Motorola Edge 70 Max

Huge Motorola fan as I am, I'm not quite sure where the firm is pitching this handset. Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely bit of kit and in many ways hugely desirable and indeed powerful. But in others, maybe not so - particularly the lack of any telephoto camera. Still, we'll come to that later and see how well the main shooter makes up for it. So the Edge 70 Max sits, kind of, beside the Edge 70 Pro really, but with some differences. Pros and cons. If we consider the Motorola Signature to be, in effect, the Edge 70 Ultra, the flagship candybar, then these two (Edge 70 Max and Edge 70 Pro) sit equally, I think, in the next-spot-down.

In the box, which is a perfumed white one, we have a USB-C to USB-C cable, no charger - get your own(!), a SIM card tray ejector tool, some papers, the phone of course and a very basic soft plastic case. Better to have one than not, I guess, but it certainly could have been one of those simple clear TPU ones from days gone by. Oh well. Given that the phone is glass on the back as well as the front, which I'll come to, it's really not going to be a very smart idea to try and use it without some sort of case - and most buyers will be absolutely fine with the supplied one. And it certainly fits like a glove - a tight-fitting glove at that! Pantone colours are here again with Onyx Black (Dark Shadow), Sage Green (Aqua Grey) and Glacier Blue (Ice Melt). This one is the black one - but I think if I was buying one, I'd go for the green!

In the hand, the phone is a big one. 164mm tall, 77mm wide, 8.3mm fat and 221g in weight. Compared to my Signature and the Edge 70 Pro, it's a bit bigger in every direction - and decidedly hefty. In actual fact, when I first held it, it reminded me of the Nokia XR20 from back in 2021 to some degree. It feels big, too, partly because of the flat screen. Most Moto phones these days tend to have the quad-curved screen making them feel, at least, smaller. Not here. It's a beast in the hand and comes with a strangely higher-than-usual resolution at 1440p when most others, almost universally from Moto these days, get 1080p. So perhaps that's it - it's for people who want a huge, flat screen for watching media - the notion supported by it having a whacking great big battery. Whatever you think, whether it suits your needs or not, it's certainly interesting and great that Moto are offering their customers choice.

The aluminium frame has a two-step design, reminding me very much of the Sony Xperia 5 Mk V phone's frame. With the front and back panels being flat and glass, I guess curved edges are out. But, like with the Xperia, it actually looks quite classy. There are antenna cut-outs dotted around the frame, of course, to get signals in and out. High up on the left is the MotoAI button (now QiraAI), which I'll come to later. Higher and out of the way is probably a good idea to make sure that when it's pressed, the user meant to press it. It can be assigned to various functions on long-press and double-press in settings. Nothing else on the left side.

Up top, we have just microphones and antenna cut-outs. On the right, a volume rocker and underneath, the power button - which can also be assigned to various actions in settings. I like it set to the power menu, but the default is Gemini and other choices are QiraAI or nothing. Double-press can be assigned to Camera, Wallet or nothing. Wallet would seem to make sense as the camera can be invoked by a Moto Gesture of twist-twist anyway (as I'm sure you probably know if you're reading this)! Anyway, all the buttons seem solid and firm in use.

Down at the bottom, we have the Dual-SIM card tray (back-to-back, 2 physical 5G SIMs as well as eSIM - any 2 at the same time), USB-C port and the bottom-firing 'right' speaker of the stereo pair. The phone is really slippery - I have it out of the case just now to write this and I nearly dropped it twice! But that will depend on your hands, I guess. Not sure why Moto have gone back to a glass back here, but I guess it's good that both back and front are Gorilla Glass 7i certified for some protection against smashing and scratching. The phone is also rated IP68/IP69 and MIL-STD-810H for ingress and even more protection. You can see how well-constructed it is when you pull out the SIM card tray with its gasket around the perimeter.

The back of the phone, apart from all the aforementioned, is clean. There is a Moto "M" in the middle, and the only other feature is the camera island, top-left in portrait, which again is a deviation from Moto's recent design choices. We're used now to seeing that sloping curve stuff going on from the back panel up to the island. Not here - perhaps because it's glass. So we have a chamfered stand-alone island instead. It still looks classy enough - but the whole design makes the phone feel more 'industrial' than fashion-stylish. Which is not a bad thing at all - and will appeal to many users fed up with the in-vogue stuff! I like it. There are 4 'circles' on the camera island, which I'll come to later.

The front panel is flat, as I said. As a pancake! The 'corners' of the frame are pretty sharp compared to some, but yes, the 'boxy' look and feel is a 'thing' these days and so we need to live with that, I think. This new fad certainly maximises available screen use, but it can make for corners digging into the palms of hands, especially with such a big phone. Up top, there's the other speaker of the stereo pair, doubling up as the earpiece speaker for calls - and a selfie camera cut-out very high up, when the phone is in use, in the middle of the Status Bar. It's quite small compared to some.

So that big 6.82" front panel is an LTPO AMOLED (hurrah for Always-On Display), refreshes at up to 144Hz in the right conditions and apps in use - mainly high-performing games and super-resolution video - and down to 1Hz when conditions allow, peaks out at 7,000 nits (again, under the right conditions) and delivers 510ppi. Which is pretty high these days for Moto, as I said earlier. The pixel count is 1,440 x 3,168 and yes, the screen is super sharp, wonderfully colourful and vibrant. It's a joy to use, like most Moto OLED panels - but this time, especially so with that Quad HD, "2K" resolution.

I'm particularly conscious now of the whole PWM thing as we have a member of our MeWe Groups who gets migraines if it's not just right. As you probably know, Pulse Width Modulation is crucial for migraine-sensitive users to know about prior to any purchase decisions. The Edge 70 series apparently uses a low base PWM frequency (around 180Hz–240Hz at lower brightness levels). The bottom line is that this is not quite as good for him as the Edge 60 Pro, for example, which offered higher-frequency dimming. Motorola does, however, add a software toggle to reduce flicker in dark environments. This swaps the PWM dimming for a DC-like dimming scheme, which some PWM-sensitive people find more tolerable than PWM, at the expense of a risk of introducing visible noise on the screen (some pixels being brighter than their neighbours) and can lead to uneven blacks and colour tinting. But I'm afraid that, for him, this is no 5-year-old LCD Poco (which is what he uses and seems to do best with). This is certainly something that some OEMs are trying hard to sort out - Honor comes to mind - so he'll be happy when they all crack this one.

I do sometimes think that I approach what many call 'bloat' in the wrong way! I'm sure that many non-techy people enjoy seeing the stuff that comes with their new phone and playing about with games, not having to install apps that half the world use anyway - likely them too - rather than us techy people who work as hard as we can to make the whole experience a clean plate, knowing what apps and services we want to use on our phones and not a bunch of other 'suggestions'. So perhaps we're wrong! And good luck to those who want to play and tinker with the OEM offerings (some baked into the ROM, but most, for us people at least, uninstallable). But it seems only fair to report what I find after setup.

Installed with no option to say "no" are Opera Browser, Perplexity (which is now, to some degree, 'baked-in' to Moto's range of AI options), Adobe Scan, LinkedIn, FIFA Heroes, Amazon Music, Facebook, Temu, Pinterest, Copilot, Instagram, Alarm Clock (doubling up on the Google one installed anyway), Gallery (ditto for Google Photos), PDF Reader, about 10 games fit only, in my humble opinion, for 2-year-olds and Global Connect (which is apparently Moto’s official travel connectivity app, powered by Gigs, designed to let you buy and activate international mobile data plans using your phone's built-in eSIM). So there's that for those who are likely to buy and set up a travel data plan without needing a physical SIM card when going to visit one of the 160 supported nations. Google away for more on that!

I thought it best to use my Signature with Google's standard Android backup and restore, and it worked very well, as it seems to these days, even between different OEMs' devices. Home screen layouts all replicated, many apps already signed into, settings mostly made it across intact - not all, but not bad. It did it wirelessly by default, but I think you can still interrupt that and use a cable if you want to. Anyway, it arrived on Android 16 (with a promise of 3 OS updates, so to Android 19), updated efficiently to October security patches (in 3 steps - June, August, October) and Google's Play System updated right up to October in one hit. They are promising 5 years of security updates, so to summer 2031 in theory. As soon as all that was done, MotoAI updated itself to Qira AI, which I'll come to.

The Edge 70 Max has a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 (3nm) and so far flies through everything I have thrown at it, so no complaints. This UK model as supplied by Moto PR has 256GB of storage (as do they all, apparently) and 8GB RAM (though there is a 12GB version out there in some regions). The storage is UFS 4.1 and there's no microSD card slot for expansion. Still, I reckon 256GB these days, for me, is perfectly good enough, although it did seem a little odd as the Moto 'standard' just now tends to be slipping up to 512GB, even in lower-end/cheaper models, let alone this kind of higher-mid-range device. Still, it's OK for me. Same with the 8GB RAM in this UK sample, not 12GB like some regions get. I do realise that at the time of writing the whole 'RAMageddon' memory constraint issue is live, so some models are coming out with less, though in most other handsets Moto seems to be ignoring this - perhaps the supply impact just takes time to knock on. Is 8GB RAM OK? Well, the industry line is that you really want 12GB for heavy AI processing, but all the features here, including Gemini and Qira, work perfectly well. Where 8GB might eventually bottleneck is with intensive on-device local AI processing rather than fast cloud-based requests, but in practice on this device, it feels absolutely fine to me.

The stereo speakers seem great to me - certainly as loud, if not louder than my Signature's. Maybe not quite the same quality at top volume, with a little less bass and a little more top-end, but there's not a huge amount in it. The stereo effect feels wide enough, though not quite the same as having the 'left' speaker upward-firing like the Signature's. Dolby Atmos is baked into the ROM as usual with Moto these days, though the whole 'Tuned by Bose' collaboration isn't present here - not that I personally place much value on that over Dolby Atmos anyway. There's no 3.5mm audio jack, of course, but you do get 24-bit/192kHz Hi-Res output via USB-C (with a suitable DAC adapter) alongside Hi-Res Wireless audio over Bluetooth. Both routes sound fabulous tested here - far too loud for my old ears and top-quality either way.

The USP of this phone, though, is clearly the large battery. It's a 7,100mAh Lithium-Ion Silicon-Carbon battery which is apparently split into two halves in order to fly under the EU/UK's radar on cell sizes. It can be charged at 90W with a cable and appropriate charger, giving a full charge from flat in under an hour, and half-way there in under 25 minutes. I think, for a Moto first, it complies with Qi2.2 offering 25W wireless charging. And it has a magnetic ring on the back so accessories made popular by Apple can be utilised. I have a basic magnetic ring charger here for testing and sure enough, it works as described (though with my test unit, not at 25W). If you use this method, with a properly maxed-out Qi charger, you can charge the phone from flat in about an hour and a half and get half-way there in 45 minutes. There's even 5W reverse-wired charging for emergencies via the USB-C port - if you have a cable with you!

My findings on the battery are that yes, the endurance of the phone is very, very good. On my 10% Reading Test it outstrips any other phone I have tested in recent times and a genuine two days of my average use is perfectly doable. I'm an every-night, overnight Qi charging person, but if for some reason I was away from base for a night, in a powercut or off for a weekend's camping, I'd be pretty confident that it would last until the next night, or until I got back. I do find that these tests are very subjective as it always depends on lots of factors, including how much time one is shooting or watching video, how long the screen is on and also considerations like how stable your cellular connection is away from WiFi - and if it keeps 'hunting'. It's impossible to say for everyone, which is why I have tested this way, for me and my use, for decades now. I am confident that my playing field is level and over all these years, the results are meaningful. At least, to me!

Connectivity is solid every which way. Wi-Fi, I have tested on 3 networks; GPS with Google Maps and other apps which rely on it; NFC for pairing up with other equipment and paying in shops with Wallet; and the Bluetooth range I have tested with various headphones, earphones and watches - and that all seems good too. Cellular connectivity for voice and data in my tests here sounds and functions perfectly fine over my 5G network with very good and fast speeds. Of course, your mileage will vary on that as it's very much dependent on cell coverage and masts.

Away from over-the-air and onto cable, the USB-C is sadly only rated at 2.0, so no DisplayPort stuff here for hooking up by cable to monitors, TVs and so forth. Wireless connectivity via various 'sharing' routes is very, very good these days - but yes, there might be that one occasion when you really need a cable. Beyond testing, I can't ever say that I've had to use that with my Signature. Lastly, there's Smart Connect - Moto's (much better) version of Samsung's DeX (especially for those of us sat in front of a PC). I have talked long and hard about Smart Connect, so at the risk of repeating it all, I'll link you here to my coverage.

In terms of security, there's an under-display optical fingerprint scanner (so not the heights of the Signature's Ultrasonic), the target for which is very low on the screen, but apart from that, it works just fine. Quick to set up and to use in practice, supported by the equally good face unlock. This was also quick to register and seems to be functioning well - always a challenge for me as I have a full beard and that can catch these systems out sometimes. Between the two of them, whatever the light conditions are, they will snappily get you into action and past the lock screen.

On to the software - and yes, during my review period Qira AI arrived to replace MotoAI, and replace it it does - lock, stock and barrel! It's a hookup with Lenovo's system, which I have written about at length recently in my review of the Moto Razr 70 Ultra, which I'll link you to here. It's all working beautifully well with my Moto Watch, Moto Watch Fit, Moto Buds Loop, Moto everything (more links to even more of my reviews)! It all even works with my Moto Sound Flow speakers in stereo, though because there is no UWB support on this phone, we don't get the higher-end clever stuff that the Signature, Razr 70 Ultra, Razr 60 Ultra, and Edge 50 Ultra get. For a deep dive on all that, follow the Moto Sound Flow Speakers link. But when hooked up, fancy stuff or not, it all sounds fabulous. I do really like my Sound Flows!

I mentioned briefly earlier the Always-On Display and yes, it's one of my major tick-boxes personally. The first thing I look for in a phone, along with wireless charging. And both are here. The AoD works pretty much just like it does on the Signature - same options, same clocks, colours, and so forth - so again, head for my Signature review for a deeper dive on all that.

For some buyers, the camera setup on the Edge 70 Max might feel a bit underwhelming on paper. If you are comparing spec sheets side-by-side in a phone shop at this £700 price point, you will easily spot competitors offering dedicated telephoto zoom lenses or higher-resolution ultrawides for less money - and it may be a dealbreaker for some. The hardware lineup consists of a 50MP main sensor (f/1.8, 1/1.56", OIS) paired with a 13MP ultrawide lens (120° FOV, which doubles as a macro shooter), alongside a 32MP front selfie camera. In practice, that main 50MP lens is plenty capable for day-to-day point-and-shoot snaps, family photos and quick video clips. But my personal take on phone cameras remains unchanged: if I want to produce real art, I'll pick up a 'proper' camera. For everyday mobile snaps, this setup does the job just fine for me, but if heavy optical zoom or high-end mobile photography is your primary reason for buying, you may well find yourself looking at the Signature or others.

As usual at this point, I will link out to our friends at GSMArena, who know much more about digital photography than me, and their deep dive on all things camera with this phone with plenty of analysis and samples. Their coverage starts here. The short version is that they, too, felt the camera system on the Motorola Edge 70 Max consists of relatively unremarkable, solid mid-range hardware whose lack of a telephoto lens and basic ultrawide feel a bit at odds with the phone's price tag. Despite the unpretentious components - highlighted by a 50MP Sony Lytia main sensor and a 13MP autofocusing ultrawide - the phone manages to deliver very respectable performance, producing sharp daytime shots, good 2x zoom results, solid low-light main camera photos and surprisingly great selfies. But click through for a proper read.

The Motorola Edge 70 Max is an interesting beast of a handset that delivers a distinct, heavy-duty alternative to the typical mid-range crowd. By pairing a industrial, tank-like glass-and-metal chassis (IP68/IP69 rated) with a massive 7,100mAh battery, a razor-sharp 1440p LTPO display and magnetic Qi2.2 wireless charging, Motorola has built a device tailor-made for media lovers and power users who prioritise endurance and screen size above all else.

However, at its £700 asking price, it asks buyers to accept a few notable trade-offs. The lack of a dedicated telephoto zoom lens and a relatively basic 13MP ultrawide shooter mean that mobile photography enthusiasts will find better camera versatility elsewhere for similar money. Additionally, the industrial design brings significant weight in the hand (221g) and the single 256GB storage/8GB RAM UK configuration might feel restrictive for power users looking for headroom.

Ultimately, if you want a clean software experience, stellar battery life and a gorgeous flat display without paying top-tier flagship money, the Edge 70 Max is a hugely capable workhorse. But for those on the fence about the camera setup or the bulk, waiting for the inevitable price drops will make it a far more compelling bargain - or indeed plumping for the Signature, especially now that it has, itself, come down in price.