Test: Motorola Edge 70 Max – No more than max

Mobile phones can cost almost anything these days and then they often have something that impresses. It could be extreme cameras, a large fleshy screen or perhaps several different things. Then when we test cheaper phones, we are almost always pleasantly surprised by how far they actually go in everyday life.

The phones between these extremes are a little more difficult to place in a compartment. The Motorola Edge 70 Max is one such phone. The price level just under 10,000 kroner sets the expectations and when I start taking pictures on an early autumn evening in the twilight, I can easily state that the cameras are not a reason to choose the Motorola Edge 70 Max. The images get sharp contrasts and gloomy white balance that do not correspond to reality. It is clear that the priorities lie elsewhere than here.

Soulless

Motorola generally focuses a lot on aesthetic expression. They often see the phones as more of an accessory and something to express your style than as technology and a purely practical tool. My test specimen in gray is clinically clean of any form of expression and is about as anonymous as it gets.

In any case, there are two other colors you can buy the Edge 70 Max in, light blue and grey-green. Although Motorola generally emphasizes materials and design, they also have a foundation of function. Durability is something that returns and in addition to durable Gorillaglass, although not the latest or most durable, the phone is also water resistant and dustproof according to both IP68 and IP69.

A look at the specifications of the Motorola Edge 70 Max clearly highlights a priority area. The battery is 7100 mAh, a significantly high capacity, and if we are to guess what the maximum in the phone’s name refers to, it is partly the battery, partly the brightness of the screen of up to 7000 nits.

The latter means that I can usually use the phone completely unhindered even in bright sunshine, but 5 or 6000 would probably also have worked and the fact that it is extra strong is not decisive. However, it happens that the automatic adjustment of the brightness does not keep up, so sometimes I have to go into the settings and manually pull up the brightness when necessary. So the only thing I really think is the best with the phone is the battery.

Messy AI

Motorola does relatively little to change and improve the basic features of Android. We get gesture control so you can swing the phone in the air to launch the camera even from locked screen or poke the phone in the air to launch the flashlight. Motorola ships with a series of unnecessary junk apps, which fortunately you can still easily uninstall, and we get the new AI package Motorola Qira, which replaces the previous Moto AI, but is similar to its predecessor and lacks support for Swedish.

The phone thus has a large and bright screen and is powered by a system chip that provides good performance. Given this and the battery capacity, the battery life is still good. That, the battery life, is really the only thing that speaks in the phone’s favor. Motorola has prioritized a lot of other things, especially photo quality in this phone which is Max but far from Pro in any way. As I mentioned, the cameras are bad in low light, but if you find subjects in daylight, the main camera is still far from useless. I can take good pictures with nice depth of field as long as the conditions are right. The accompanying wide-angle camera with macro, on the other hand, is significantly weaker.

Questions and answers

How does it charge?

Support for 90W wired charging and 25W wireless charging with support for magnetic chargers according to the Qi2 standard.

How does it feel in the hand?

It’s a big phone and you can feel it in your hand, one of the biggest phones sold today. If it is a large screen you are looking for, however, there are many better choices that are significantly cheaper. Today, many cheap phones have large screens, finding cheap compact phones is difficult.

System updates?

Be gentle with it! Motorola only offers two years of Android updates.

An alternative

In roughly the same price range is the recently released Samsung Galaxy S26 FE, but its predecessor is very similar and significantly cheaper, so the S25 FE may be a better choice. Even the Samsung Galaxy S26 can be bought cheaper than the Motorola Edge 70 Max.

Camera example

Poor in lower light and not nearly as versatile a camera setup as we would have liked or expected. The main camera is acceptable for photos in daylight, but we lack dark performance, a good wide angle and optical zoom. No unreasonable demands at all for the price tag Max has.