro mode is also slightly broken in this release, and will automatically switch to the ultra-wide macro camera even if I turn the option off. I really hate using an ultra-wide camera for macro shots on any phone because it’s almost always the worst looking version of the shot. I’d like to use a more telephoto camera and go a bit farther, but I can’t do that on this phone until the auto macro feature is fixed.
Finally, a mid-range Moto phone that I can recommend
Overall, this is Motorola’s strongest mid-range offering in as long as I can remember. Perhaps their most powerful yet, and its design, great performance, good camera and long battery life make for a really good phone that you’ll love to use. This is especially true if you’re on a carrier like Verizon, which has very limited phone options.
I haven’t been able to recommend a mid-range Motorola phone in years, and I’m happy to say (for Motorola’s sake) that this year is different. The Edge 2026 is a great buy, even at full price, and some good carrier deals (and maybe Prime Day-style sales) will make it an even better buy.
The Motorola Edge 2026 is the company’s best mid-range phone in ages, offering great performance, great cameras, fantastic battery life with fast charging, and my favorite slab phone design.
