Motorola Edge 2025 Review: Stunning Design, But Sluggish Performance

There’s a real tug-of-war going on inside the Motorola Edge 2025.

On the outside, it looks and feels like a premium flagship. It’s sleek, sharp, and surprisingly rugged for something this slim. But beneath the surface, it’s a different story. The Edge 2025 is Motorola’s latest swing at the competitive sub-$600 market, and while it nails the aesthetic and hardware feel, its performance and software story reveal some frustrating contradictions.

This is a phone that’s incredibly well-built, has a dazzlingly bright display, and checks off a lot of spec sheet boxes. But it also struggles to keep up with daily tasks, and its long-term software support feels like a throwback to an earlier era. One from around three years ago and one that we should be moving on from.

Let’s unpack all of that.

Specs at a Glance

Design and Build: Mid-Range Price, Premium Vibe

Motorola absolutely nailed the design on this one. The vegan leather back in a deep, PANTONE-certified forest green feels genuinely upscale and offers a comfortable, grippy texture that resists fingerprints. The aluminum frame is another nice touch and it’s a clear upgrade over the plastic shells common in this range. At just 8mm thin and 181g, it feels light but solid, with enough taper on the sides to make one-handed use feel natural.

With one of the brightest displays in its class and a refined, leather-backed design, the Edge 2025 delivers a premium feel that belies its price tag, especially once it goes on sale.

The curved display is a love-it-or-hate-it affair. Aesthetically, it’s gorgeous. The screen flows right into the edges, creating that almost borderless, waterfall effect. But in practical use, it introduces familiar annoyances. Stuff like screen protectors that don’t quite fit, accidental touches, and occasional glare or color shift along the curve. Although, to be fair, that last one isn’t immediately obvious to a lot of people.

I didn’t have some of the issues with the edge screen here that I have had in the past with other brands and models. And really, it does look pretty sweet. It’s very thin in hand and features like the Edge Lights can give it some extra pizzazz that you can’t get with a flat display.

Motorola seems aware of the skepticism and counterpunches with some serious durability credentials. We’re talking IP68 and IP69, along with MIL-STD-810H compliance. That means the phone can handle both immersion and high-pressure water jets. That’s not something you usually see together on a mid-ranger. Add in Gorilla Glass 7i up front, and this is one of the toughest “pretty phones” I’ve handled in a while.

The Display: Brilliant but Flawed

On paper, this screen is a showstopper. A 6.7-inch pOLED panel with sharp resolution, 120Hz refresh, and a claimed 4500 nits peak brightness. Outdoors, especially in direct sunlight, it’s one of the easiest displays to read. But there’s a caveat.

I noticed a bit of what’s called “mura” on the screen, which is subtle blotchiness or unevenness in brightness and color. It becomes more noticeable on dark screens or uniform backgrounds. I looked around to see if it might have been my review unit and found others also experiencing a similar thing.

What you end up with is a split personality: dazzling in daylight and scroll-worthy most of the time, but sometimes distracting during video playback in low light. If you’re sensitive to inconsistencies, or can’t seem to un-see things, you might find out quickly if the Moto Edge 2025 needs returned or exchanged.

Although, to be fair, I was scrutinizing this phone in a way that I don’t think average people do. I often hand review units over to my wife for a quick reaction or hot take just to see if something different jumps out. She didn’t detect anything odd happening along the edges, and I actually forgot about it for the most part, and only bring it up now from my earlier notes.

Performance: The Weakest Link

This is where the Edge 2025 stumbled for me. Motorola went with the MediaTek Dimensity 7400 Ultra which is totally fine on paper. In practice? It just doesn’t hold up under pressure.

Day-to-day performance is noticeably sluggish. Whether you’re bouncing between apps, trying to use picture-in-picture, or just navigating around the OS, there’s too much hesitation. It feels like a mismatch: a screen that can refresh at 120Hz paired with a chip that can’t deliver the frames to take advantage of it.

At times I felt like I was using the phone fresh after a restart, and before it was done with the initial processes after rebooting. It’s kind of hard to articulate but it seemed like the handset was busy doing something else that I couldn’t see.

It was not all the time, though, which is what made it a bit more aggravating. At times it would be cruising along just fine and then hit a roadblock of sorts.

For basic tasks, the Edge 2025 holds up very well. But push it even slightly (gaming, multitasking, or anything involving background processing) and the experience risks breaking down. Games I tested didn’t feel all that smooth, and the phone heats up faster than it should.

Battery and Charging: Strong Points

Here’s a silver lining. The 5,200mAh battery can go the distance for most people. If your day involves email, social media, and light video, two full days is possible. Push it harder, and you’ll still get a reliable full day with juice to spare.

Motorola’s 68W TurboPower charging is a welcome addition. It’s fast enough to hit 70% in about half an hour and full in under an hour. There’s also 15W wireless charging, which feels like a thoughtful touch in this price range. Just double-check your region, though; not every box includes the fast charger.

Cameras: Great Hardware, Uneven Output

The camera setup on the Edge 2025 is surprisingly robust:

• 50MP main sensor (Sony LYTIA 700C, f/1.8, OIS)
• 50MP ultrawide (122° FOV, doubles as macro)
• 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom
• 50MP selfie camera with PDAF

In good light, you can get some beautiful shots. The telephoto lens adds real versatility that most competitors skip entirely. And Motorola deserves credit for upping its motion capture game. Some shots of pets and kids came out surprisingly crisp.

So what is the problem? Inconsistent processing. There’s a tendency to oversharpen or blow out highlights. Skin tones can look off, and front-facing shots sometimes smudge fine detail into oblivion. It feels like there’s good hardware fighting with clunky post-processing. This signals to me that it could potentially be fixed or tweaked with an update.

Video performance mirrors the stills story. Yes, it supports 4K at 30fps on all four cameras, which is impressive. But one test showed weird grain and washed-out footage at 1080p, hinting at software bugs that need squashing.

Software Experience: Split Personality

Motorola used to be the brand you turned to if you wanted a phone that didn’t mess with Android too much. And in a lot of ways, that spirit still lingers in the Edge 2025, but not in the way you might hope.

When you first boot up the phone, it does feel pretty close to stock Android. The layout is familiar, animations are clean, and useful touches like Moto Actions (twist to launch the camera, chop to toggle the flashlight) are still here, still intuitive. There’s also a Moto Secure app that consolidates privacy features, permissions, and safety settings in one tidy place. All good things.

I love these things in other Motorola devices and find they work quite well. I actually found the experience to be really refreshing in the Razr 2025 which I recently reviewed.

But then come the speed bumps.

During setup, the phone nudges you into enabling apps and games you didn’t necessarily ask for, and ready-to-install suggestions or third-party apps you probably don’t want. It’s not an overwhelming amount of bloat, but it’s just enough to feel out of place on a phone that you might expect to have “clean Android.”

There’s a Taboola screen or panel that you can enable in the app draw if that’s your thing. It’s not mine, but I can see why some users like having news in a spot like this. To me, it’s a bit redundant from the Google panel on the home screen, but hey, to each his own.

There’s also the new “Moto AI” system, which honestly feels more like a checkbox feature than a meaningful tool. You get a dedicated AI button on the side of the phone but it’s far too easy to trigger by accident. Tap it and you’re presented with options that tie into both Google’s Gemini suite and Motorola’s own tools, powered by Perplexity.

In theory, it’s supposed to help with search, summarization, and contextual suggestions. In reality, it feels like it’s trying to be helpful in places where it just adds clutter.

Gemini and Circle to Search are great to have as they’re Google features, and they work well here. But Motorola’s own Moto AI? Its layers feel like an extra interface that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.

While I’ve been a fan of ChatGPT for a couple of years, I’ve increasingly warmed to Gemini for its capabilities. And because Google keeps sprinkling it into other apps and services, it’s becoming harder to avoid. I’m still torn, though, and haven’t gone all-in on any one AI tool. Then you throw in Moto AI and some of the stuff that comes with it and suddenly it all feels sort of in the way.

Then there’s the update policy, and this is where things go from annoying to disappointing. Motorola is only promising two major Android version upgrades and three years of security patches. That’s not just behind the curve but almost a few year’s out of touch. For context, Google is offering seven years of updates on the Pixel 9a, which costs less than this phone. Even Samsung, OnePlus, and Nothing are upping their game in this space. Motorola, for whatever reason, hasn’t.

As history shows us, Motorola’s update cadence has been somewhat slow and rather inconsistent. Users with last year’s Edge devices have had to wait months longer than expected for security patches or feature drops, and there’s no real transparency around when, or if, new updates are coming. It creates a trust gap that’s hard to ignore.

So what you’re left with is software that feels like it’s caught between identities: stock Android with a side of monetization. There’s a version of this phone that could’ve leaned hard into simplicity, speed, and longevity. An honest-to-goodness Pixel alternative from Motorola excites me. But that’s not what this is. Instead, it’s a mixed message. It wants to be both minimalist and monetized. Helpful and hands-off. Clean and clever.

And unfortunately, those contradictions don’t resolve themselves over time. If anything, they just become more noticeable the longer you use the phone. When dealing with a junior flagship or upper-middle phone you shouldn’t have some of these issues.

Audio and Connectivity

Stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos do a decent job, especially for video calls or YouTube. There’s no headphone jack, but you do get high-res audio via USB-C if you have the gear for it. Connectivity includes Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, and dual SIM support.

Value: It All Comes Down to the Price

At full retail ($549.99) the Motorola Edge 2025 is a tough sell. The sluggish performance and weak software support are hard to ignore when better-balanced phones like the Pixel 9a exist for less.

But Motorola’s phones are never really about MSRP. In fact, if you’ve been watching this brand for more than a minute, you know the sticker price is more like a placeholder. Within a month or two of launch, it’s almost guaranteed you’ll find the phone on sale, either through Motorola directly, third-party retailers, or in bundle deals from carriers. Motorola simply loves to offer limited-time discounts.

And that’s when the conversation shifts.

The moment this phone drops into the sub-$400 range, and history suggests it will before too long, it becomes a very different kind of product. Suddenly, the compromises start to make more sense. That slightly sluggish performance? Easier to forgive. The AI quirks and lackluster update promise? Still annoying, but tolerable. For $350 or whatever it ends up, you’d be getting a phone with a flagship-level design, a shockingly bright display, and true IP69 durability. You just won’t find those things together in many other phones at that price.

It’s not unlike buying a luxury car with an older engine. If you paid top dollar, you’d feel let down. But if you got it lightly used at a steep discount, you’d be thrilled with the comfort, look, and feel. Just don’t expect it to win any races.

The Edge 2025 feels like a $350 phone that got dressed up to pass for a $550 one. In a vacuum, that’s not a terrible thing. For folks who prioritize build quality, display brightness, and fast charging over benchmark scores or long-term updates, it’s got plenty of appeal. But for those shopping in the fiercely competitive mid-range market, “not bad” isn’t enough.

Final Verdict

The Motorola Edge 2025 is a beautiful contradiction. It’s the kind of phone that wows you in the hand, impresses on paper, and feels like it should be a flagship. Until you push it a little harder and the cracks begin to show.

Awarded to products with an average rating of 3.75 stars or higher, the AndroidGuys Smart Pick recognizes a balance of quality, performance, and value. It stands out in design, innovation, and user experience, delivering great functionality at a competitive price.

If design, display brightness, and durability are high on your priority list, there’s a lot to like here. Motorola nailed the hardware feel, packed in meaningful durability upgrades, and added some thoughtful conveniences like wireless charging and a genuinely versatile camera setup. For casual users or anyone who just wants a handsome phone that looks and feels great, the Edge 2025 can absolutely deliver, especially once it hits its inevitable sale price.

But make no mistake: general performance today and long-term support for tomorrow are its Achilles’ heels. The sluggish chipset holds it back from feeling truly fluid, and Motorola’s software update policy is a serious strike against anyone hoping to keep this phone for more than a year or two. Add in the odd mix of clean Android with post-sale bloat and “too many cooks” AI features, and the software story becomes frustrating.

So who is this phone for? It’s for the deal hunter. The shopper who knows the MSRP is just a suggestion. If you snag the Edge 2025 for under $400, it becomes a very solid buy, and one of the most visually striking and physically durable phones you’ll find in the mid-range. This could be an excellent buy with great value six months from now.

At full price? Circle back when there’s a back-to-school promo or some other limited-time sale. On sale? Easily worth a second look. Just know what you’re getting into, and what you’re not.

Related