Motorola Edge 2024 review: Immediately forgettable, despite its good looks

When Motorola began announcing its 2024 Motorola Edge phone lineup back in April, I was really excited. Last year, Motorola blew me away with the Motorola Edge Plus 2023, a phone that not only exceeded my expectations but became my daily driver after becoming severely affected by PWM sensitivity last May.

But it feels like Motorola forgot some of the lessons learned from last year's phones. While the Motorola Edge 2024 still offers super fast 68W charging and excellent battery life, the camera is as mediocre as ever. Worse yet, the slow processor is on-par with ancient phones like the LG V60, making everything feel old and slow even though this is a brand-new phone.

That's particularly sad because Motorola seemed to have finally figured out its groove in smartphone design again. The vegan leather back on my review unit is an absolute joy to use all day and it offers a level of grippiness and classic chic design we don't often see in devices like smartphones. The phone is immediately identifiable from the pack of iPhone clones on the market, yet because of some poor decisions, it's immediately forgettable from the moment you use it.

Motorola Edge 2024: Price and availability

The Motorola Edge (2024) became available in the U.S. on June 20, 2024 for an MSRP of $549.99. It can be purchased unlocked at motorola.com, Best Buy, and Amazon. The usual suite of U.S. carriers will have the phone as well, including T-Mobile, Metro by T-Mobile, Spectrum, Consumer Cellular, Straight Talk, Total by Verizon, and Visible.

Canadian customers will be able to purchase the phone later this year, but Motorola hasn't given a specific release date yet.

The Motorola Edge (2024) ships in a single colorway, Midnight Blue, which is the vegan leather-clad model we used for review. I've used the Motorola Edge (2024) on T-Mobile's 5G network as my main device for 10 days as of the publishing of this review.

Motorola Edge 2024: What I like

From the moment I took the Motorola Edge 2024 out of the box, I loved it. Motorola's phone design absolutely shines through every square inch of the phone, from the high-quality metal frame to the gorgeous and slip-resistant vegan leather back. This is a really good looking phone and it feels as good to use as it looks, too.

So many phones use slippery plastic or glass backs and it makes holding on to them a chore. The Motorola Edge 2024 is so pleasantly grippy I think many people will feel like they can go caseless without feeling like it's going to fall to the floor at a moment's notice.

The phone is also surprisingly thin, coming in at 1mm thinner than the Pixel 8a and feeling incredibly sleek because of it. I'm not a person who usually advocates for thinner phones because it normally means that the battery is smaller or other concessions had to be made, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

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This may seem like a silly thing to gush about, but think about how many times you put your phone down only to watch it slide off that surface right away. When I make a phone call and put it on speaker, I don't have to worry about resting it in my lap for fear of it sliding off. When I put it on the counter while I cook, the sound emitted is a soft, comfortable tone rather than the scary crunch of glass—something especially true if you have stone countertops.

The one thing missing from this (and every other Android phone so far) is Qi2 with MagSafe. On the bright side, because this uses vegan leather and not slippery or fogged glass, popping on a MagSafe ring adapter without a case is completely possible. Other kinds of phone backs often don't work well with these adapters as the adhesive doesn't stick well to those surfaces.

In addition to a lovely textured back, Motorola brought another one of my favorite ThinkPhone features to the Edge 2024: the side button. This customizable key launches Motorola Smart Connect by default but can be customized to launch any app or several different actions with a single press or double press.

Motorola Smart Connect was one of our favorite things from MWC 2024 as it melds your computer, tablet, and smartphone in an even more cohesive way than Samsung Multi Control.

You can even set this key as the walkie-talkie feature from the Microsoft Teams app, evoking one of the coolest features from classic Nextel phones. I set mine to open the Google Keep notes app when single-pressed as I find myself jotting down notes and thoughts throughout the day. This little button streamlines my usual routine, and I learned to love its existence very quickly.

PC users are going to love Motorola Smart Connect. There's something truly magical about controlling your smartphone with the same keyboard and mouse that simultaneously controls your PC. The best part is that all you have to do is move your mouse cursor over to your smartphone's display as if it were another monitor hooked up to your PC, and it just works.

I have a smartphone stand on my desk that sits right below my center monitor, making this particular setup effortless, but it'll also work just fine with plenty of other setups, too. If I'm already on a computer there's almost no reason I want to pick up my phone to do anything because of the screen size and awkwardness of typing/navigating on a smartphone versus a computer. This fixes a lot of that.

Speaking of using your phone often, this is a phone you can use all day (and then some) without ever worrying about battery life. Plus, even when you do need to top up the battery, the 68W charging speed ensures that just a few minutes get you plenty of battery for the rest of the day. I use an Anker nano charger for this job as it provides plenty of watts without taking up much space.

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 is a very efficient processor that doesn't get particularly hot—even when playing games like Call of Duty Warzone for an hour—and it sips battery even through these processing-intensive tasks.

And while this is a more mid-range processor, it still plays modern games just fine. I played everything from the aforementioned CoD Warzone to Diablo Immortal and even Genshin Impact without any performance issues. That said, games won't run at as high of detail settings, resolution, or framerate as a more expensive phone but so long as you don't mind that, this was a surprisingly great experience.

Motorola's software and features also make the experience truly sublime. Features like per-app volume adjustment makes it easy to keep listening to your own music while playing a game or doing something else that usually emits music-interrupting audio.

The phone's pOLED display is generally excellent and not only gets plenty bright under sunlight but also offers an important flicker-reduction setting for PWM-sensitive people. This ensures that the phone never uses PWM dimming, even at low brightness levels that usually cause quality issues with other types of OLED displays.

Motorola Edge 2024 PWM and dithering tests - YouTube

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The phone utilizes 720Hz PWM at low brightness levels with this setting turned off, though, so if that's more comfortable, you can always leave it at the default setting. The only downside I found is that the display has some potential dithering when using the natural and radiant color modes. The default vivid color mode appears to have no dithering.

As is the case with a lot of Motorola's flavor of Android 14, customizability means this phone will look and feel the way you want it.

Motorola Edge 2024: What I don't like

I use a lot of phones in any given year and can immediately tell the difference in haptic quality when I turn on a phone. This phone, unfortunately, still uses really low quality haptics that make it feel inherently cheap compared to something like a Pixel 8a or OnePlus 12R, two phones that are in the same price range.

And the processor is also slower than both of those phones by quite a wide margin. According to Geekbench 6.3, the Google Pixel 8a is 140% faster in multicore performance, while the OnePlus 12R is nearly 200% faster. Even just playing games or doing normal tasks on the phone feels substantially slower than those phones. Imagine what it'll feel like in 2 years from now? Not good.

The overall camera quality of the Motorola Edge 2024 is fine enough, but it's not going to win any awards. In many situations, I found that it traded blows with the OnePlus 12R despite using a newer Sony sensor than that phone.

But the quality really isn't the issue with the camera. It's the speed. Launching the camera is slow and clunky feeling, as it not only takes a few seconds for the camera to appear but it's initially laggy in a very unflattering way. Photo capture, likewise, was quite slow and often had a lot of odd shutter lag.

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It doesn't handle motion capture particularly well, nor does the OnePlus 12R. If you take lots of pictures of your kids or pets, get a Pixel 8a, instead. It's the same price and has a much better camera.

The list of "things I don't like" isn't exactly lengthy but, even with that said, the negatives make the price feel way too high. The use of a slower Snapdragon 7-series processor isn't a good look on a $550 phone, and Motorola only guarantees two years of software updates on the phone. Meanwhile, the OnePlus 12R gets 4 years of software updates and Google offers 7 years of updates on the Pixel 8a.

That substantially slower processor affects a lot and it doesn't feel like there's much making up for those lacking pieces. Sure, it's got faster charging than the Pixel 8a but so does the OnePlus 12R. Meanwhile, the OnePlus 12R has the fastest processor of the bunch by a wide margin, while Google leads on the camera front.

What does Motorola offer uniquely here? I'm not sure, other than a nice vegan leather back and a different type of eye-friendly display.

Motorola Edge 2024: Competition

The Google Pixel 8a is a better value from almost every angle. It's got a far better camera that's lightning-fast to launch and snap pictures from. Video recording quality is higher, and Google's Tensor G3 processor is both more powerful and sports more AI processing power, ensuring that all the latest Google Gemini and Pixel features are at their best. Plus, Google guarantees seven years of software updates for the Pixel 8a which is several more than Motorola.

Motorola still holds the edge in display quality and comfort, and anyone who is PWM-sensitive should never consider a Pixel because of Google's harsh flickering display tech, anyway. Plus, the vegan leather on the Motorola Edge 2024 is even nicer than the matte back on the Pixel 8a, and there's no getting around the fact that Motorola's 68W charging speed is substantially faster than the Pixel 8a's anemic 18W.

But I'd personally rather buy a OnePlus 12R over both of those other phones for many reasons. The price is lower, the processor is faster, the display is the best of all three, and the charging is faster. The camera is better than the Motorola Edge (2024) but not as good as the Pixel 8a, so that's certainly worth mentioning. While OnePlus only offers four years of software updates, I prefer OxygenOS over either Google or Motorola's flavors of Android for its design and features.

Motorola Edge 2024: Should you buy it?

The Motorola Edge 2024 is a pretty good phone in its own right. The design and the vegan leather back are simply stunning to look at and to hold, delivering a classic elegance not expected from a smartphone. The display looks great in any light and it's incredibly eye-friendly thanks to Motorola's flicker-reduction option. Plus, it charges fast, has great battery life, and sports Motorola updated UI, powered by Android 14.

But at $550, it's impossible to recommend over the competition for almost any reason. Sure, Motorola Smart Connect is a great utility that you won't find on a OnePlus or Google Pixel phone but that's about where Motorola's advantage ends. With a slower processor, worse camera experience, and fewer years of software support, I can't recommend the Motorola Edge 2024 at its full price.

If this phone was even just $100 less, it would be a lot easier to consider but that price is simply too high. Carriers in the U.S. often offer phones like this for a lot less, though, and that's where it starts to make more sense, especially if you're like me and find the displays of Google, Apple, and Samsung phones highly uncomfortable to look at.