Motorola launches the Edge S, a budget flagship 5G phone with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870 - XDA Developers

Motorola today launched the Motorola Edge S, an affordable flagship smartphone with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870 chipset.

Under-the-hood, the Motorola Edge S is the first phone to feature the Snapdragon 870.

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888 definitely benchmarks higher than the Snapdragon 865 and, by extension, it likely outperforms the Snapdragon 870, but you won’t be missing out on much by choosing a phone with the Snapdragon 870 over one with the Snapdragon 888.

The Snapdragon 870 will be paired with 6 or 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 128 or 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage, the latter of which is expandable with an up to 1TB microSDXC card.

More importantly, the Snapdragon 870 is paired with a discrete Snapdragon X55 modem, which allows the Motorola Edge S to connect to sub-6GHz 5G networks.

Unlike the other two devices in the Motorola Edge series, the Edge S doesn’t have a curved display, but it does offer a higher than normal refresh rate at 90Hz.

The Motorola Edge S runs Android 11 out-of-the-box and is the first phone from Motorola to support the company’s new desktop mode software, which we exclusively detailed early last month.

The Motorola Edge S is on pre-sale in China, but it will very likely debut internationally in the near future under the Moto G100 name, according to Evan Blass.

XDA » News Brief » Motorola launches the Edge S, a budget flagship 5G phone with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 870.