Hidden Motorola Edge Features That Will Make Your Phone Even Better

The Edge 2022 is one of Motorola's latest offerings in its premium smartphone lineup that started almost 3 years ago with the original Motorola Edge. The name 'Edge' initially signified the phone's curved screen at the edges, giving it a fancy high-end look, but this trend was quickly killed off after negative reception.

Motorola has now fully adopted a flat-screen design despite the "Edge" in the phone's name. But to this day, it is still high-end, but not quite a flagship device with a MediaTek Dimensity 1050 SoC, a high refresh rate OLED screen, wireless charging, and a capable camera setup.

It is not to be confused with the Motorola Edge+ 5G 2022, which is simply an enhanced version of this phone and a true flagship complete with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, 8K video recording, and all other top-notch bells and whistles.

One of the things that Motorola phones stand out for is their vanilla-esque software. These phones feature Motorola's My UX skin, which brings a near-stock Android experience like Google's Pixel phones.

But you can take your software experience even further with some of Motorola's hidden features that make the phone even better to use.

Here are 12 features you can use to kick things up a notch.

If you are going to customize your phone and truly make it your own, then Motorola's proprietary Moto app is a must-have. It comes built-in with most Motorola phones, but in case you don't have it, you can download it from Google Play Store.

This app will let you change everything from the phone's look to its gestures, display settings, audio settings, and much more. Some of these features are already found in the phone's settings section, but the app helps keep everything in one place so you can easily find what you are looking for.

Once you have this app, you will be able to make tons of changes to your phone. Some of them are minor features for convenience and ease of use such as lift to unlock or flip for DND, but there are also major features such as changing your entire phone's theme.

Most of the features mentioned later on will be found in the Moto app. In short, this app will be your best friend for phone customization.

While going through the Moto app, you must have noticed an option for Gestures in there. This was previously called Moto Actions, but now it has been updated to a simple "Gestures." This is not to be confused with gesture navigation as this section is meant for something else entirely.

Going back to the Moto app and into the Gestures menu, you will see a list of useful actions you can enable to quickly launch apps or other functions such as taking screenshots.

For instance, you can enable the screenshot gesture, which will quickly snap your screen if you press three fingers on the display. You can also do a chopping motion with your wrist to launch the flashlight so you don't always have to go through menus to find it. Additionally, you can twist your wrist quickly to open the camera app from any screen, or swipe back and forth to use a split screen.

Like most other functions, Gestures can also be found through the phone's settings by going through Settings > System > Gestures.

Moto Gametime is, in a way, similar to the Edge Touch feature we talked about earlier, except it is optimized for gaming purposes. Enabling Gametime through the Moto app will give you a small overlay while playing games on the phone. Once enabled, the icon should look like a tiny controller.

This icon will grant you access to various tools, settings, apps, and other features within the game so you don't have to minimize it. You can access your social apps like WhatsApp right within the game or take a screenshot without pressing any extra buttons. You can also mute notifications or calls through this menu so you are never interrupted while blasting campers in Call of Duty. You can even allow certain contacts to call you while blocking others with Gametime.

This icon can be moved around anywhere on the screen for convenience. You can either tap on the icon to expand it or swipe from the side to pull it out.

This is a feature that started making rounds on Android phones over the past few years. Exactly as the name says, it lets you add some more RAM capacity by using some of the phone's regular storage. This concept took off with computers at first but gradually made its way to smartphones and other devices.

This is especially useful on phones with low amounts of RAM, but you can also put it to good use on handsets with more memory. Having extra memory is always good for juggling between multiple apps or keeping larger programs running without any hitches. You can even have more browser tabs open with more RAM, but keep in mind that it does not improve gaming performance whatsoever.

The Motorola Edge 2022 comes with 8GB RAM by default, but this can be boosted to 10GB through the RAM boost feature found in settings.

Simply go to Settings > System > Performance > RAM boost to find it. The phone will require a restart once you enable this feature and it will have 10GB of RAM when you come back to it. Make sure to confirm this by going into RAM boost settings again.

If you have a 6GB variant, your RAM should now be boosted to 8GB.

Peek Display is Motorola's answer to the Always On display feature found on most Android phones with an AMOLED screen. Except, it is not quite the same since it does not actually stay on all the time and is only there to show you notifications, time and date, and other information at a glance. This way, it is more battery efficient than your typical Always On display.

With Peek Display on, you will see a minimalistic screen showing you the time and date, notification icons, and the fingerprint unlock icon. Touching a notification will show you a preview of it and dragging that notification down to the fingerprint icon will open the respective app. Of course, it will have to be the finger that is registered with your phone.

You can customize it by going into Settings > Display > Advanced > Peek display. This section will let you decide how the Peek display should work. You can tap the screen to wake it up or simply approach it, though the latter option does not work as well. You can also block certain apps or choose the detail to show on this screen for privacy.

Multiple phone manufacturers including Samsung and Apple offer an extra layer of security to protect sensitive data on your phone. Samsung has its Knox security suite, while Apple brings its Secure Enclave for hardware-level security on iPhones.

Likewise, Motorola Thinkshield features end-to-end security for business-grade protection. This feature comes directly from Lenovo since the Motorola brand belongs to the Chinese hardware maker. This is why Thinkshield is also present on some Lenovo ThinkPad laptops and Motorola's one-of-a-kind Thinkphone that focuses primarily on security.

Thanks to Thinkshield, you get industry-leading certifications, built-in hardware security, secure boot, hardware root of trust, remote device lock/disable, anti-phishing security, a dedicated security incident response team, and much more.

This level of security is already built into the phone, meaning it is active on the device from day one. But you can unlock more through the Thinkshield app.