Motorola Signature Review: An Edge in Signature clothing

Design

• Slim, but not the slimmest around
• Still looks similar to the Edge family
• Robust dust and water resistance

Motorola claims that the Signature represents ‘luxury and refinement through an ultra-thin design’ – but, in reality, it looks a lot like the rest of the Edge collection. That’s kind of the problem when you use premium Pantone-certified colours and interesting finishes on even your budget-friendly phones – it makes the premium alternatives struggle to stand out.

I think Motorola has an even tougher time of it because the Signature, overall, looks a lot like the 6mm-thick Edge 70 that launched in November 2025 as an answer to the likes of the iPhone Air and Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge. The difference? The Signature is both thicker and heavier than the Edge at 7mm and 186g, and that doesn’t feel especially premium if you’ve handled the Edge 70, as I have.

Granted, compared to other flagships like the 8.1mm thick, 215g OnePlus 15, the Signature is indeed thin and light, and coming from the Oppo Find X9 Pro, my current daily driver, the differences are immediate. It is a much slimmer phone that’s much nicer to use one-handed, even with a 6.8-inch screen – it’s just not as thin as it could be. 

Now, it’s not exactly thicker for the sake of it – there are benefits to being a little thicker, namely in performance, battery life, and camera tech – but I’ll get to that later.

I must admit, I’m not a huge fan of the Pantone-certified Carbon Shadow finish provided for review either; Motorola describes it as a dark blue, but for all intents and purposes, it’s black. I’ve looked at this thing in so many lighting conditions, and I’ve not once seen a hint of blue. I do like the linen-inspired finish it comes with though – it feels really nice in the palm of the hand, and unlike actual linen, it remains durable. 

The Martini Olive finish is the nicer of the two, in my opinion, complete with its twill-inspired finish – but that’s the beauty of being able to choose the colour option that suits you best. It’s all down to taste.

Despite its slimline nature, the phone isn’t going to snap in your pocket; in fact, with a combination of MIL-STD-810H certification, dual IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance and Gorilla Glass Victus 2 screen protection, the phone should be able to survive a drop or a dunk, and then some.

Screen

• 6.8-inch AMOLED screen with 165Hz LTPO
• Top-notch screen experience
• Subtle curvature feels nice without ruining things

While the overall design might be a close copy of the Edge 70, albeit slightly thicker, the Signature stands out more in the screen department. 

You’re getting a larger 6.8-inch 1.5K AMOLED screen that not only has a faster 165Hz screen than much of the competition, but it’s LTPO-enabled up to 120Hz – though that does mean you have to decide whether you want faster frames or smoother, more battery-efficient performance. I tend to go down the 120Hz route for general use, but the 165Hz support is nice for games that support high frame rates. 

What’s even more impressive is the brightness of the panel, clocking in at 6200 nits peak brightness, making it brighter than the likes of the iPhone 17 Pro and, really, most top-end phones available right now. 

Of course, that only really matters when you’re watching HDR content, but even in general use, the panel is more than bright enough, even on the rare sunny day in Blighty during the winter. 

There’s an ever-so-subtle curvature to the screen so it’s not quite the flat-screen experience that’s in vogue at the moment, but it’s so slight that you’re not really going to notice it in everyday use.

There’s none of that odd shadowing you get at certain angles with more dramatically curved panels, and text doesn’t disappear off the sides of the screen. It just feels a tad nicer in the hand, and makes swiping in from the sides of the screen a much more pleasant experience on the thumb. That’s the kind of curved screen I can appreciate. 

The AMOLED nature of the screen, combined with Pantone-certified colour, makes for a vivid experience whether you’re watching a movie or an anime, and it makes the interface feel brighter and more vibrant – though if it’s a little too sickly for your tastes, you can always tune it in the Settings menu. 

Really, there’s very little to complain about here – it’s a solid screen, through and through. 

Cameras

• Triple 50MP rear camera setup
• Versatile for a slim phone
• Main camera is best, but zoom lens keeps up

Slimeline phones tend to have fairly limited camera hardware, particularly in the zoom department, but Motorola has proved that you can overcome that by being just a smidge thicker. 

The combination of triple 50MP rear cameras, split between a main snapper with a fairly large 1/1.28-inch sensor, a 3x periscope zoom and a 122-degree ultrawide, is very much in line – and at times, better – than what you’ll get from similarly priced, yet much thicker, phones.

The main sensor is definitely the star of the show, delivering great-quality shots with solid exposure and a wide dynamic range, even in more challenging backlit situations. 

There’s a great amount of detail on offer here, and by default, the colours are much more neutral than the sometimes-sickly blues and greens you get from the likes of Samsung – in its default profile, anyway. There is a Signature Style mode that boosts contrast and vibrancy, but it makes shots look too warm for my tastes, and it can occasionally make low-light shots look overprocessed. 

The periscope design of the zoom module means that it covers anywhere from 3x to 6x with impressive quality, with shots that retain plenty of detail, and they’re in line with the main lens in terms of colour palette. It’s particularly solid for portrait shots, combined with Motorola’s dedicated portrait mode that lets you tweak elements like lighting and the bokeh effect to further stylise your shot.  

There is the ability go all the way to 100x using AI-powered zoom, but the results, particularly past the 30x mark, aren’t worth writing home about. Leave the extreme zoom to the likes of the Honor Magic 8 Pro and Oppo Find X9 Pro with their high-res 200MP snappers, in my opinion. 

The ultrawide is similarly well equipped, with none of the shortcomings you often see from ultrawide lenses – distortion at the edges, a noticeably different colour palette, overall softer images – present here. It’s a great camera for shooting those scenic vistas, and doubles up as a competent macro lens thanks to its PDAF tech. 

That all-round great performance continues even as light levels begin to drop – particularly where the main sensor and its f/1.6 aperture are concerned. Even in dimly lit shots, photos look detailed and well-lit without veering too much into over-brightened, over-enhanced territory, and the zoom lens holds up pretty well too. 

The ultrawide is the weakest of the trio with its narrower aperture and smaller sensor, so particularly dark shots can look a bit soft and muddy, but if there are sources of light in the shot, it can do a pretty good job with the hardware available. 

While the Motorola Signature isn’t going to take on some of the best camera phones around, it’s amazingly capable for a phone this thin. If you want the lightweight feel without compromising camera hardware, the Signature is the best option available right now. 

Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 power
• Solid sustained performance
• Top-notch connectivity

One of the major complaints about the slimline Edge 70 that, despite its price tag, it featured a distinctly mid-range chipset. 

Well, the Signature doesn’t make that same mistake despite similarly thin dimensions, instead packing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 and either 12- or 16GB of RAM depending on the storage option you go for. Now, it’s still not quite the top-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but in day-to-day use, you won’t tell the difference.

The phone feels slick, no doubt aided by the LTPO-enabled refresh rate, with apps opening instantly, super smooth scrolling and the ability to run even fairly demanding games without any stutter. 

In fact, despite the thin dimensions, the Signature maintains solid performance over long periods of stress, scoring 68.3% in our gaming stability benchmark, beating the thicker, more expensive Honor Magic 8 Pro at 55.4%. Its new ArcticMesh cooling system does really seem to do the trick, even if it’s not quite gaming phone-standard. 

Other benchmarks aren’t quite so rosy, however, with the 8 Gen 5 falling behind phones like the OnePlus 15 with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and even phones like the Galaxy S25 Plus with last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset in CPU, GPU and NPU tests. 

So, yes, there are certainly more powerful phones around, but will you actually notice the difference? Unless you’re running local LLMs or rendering multiple streams of 4K video, I very much doubt it. 

Connectivity is also top-notch, as you might expect from a premium phone, including support for both Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, along with NFC for payments, GPS and even UWB support that allows it to play nice with trackers including Motorola’s new Moto Tag 2.  

Software

• Android 16 with Motorola tweaks
• Moto AI UI can feel bloated at times
• Signature Club app not available yet

Motorola’s software has been praised for its simplicity for years, choosing to stick closely to the stock Android formula offered by the likes of the Google Pixel range, rather than the world of massively customised skins from Chinese rivals like Oppo, Honor and Xiaomi. 

But that’s slowly starting to change – and I’m not entirely sure it’s for the better. The Signature runs Android 16 with the usual Motorola twists we love – elements like karate chopping the phone to turn the torch on, and twisting the phone to activate the camera – but with a new infusion of AI that, at times, can feel a little bit messy.

The Moto AI toolkit has the best of intentions, with features that summarise your notifications, record and transcribe conversations, provide you with daily briefings and even create playlists based on a specific mood (though, rather frustratingly, only if you use Amazon Music, and who uses that?!) – but it can look busy on screen at times.

Elements like Catch Me Up appear on an already busy notification shade, adding to the visual clutter, and you’ll get daily briefing notifications that pop up at the top of the screen at various times throughout the day. 

It also adds an entirely new news feed to the experience, though oddly this is accessed by swiping left from the app drawer, not from the left-hand panel on the Home screen where Discover usually lives. To be honest, it’s a blessing, as I still prefer Discover’s truly personalised news notifications over the fairly limited selection offered by Motorola’s alternative.  

There are some smart elements here, namely Moto AI’s interoperability with Microsoft’s Copilot and Perplexity Pro, with a free six-month subscription for the latter, allowing you to dip between Motorola’s assistant and other LLMs without any real effort. But even the existence of Moto AI alongside Gemini feels a bit messy, with both assistants featuring dedicated keys on either side of the device – it should be either-or, in my opinion.  

AI aside, the one element that’s supposed to separate the Signature from other Motorola devices running Android 16 is the Signature Club – an app that provides, as Motorola puts it, the ‘white glove experience’ with access to exclusive experiences, restaurants and the like. 

The catch? It’s not actually ready for launch, with the app instead set to appear on the phone in the coming months. It also comes with a few non-Moto pre-installed apps, something I wouldn’t expect from a £900 phone. That doesn’t feel very premium, very Signature, especially for the first device under the all-new branding. 

What feels more premium is the fact that Motorola has finally committed to seven years of OS upgrades, allowing the Signature to compete with other 7-year-guarantee phones like the Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S25 – something previous Moto phones haven’t been able to do, and should take the phone through to 2033’s Android 23. 

Battery life

• 5200mAh silicon carbon battery
• All-day battery life
• 90W wired and 50W wireless charging

Despite its fairly thin dimensions, the Signature packs a 5200mAh silicon-carbon battery, allowing for a denser battery without the thickness that often comes as a result. It’s not exactly as thick and heavy as the 5000mAh Galaxy S25 Ultra, is it? 

That said, the 5200mAh cell on offer here – 400mAh more than the Edge 70, by the way – is enough to deliver all-day performance with a mix of social media scrolling, messaging, taking the occasional snap and even diving into the occasional game in Archero 2.

I’d usually get to the end of the day with around 10-20% left, so not exactly the most comfortable all-day experience when you can get phones like the Oppo Find X9 Pro with a whopping 7500mAh cell that can go two days without breaking a sweat, but again, you’re compromising for the thin, lightweight build on offer. 

Still, I’d say that for all but the most screen-addicted, what Motorola offers here is more than enough. 

What’s more, there’s much faster charging than the similarly slim Edge 70, offering boosted 90W wired charging along with 50W wireless and 10W reverse wireless charging to boot. 

You’ll need a Motorola-branded TurboCharge brick to hit those full 90W speeds, but with support for other fast-charging standards, I managed to hit around 55W using my Anker Prime 250W desktop charger. At those speeds, the phone managed 39% in 15 minutes and a full charge in 56 minutes – though Motorola claims that you can get 50% in 15 minutes with its branded alternative. 

Should you buy it?