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I was planning on seeing a lot of new things at IFA 2025, but I wasn’t expecting to see much in the way of smartphones. Usually we’ve rattled through most of the big releases by this point in the year, leaving room for tablets, laptops and the like to shine. Which made it all the more surprising when part of Lenovo’s showcase was dedicated to showing off three new Motorola handsets.
The biggest news out of this unveiling was that the upcoming Moto G06 Power is fitted with a massive 7,000mAh battery – the largest I’ve seen here in the UK – and both it and the standard Moto G06 have the largest displays on any Moto phone to date.
Despite all of that record-breaking, however, my eye was most drawn to the Edge 60 Neo. This mid-range phone gets a big battery upgrade of its own (though not 7,000mAh big) and a couple of smaller improvements that set it up to be one of the year’s most intriguing compact phones. Let’s take a closer look at it.
Motorola Edge 60 Neo hands on review: Design, key features and first impressions
For a brand that can make phones as eyecatching and unique as the Razr 60, it’s a little strange how uniform Motorola chooses to make its slab phones. The Edge 60 Neo looks near-enough identical to the Edge 60 and Edge 60 Pro, which in turn aren’t all that different from last year’s models.
To that end, it has a very similar profile to its predecessor, the Edge 50 Neo, to the point where I expect that the measurements and weight (I don’t have exact figures just yet) will be close to identical. That’s no bad thing – the 50 Neo was a wonderfully lightweight compact phone, and based on my hands-on time with it, the Edge 60 Neo is fixing to follow suit.
That’s not to say it’s a complete rehash of last year. For one thing, durability gets a minor upgrade: the screen is now covered with Gorilla Glass 7i and dust and water resistance is rated at IP68/IP69, certifying the phone as dust-tight and able to withstand high-pressure, high-temperature jets, as well as submersion in 1.5m of water for up to 30 minutes.
There are new colours, too, each of which gets the same leather-inspired finish. I don’t have the official names of the colours (expect them to be Pantone-approved shades) but the options are a bright red, an aquamarine blue and an understated lilac-grey.
The display appears to be the exact same as last year; it’s a 6.36in pOLED panel with a 2,670 x 1,200 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 3000 nits.
The same 32-megapixel selfie camera as last year sits in a holepunch notch at the top of the display and, over on the rear, we’ve got a very familiar camera loadout: the trio of a 50-megapixel main lens, 13-megapixel ultrawide and 10-megapixel 3x telephoto lens carries over from the Edge 50 Neo as well.
We finally see some fairly substantial changes inside the phone. The new Mediatek Dimensity 7400 is an iterative update on the 7300 chipset used in the Edge 50 Neo, so expect a minor bump in performance scores, and I don’t yet know what RAM and ROM options will be available – but it’s likely that it will be 8GB and 256GB, like last year.
More interesting, however, is that the Edge 60 Neo has a much larger battery than its predecessor (5,000mAh, up from 4,310mAh). That could ruin my dreams of another incredibly lightweight handset, but it should help with battery life, at least.
65W charging returns and Motorola claims that just seven minutes on charge can give you enough power to see you through the day. That’s quite a subjective measurement, so we’ll see more about that when it comes time for testing.
Finally, Motorola highlighted some of the AI features that will be available on the Edge 60 Neo. In addition to Google Gemini and Circle to Search, you also get the brand’s own Moto AI, which I recently reviewed on the Razr 60 series. This has some interesting inclusions, such as “Next Move”, which learns your behaviours and starts to suggest actions when it thinks you’ll want them, but overall, it didn’t feel all that useful to me.
Motorola G06 and G06 Power hands-on review: Design, key features and first impressions
To my point earlier about Motorola reusing this same style again and again – it’s difficult to tell at a glance which phone is a G06 and which is the Edge 60 Neo.
Once again, colour varieties help us out here, with four bold options for the standard G06: blue, tan, orange and green. The G06 Power only gets the one style, however, coming in a darker orangey-red.
That’s one of two differences between the G06 twins – the other, is the battery sizes. The Moto G06 has a respectably sized 5,200mAh cell but the G06 Power, living up to its name, is fitted with a gargantuan 7,000mAh battery. That will no doubt give it an edge in our battery testing when it comes time for review. Could we be seeing the rise of a new champion in our best phone battery life rankings?
Otherwise, both phones are identical. Their displays are 6.88in LCD screens – the largest on any Moto phone to date – with HD+ resolutions and 600 nits peak brightness, the builds feel identical in the hand and both have the same protective credentials, with Gorilla Glass 3 over their displays and IP64 splash resistance.
I’m not expecting miracles from the Moto G06 series – battery life could prove to be record-setting but the rest of the specs indicate very low-power, affordable phones that will only appeal to a small sect of people.
The Motorola Edge 60 Neo, on the other hand, has potential. It appears to carry a lot over from its predecessor, which could hurt its overall appeal, but a lot of those borrowed features are winners: the lightweight build, OLED display and telephoto camera are all great inclusions, and the latter especially is still relatively rare for mid-range phones.
We don’t have prices or a firm release date just yet but, based on everything else announced by Lenovo at this showcase, I’d be surprised if these weren’t on shelves by the end of October. I’ll be getting my hands on review samples soon enough, so check back in soon to see my final verdict on Motorola’s latest batch of smartphones.
