Motorola Edge 20 Pro
The Motorola Edge and Edge Plus were some of the most interesting phones of 2020, bringing premium-feeling devices to a mid-range price point (well, at least for the former - the latter was a top-end device all around). We were anticipating the Edge 20 series, since they promised to take the best parts of the Edge and fine-tune them, but after testing the Motorola Edge 20 Pro, we're not so sure.
Where's the Edge!? Though the original Motorola Edge phones were seemingly named after their sleek curved-edge screens, which ensured the handsets felt great in the hand, the Edge 20 devices have flat displays.
That baffling change has implications. The Edge 20 Pro isn't comfortable to hold in the hand - though that's not just because the edge has gone, but because it's absolutely huge, with an angular frame that sits uncomfortably in the hand, and with a side-mounted fingerprint sensor that we couldn't reach in our wildest dreams.
That hand-feel issue plagued our initial testing of the phone. In other departments it doesn't seem so bad - it's fairly powerful, boasts some impressive camera specs, and has a high screen refresh rate - but to appreciate those specs, you do have to ignore the design issues.
Motorola Edge 20 Pro release date and price
The Motorola Edge 20 Pro is already available to buy in some regions, including the UK, where it's available on Motorola's website or Amazon. We're still waiting to hear about availability in other countries.
The handset costs £649.99 (roughly $900, AU$1,230), so it sits on the border of 'mid-range' and 'premium' - it'd be best to compare it to the OnePlus 9, also in this price class at $729 / £629 (about AU$940).
| Phone | Launch year | US price | UK price | AU conversion |
| Motorola Edge 20 Lite | 2021 | $410 (conversion) | £299 | $570 |
| Motorola Edge 20 | 2021 | $600 (conversion) | £429 | $810 |
| Motorola Edge | 2020 | $699 | £549 | $1,015 |
| Motorola Edge 20 Pro | 2021 | $900 (conversion) | £649 | $1,230 |
| Motorola Edge Plus | 2020 | $999 | £1,050 | $1,550 |
For context on how it compares to the other Motorola Edge phones, both the original and 20 series, check out our chart above. Just note this is for launch prices, as the original family may be available cheaper from retailers now.
As you can see, the Motorola Edge 20 Pro is one of the pricier handsets in the line, but is still a far cry from the Edge Plus from 2020, which remains the only out-and-out premium entry.
Design and display
The Motorola Edge 20 Pro has a big 6.7-inch display - that's the same size as every other entry in the line, but because the 2020 phones had curved-edge screens, the actual front-facing portion of those screens was smaller.
As a result, this screen feels pretty giant, which is good for keen mobile gamers or people who like to stream video. It's broken up by a cut-out at the top for the selfie camera, and has a slim bezel all the way around.
This OLED screen has a FHD+ resolution - that's 1080 x 2400 - with HDR10+ support, and a 144Hz refresh rate. That latter spec might cause some to raise their eyebrows, not out of suspicion but out of surprise - few non-gaming phones have this spec, and while it's mostly useful for games, some might notice its effect for other uses too.
A 144Hz screen updates the image 144 times per second. For a long time 60Hz was the norm, but in recent years lots of handsets have come out with 90Hz or 120Hz displays - 144Hz is still very high, and only a handful of phones reach or exceed it.
While we've praised the display, we can't do the same for the design, as it's by far the weakest aspect of the Motorola Edge 20 Pro.
The phone is huge, and it doesn't feel comfortable to hold in the hand - partly because of this size, but for myriad reasons besides. The handset's frame sticks out from its rear a small way, creating a ridge that digs into the hand during use. We actually had to stretch our digits to hold the device safely.
And, most egregiously, the side-mounted fingerprint sensor is incredibly high - our thumb didn't even begin to reach it. We literally had to readjust our grip on the device to unlock it.
The move from a slender, curved-edge-screen build in the original Motorola Edge family, to this awkward brick, is by far the biggest difference between the generations, and is also a huge downgrade.
Besides that, the phone has a USB-C port but no 3.5mm headphone jack. There's a Google Assistant button on the left edge and a volume rocker above the power button on the right edge, but both are so high that you won't reach them in your wildest dreams.
On the back there's a raised camera bump with the three lenses - nothing surprising about this, though the lenses are quite big, which hints at the photography prowess of this phone, more on which below.
The Edge 20 Pro is available in blue, either with a glass rear or with a premium-sounding faux leather cover that we didn't get to test. An Iridescent Cloud version of the phone was also announced but it's not on sale, at least in the UK.
Cameras and battery life
We move on from the design section with a bitter taste in our mouth; while you'd expect that to linger in this section, as Motorola is certainly not known for photography prowess, we were actually fairly impressed with the snappers in our brief testing time.
There are three rear cameras: a 108MP main, a 16MP ultra-wide and an 8MP periscope, the latter of which hits 5x optical zoom or 50x digital. On the front is a 32MP snapper for selfies.
Pictures taken on the main camera looked fairly vibrant; we'd guess there's some pixel binning going on here, which combines pixels on high-resolution cameras to take brighter, lower-resolution snaps. A quick tour of our home with the camera produced some nice-looking images of objects and of outlooks from windows.
The ultra-wide camera was a little distorted at the edges, but not so bad you'd notice if you weren't looking for it, and snaps were fairly pleasing if not quite as colorful as on the main snapper.
We found the periscope camera performed well for long-distance photography, with 5x images being totally usable for social media or sharing, though when we jumped up to 50x zoom we found the images unpalatable (as you'd imagine).
Selfies looked pretty good too, and not just because they were of our phone team's staff writer; there seems to be some savvy optimization to make the subject stand out from the background. We found the actual Portrait mode was a little overzealous on the bokeh, but that's an issue with almost all smartphone cameras.
A selling point of the phone was its 8K video recording, a feature reserved usually to top-end phones. Putting aside the big question of "who wants 8K video recording?" film recorded felt pretty smooth and stable, and audio zoom works (to pick up distant conversations), though actual video zoom doesn't.
In terms of battery, the phone packs a 4,500mAh one, which is a fair size for an Android smartphone. We haven't had time to properly test the device's lasting power though.
Charging is 30W, which is a little on the slow side now that cheaper phones can reach 65W and some others reach 90W or 120W. Still, it beats some other similar-priced phones (looking at you Apple and Samsung).
Performance and specs
The Motorola Edge 20 Pro doesn't use the top-end chipset available to it, which would be the Snapdragon 888 (or technically the Snapdragon 888 Plus, but hardly anything uses that). Rather, it uses the Snapdragon 870, a nearly-as-good spin-off that's technically an improved version of 2020's Snapdragon 865 which the Edge Plus used.
It's paired with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, both fairly generous helpings of bytes, and we found the phone is no worse off for its 870 chipset. It feels fast to use, both in apps and when jumping between menus.
We tested a few games including PUBG Mobile and Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion, and found the handset could render top graphics without losing frame rate, making it perfect for gaming. Plus, the Snapdragon 888 has been criticized for overheating issues, which the 870 doesn't suffer from as much, and we found we could game for a lot longer without needing to worry about warming the phone.
The Edge 20 Pro uses stock Android 11, though with some additions designed by Motorola. The most useful of these is the quick actions, little functions you can easily trigger like doing a 'karate chop' motion to turn on the flashlight.
This kind of tool isn't game-changing, but it can be really useful (saving you having to turn on the phone and swipe down the quick-settings menu to turn on the light, for example). Once you get the knack of these shortcuts, you'll find yourself surprised you ever used a phone without them.
We'd speculate that the Motorola Edge 20 Pro will probably be one of the first Moto handsets to get Android 12, but that's a guess for now.
The phone comes with a cable for Ready For, Motorola's Dex-like service that lets you plug your phone into an external monitor for productivity or entertainment services - some might find this a useful extra, but others might not care.
Early verdict
The structure of a TechRadar hands-on review may make it seem like we're more negative on the Motorola Edge 20 Pro than we actually are - we started with its weakest point, the design and looks, and only afterward limped on to the phone's stronger suits.
That's not to say we're not negative about the phone - we are, and from our first impressions it's something of a disappointment compared to Motorola's 2020 Edge offerings - but only mildly so. The handset does have features to like about it, like its camera performance and processor, but then again the Moto G100 does those things well too, for a lower price.
Overall, it's hard to recommend the Motorola Edge 20 Pro, at least from our day of testing. We'll be using the phone a lot more ahead of our full review, so stay tuned for that in the coming weeks - maybe our thoughts on the device will have changed.
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