Motorola Edge S is a cheap flagship 5G phone with the Snapdragon 870

Motorola today unveiled the Motorola Edge S, an affordable smartphone with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870 chipset. At a starting price of just CNY 1999 (~ $ 309), the Edge S is one of the best value-for-money smartphones on the market. When launched internationally, it will undoubtedly be priced a bit higher due to import / export costs, GMS licensing, IP certification, etc., but it will still be one of the cheapest flagships on the market. We will of course discuss the launch of the device if it is released outside of China, but for now here is a preview of what to expect.

Under the hood, the Motorola Edge S is the first phone with the Snapdragon 870. The Snapdragon 870 was announced earlier this month and is essentially a Snapdragon 865 ++. It features a faster “Prime” core clocked at 3.2 GHz and presumably the same GPU speed improvements as the Snapdragon 865+, but in all other respects it is the same chipset that powers most of the 2020 Android flagships of 2020 provide. Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888 certainly measures higher than the Snapdragon 865, and in advance it will perform better than the Snapdragon 870, but you will not miss much by choosing a phone with the Snapdragon 870 more than one with the Snapdragon 888.

The Snapdragon 870 is paired with 6 or 8 GB LPDDR5 RAM and 128 or 256 GB UFS 3.1 storage, the latter of which can be expanded with a microSDXC card of up to 1 TB. More importantly, the Snapdragon 870 is connected to a discrete Snapdragon X55 modem, which enables the Motorola Edge S to connect to sub-6GHz 5G networks.

What else do you get with the Motorola Edge S? It has a 6.7-inch LCD panel with a resolution of 2520 × 1080, which makes it quite long. Unlike the other two devices in the Motorola Edge series, the Edge S does not have a curved screen, but offers a higher than normal refresh rate at 90Hz. A Full HD + LCD at 90Hz is definitely a step away from the Quad HD + OLEDs at 120Hz found in a few flagships in 2020 and 2021’s Galaxy S21 Ultra, but it’s likely to satisfy most users there.

To power the entire device is an abundant 5,000 mAh battery that can be charged with a 20W cable charger. No fast wired or even wireless charging is certainly one of the biggest compromises here, but it’s what we would expect, given the low price. Fortunately, the 3.5mm headphone jack is not cut off from the device. Also for those of you who like physical fingerprint scanners, you will be glad to know that there is a scanner on hand.

The triple cameras are also pretty standard: a 64MP main image sensor is combined by an 8MP ultra wide angle sensor and a 2MP depth sensor. Among the dual-hole cut-outs at the front are two cameras: a 16MP main and an 8MP ultra wide-angle image sensor.

The software experience is where things get interesting. The Motorola Edge S runs Android 11 out-of-the-box and is the first Motorola phone to support the new PC mode software, which we exclusively outlined early last month. Motorola sells a dock that allows you to connect your phone to an external monitor such as a TV or monitor. Given Motorola’s record, however, we do not expect this device to receive an OS update beyond Android 12.

The Motorola Edge S is on sale in China, but it will probably soon appear internationally under the Moto G100 name, according to Evan Blass. Blass also reports that the Moto G10 and Moto G30 may also arrive next to the Moto G100. This will undoubtedly make Motorola’s Moto G series even more confusing, but it’s hard to argue against the value offered.