I’ve been as much of a thin phone skeptic as anyone. Why would I give up on camera specs and battery life just to shave a couple of millimeters off a phone’s waistline? I asked pretty much exactly that when I first saw Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge earlier this year.

But the Motorola Edge 70 may have made me a convert. It’s a cheaper take on the S25 Edge or iPhone Air, out now in the UK and Europe for £699 / €799 (around $920), but it “will not be a US device,” according to Nicole Hagen, Motorola’s head of global product marketing.

It’s just a third of a millimeter thicker than the Air — an all but imperceptible difference — but meets some of that phone’s failings head-on by offering a bigger battery and more durable design. It introduces a few new flaws of its own, but as a blueprint for where thin phones go next, this makes more sense to me than Apple’s and Samsung’s offerings.

We are truly in silicon-carbon battery season, because this is the second time in as many weeks that I’ve found myself praising a manufacturer for fitting a high-capacity battery into a small space. While the Oppo Find X9 Pro uses the novel battery tech to cram an unusually large 7,500mAh cell into a regular-sized phone, Motorola has instead employed it to fit a regular-sized battery into an unusually thin phone.

The Edge 70’s 4,800mAh battery is as big as many flagships’, breezing past the iPhone Air’s “all-day battery life” to last well into a second day. It won’t last a full two days unless you use it lightly, but heavier users will struggle to run the phone dry in a single day.

The silicon-carbon battery fixes the single biggest fear most prospective buyers have about this year’s wave of thin phones, comfortably outclassing the 3,149mAh battery in Apple’s Air or the 3,900mAh cell in Samsung’s Edge. Those phones force buyers to give up battery life. Motorola’s does not.

The Edge 70 tops up quickly with 68W wired charging, and 15W Qi wireless is also available. There isn’t Qi2 support, though Motorola includes a magnetic plastic case with the phone in EMEA if you’re jealous of the Qi2-enabled Pixel 10 phones.

Slim as the case is, it inevitably detracts from just how thin the Edge 70 feels. I’ve only used Samsung and Apple’s thin phones in passing, and after sticking with this phone for a week, I was surprised to find that thin feeling never really got old. I marvel at the phone every time I pick it up, that it can be so thin, so light, so comfortable in the hand.

I’m sure the Air and S25 Edge feel much the same. Where Motorola diverges is in how it built the Edge 70, with an aluminum frame and textured silicone rear that feels less vulnerable than the glass backs of its rivals. This is the only phone of the three to have both an IP68 rating and meet the tougher IP69 standard, and it also meets the MIL-STD-810H military testing standard for durability.

That’s not to say the Edge 70 is indestructible — far from it, especially since the Gorilla Glass 7i used on the screen is more vulnerable than the ceramic-hardened versions on those other phones. But free of the fear of shattering the back, I’ve found myself more carefree about using the phone as is, rather than trapping that thin design in a bulky case.

So that’s that; the Edge 70 has solved thin phones for good. If only, eh? It may have improved on some of Samsung and Apple’s failings, but not all of them — and it introduces a few of its own.

The cameras are the most obvious compromise, though less than you might think. The 50-megapixel main camera isn’t bad, even doing a decent job in dim conditions, though the combination of dark skies and bright lights at an evening soccer game proved too much for it to process perfectly. Unlike the iPhone Air, you get an ultrawide lens alongside it, though there’s still no telephoto — what looks like a third camera is really only a light sensor. You can get a half-decent telephoto for less in the likes of the Galaxy S25 FE or Xiaomi 15T Pro.

Spec-heads might also take umbrage with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset inside. It’s not a bad chip, but you’ll find flagship silicon in similarly priced devices. It’s plenty of power for most people, but on paper it’s less capable than other phones at this price, even if competitive gamers are likely the only ones who’ll notice.

Motorola’s take on Android is the bigger problem, and it’s probably the only version of the operating system getting worse.

Quite simply, a £699 phone — hell, any phone — shouldn’t ship packed to the rafters with ads and bloatware. There are at least 14 Motorola-branded apps preinstalled, and other apps including Candy Crush Saga, Microsoft Copilot, Monopoly Go, Pinterest, and something called Toon Blast.

Worse, the first slot in the app drawer is taken up by a games “folder” that actually just suggests more time-killers I should download, including gems like Block Blast! and Stack Ball. Above that, a suggestions row dynamically recommends three of my own apps I’m likely to need at that moment in time based on my past behavior (which is useful enough), along with a fourth app I don’t have and never want, ranging from payment app MoneyGram to the musical Simply Guitar.

I’m not done yet! The Live Lock Screen is the most egregious of all. Suggested during setup, this replaces your lock screen with a cycling stream of images paired with links to articles from the web on a predefined set of broad interests like “food” or “tech.” These are ads in disguise, but every three or four, you’re rewarded with something more overt — usually a full-screen banner advertising Temu.

It’s easy to turn all of this off and uninstall the apps, but it shouldn’t be there in the first place. Motorola is embarrassing itself by including it.

I’m not sure if the way its compromises shake out make the Edge 70 a better phone than the iPhone Air. But as I look forward to where this form factor might go next, Motorola’s phone feels like a better blueprint than Apple’s, and suggests that adopting a silicon-carbon battery is what’s required to elevate the Air’s second generation.

The Edge 70 preserves battery life while shaving down the bulk, and feels just tough enough to risk going case-free so all that hardware R&D doesn’t go wasted. The cameras are basic, but so are the iPhone’s, and it may be underpowered, but who’s buying the year’s third-thinnest phone and hoping for a powerhouse? You want it to feel great and last all day, and on that count, the Edge 70 has nailed it.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge