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Art et designTranscription
00:00Hey what's up guys, MKBHD here and Motorola is back in the flagship smartphone game.
00:09Do you realize how long it's been?
00:11And to be honest, I kind of miss these.
00:12You know, it wasn't that long ago that I remember the Moto X and the Droid series being super
00:18competitive and unique and just Motorola in general bringing a certain spice to the high-end
00:23flagship game before their absence.
00:26But then they didn't make one for a couple of years.
00:28So they did budget phones for a while and they dropped a folding phone.
00:32But now it's 2020 and they're back with a flagship.
00:35So what do they pack in?
00:36Well, Snapdragon 865, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of fast UFS 3.0 storage and a 5000mAh battery.
00:46There's a triple camera on the back headlined by a 108MP main shooter.
00:51This thing's got 5G radios and it's capped off with a 6.7-inch 90Hz OLED display that
00:59is massively curved around the sides, hence the name Edge+.
01:03So there's a lot of good things here, but it's far from perfect and there are some things
01:07that are frustrating that sort of feel like come from Motorola being rusty making flagship
01:13phones.
01:15And we got to talk about the whole curved display thing.
01:17But first of all, I mostly really like the way this phone is built.
01:20You know, it's metal and glass like any other flagship and it has some character with the
01:24curves in the top and bottom rails that I like.
01:28And yes, you're not seeing things.
01:30That is a headphone jack on a flagship phone in 2020, one of the last you'll find.
01:36Speaker at the bottom that's paired with the earpiece at the top to my ear gets pretty
01:40loud and sounds really good.
01:41But what's funny is even as thick as this phone is, the camera bump on the back for
01:46those huge cameras still sticks out even more.
01:49And since it's off to the side, yes, it absolutely still rocks on a table.
01:53Classic.
01:54But the one thing I dislike the most isn't the camera bump or the fingerprint magnet
01:58that is the back of this phone, but it's because this display, this waterfall display so dramatically
02:03curves over the edges like the Huawei Mate 30 Pro, it pushes the buttons on the side
02:09of the phone back from the center.
02:11So they're not in the middle anymore.
02:12They're like pushed back even further from the middle where they'd usually be.
02:16And also I usually like when the volume buttons are on the opposite side of the phone as the
02:19power button, but they're all on one side here.
02:21But I guess that's something you can pretty easily get used to.
02:24Oh, you know what else I recently noticed?
02:25When you shake this phone, aside from turning on the flashlight, it makes this noise.
02:31You hear that?
02:32So I thought that noise was coming from the buttons, like rattling inside the phone, which
02:36was like, oh, that's not very good quality.
02:38That's not very good feeling.
02:40But you still get that noise when you hold the buttons down.
02:44Turns out that noise is coming from the giant camera and the optically image stabilized
02:49sensor inside the back of the phone here.
02:51I verified that because the same sort of system in the Galaxy S20 Ultra also makes this rattling
03:00noise.
03:01Anyway, it's not an actual fault of the phone.
03:02I just felt like pointing it out because I noticed it.
03:05These sensors are getting huge.
03:06Also don't shake your phone that much.
03:09I missed the Motorola flagship software treatment, like a lot.
03:14There's not that many like it, but it's really nice.
03:15It's a relatively clean Android 10 with Motorola features added.
03:20That's always why I loved about those previous Motorola flagships.
03:22If you go back and watch those older views, this is almost the same thing.
03:27You have the Motorola actions, the double chop to turn on the flashlight, the double
03:32twist to quickly open the camera app, and all that stuff is still here.
03:36There's also Motorola's couple of widgets, including this time and weather one on the
03:39home screen with this weirdly low frame rate animation, but it's still pretty much mostly
03:45what I would expect.
03:46I guess they've gotten a bit rusty because this Verizon exclusive phone has more bloatware
03:51pre-installed than I've seen on any premium phone in a long time.
03:55I actually didn't uninstall any of them yet, so you can see them all here, but it came
03:58with all these games, two different versions of Candy Crush, the Verizon cloud app, a digital
04:06secure app, there's Disney Plus, and then another game, and then another game.
04:11Sheesh.
04:12I didn't know initially if this is a Verizon thing or a Motorola thing.
04:16Probably a Verizon thing, but yeah, of course you can just go through and uninstall them
04:20all one by one, but it just doesn't feel premium when you have to go through that.
04:25Also, one other little thing that doesn't feel flagship quality on this phone is the
04:28vibration motor, something that's underrated on a lot of those really good phones.
04:33This one has one that's kind of rattly and doesn't feel that great on par with $400 phones.
04:39I wish it was better.
04:40But the battery is one thing I can't complain about though.
04:425,000 milliamp hours is here.
04:44It's a huge sale and that's a trend I'm happy to see continuing in these flagships and it's
04:48translated well.
04:49I was getting regularly six plus hours of screen on time, which is awesome, and it was
04:53lasting through the end of the day with battery to spare, which is what matters.
04:57I guess that makes perfect sense for a phone with a 1080p display and such a huge battery.
05:01There's also wireless charging and it comes with a decently fast charger in the box.
05:06The one thing I'd be hesitant about, well, not hesitant really, just to keep in mind,
05:10is this is a 5G phone.
05:12That's one of their main focuses of it on Verizon, which, cool, great, but I'm not in a 5G area.
05:19You might've seen my 5G explained video where I was testing Verizon's millimeter wave 5G.
05:24If not, I'll leave it below the like button.
05:26But basically, I live near New York City, which is one of those cities that's lighting
05:30up with 5G now, but that millimeter wave does not reach here from there.
05:35So I've been using this as a 4G phone basically since then.
05:38So that means someday in the theoretical future, they'll be lighting up 5G around here and
05:42then this phone will connect to that and it'll start getting those better speeds, but also
05:47that will draw more battery life.
05:50How much more?
05:51We don't know, but that's why 5G phones have all had mostly bigger batteries.
05:56But generally 5,000 million hours, I'm not complaining.
05:58And then this camera, 108 megapixels.
06:01Now, you might be thinking, wait a second, we've seen that number before.
06:05And you'd be right.
06:06Galaxy S20 Ultra, Mi Note 10, this is another 108 megapixel main camera.
06:13And for the most part, it's pretty similar to Samsung's camera.
06:15Matter of fact, the colors are quite nice and the shots are very detailed as you'd expect.
06:20Dynamic range is nice with auto HDR as well.
06:23And it's spitting out 27 megapixel photos by default.
06:26And basically, if you give it a little light, you get good shots.
06:29But it struggles again, I have to mention this, with the sensor being so huge and the
06:35super shallow depth of field that comes with that, especially with closer up subjects.
06:39You've heard me say this before, but sometimes a shallow depth of field looks cool.
06:43I've raved about that in the past, but to a certain limit.
06:47Look at this photo I took of a sign.
06:49It's crazy.
06:50It looks normal at first, but the left side of the sign is sharp and in focus, but the
06:54right side is a little out of the plane of focus.
06:57So it's blurry.
06:58Sheesh.
06:59Now, you've probably heard me talk about this before, but the real problem here is
07:02Motorola's viewfinder in their camera app sharpens the crap out of whatever you're
07:08taking a photo of.
07:09It looks, it's like cranked to a hundred, like, you know, that Lightroom clarity filter,
07:14if you just turn sharpness all the way up, it looks like an effect.
07:17So the sharpness is exaggerated literally to a point where you can't actually tell looking
07:22through the viewfinder, if you're nailing focus or not.
07:25I took shots like this by pointing and shooting, thinking focus was fine because it was sharp
07:29in the viewfinder.
07:31But then when I look at the picture closely and I saw what happened, I had to take it
07:35again.
07:36And this happened multiple times.
07:37Here's a screenshot of the viewfinder of what I'm seeing and then the photo that I got.
07:41And again, when you zoom in a bit, you realize it's a bit out of focus and you have to actually
07:45look at the photo to realize and take another picture.
07:48You can legitimately actually miss focus if you don't check.
07:52Motorola, why are you sharpening the viewfinder this much?
07:55You have a good camera, tone it down, relax.
08:01But also I feel like we could use that dual aperture feature again.
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09:23Alright, we gotta talk about curved displays.
09:27So this phone is of course leaning into it pretty hard.
09:30There's some edge display features that'll glow when you get a notification, when your
09:35alarm clock goes off, the whole side thing, they really love it.
09:39They also named the phone the Edge Plus, but can we stop?
09:45I hope the world can see now what's really going on out here, because it's getting ridiculous.
09:49It's really ridiculous.
09:50Like there was a day a few years ago where every smartphone display was pretty much flat.
09:56But as we start to reach out towards those edges and shrink the bezels a bit, Samsung
10:01tried one of the sides rolling over the edge because hey, there's Samsung and they can
10:05try stuff.
10:06They just dropped a news ticker and some stocks over there and some quirky features
10:09on the side and suddenly it was a hit.
10:11People loved it because it looked cool.
10:14And next thing you know, their next phone has both the sides flowing over the edges
10:18and we're loving it.
10:19And other companies are scrambling to figure out how can we get our displays to do that
10:22too.
10:23Meanwhile, accidental touches start to become a thing, but you know what?
10:26It's early.
10:27They'll iron that out.
10:29But that never really fully got ironed out.
10:32Now don't get me wrong.
10:33It still looks super cool.
10:34That's the whole point.
10:36This is prime form of a function, but it turns out that curve over the edges doesn't really
10:42seem to be worth the extra cost and the extra accidental touches we still get no matter
10:47how much they've worked on this palm rejection software.
10:50And so now if you look back at Samsung's newest flagships, the Galaxy S20 is one of the first
10:55ones going back to flatter displays.
10:58Turns out it's okay to roll back on some things.
11:01We had capacitive buttons at the bottom of the phones for a long while before we just
11:06stopped that completely.
11:07You don't see it anymore.
11:08We've had ring flashes.
11:10We've had branded bezels.
11:12We've had flaps over ports for better water resistance.
11:16But all of those things, we slowly realized there's better ways to do that, or this isn't
11:20the best idea.
11:21And now they're gone.
11:23It's okay to roll back on things.
11:25And so this is my formal petition to realize that these curved over screens, at least these
11:31extreme ones, these 90 degree waterfall edges, we can work it back.
11:37Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
11:39Also, not to pile on, but this is the worst fingerprint reader I've ever seen under glass.
11:46Ever.
11:47Like I really don't know what happened here.
11:48I've tried re-registering my fingerprint twice using a different finger, but this reader
11:53gives me the most failed attempts and the slowest average speed I have ever seen in
11:59an in-glass fingerprint reader.
12:00So couldn't leave that out.
12:02So to sum it all up, I've liked using this phone, but I didn't love it.
12:07And when you start to shop around and compare it, like the OnePlus 8 Pro that I just came
12:10from has a higher resolution, a higher refresh rate screen, a better quality screen overall.
12:17Turns out about the same quality camera system, much faster charging.
12:21There's the same specs, a better fingerprint reader, cleaner software, no bloatware, fast
12:27software updates, and less of a curve around the screen.
12:31So you know, the smaller battery is maybe the only downside, but what reason is there
12:37to buy the Moto for $999?
12:39I just think it falls in that category of phones that you'd be okay with using if you
12:43got it, but there are other better phones to buy out there.
12:47And I think someone's got to say it.
12:49It's really just time to be done with those curve displays.
12:52And I don't think Motorola's done by any means with trying out flagships.
12:56I think they'll be back.
12:57At least I hope so.
12:59Either way, that's been it.
13:01Thanks for watching.
13:02Catch you guys in the next one.
13:04Peace.