The Motorola Edge 50 Pro is a nearly perfect mid-range smartphone. For the features on offer such as IP68 dust and water resistance, 50 W wireless charging, and a 144 Hz pOLED display, it has been priced competitively starting at merely ₹31,999. The Motorola Edge 50 Pro also has one of the most gorgeous designs on the market in its price segment – the colour-matched aluminium frame, the soft vegan back, and the delightful colour choices make it a treat for the eyes. You also get a colour-accurate display, decent performance, and super fast 125 W charging speeds. However, the camera experience is a chink in its armour. The camera array, while impressive, hasn’t been tuned exceptionally well leading to some issues with skin tones and general colour reproduction.
The Motorola ‘Edge’ series of smartphones is something special. They’re some of the lightest and most feature-packed mid-range phones available on the market. Last year, Motorola created waves across the tech community by launching the excellent Motorola Edge 40 (review) and Motorola Edge 40 Neo (review). They provided users with a holistic experience with very few compromises – a rarity in the sub-₹40,000 price segment. Cut to 2024, Motorola has ushered in its first Edge series launch of the year – the Motorola Edge 50 Pro. Even though it has ‘Pro’ in its name, don’t be confused by the nomenclature; this is the successor to last year’s Motorola Edge 40 as indicated by the price and specifications. The phone packs some improvements and refinements across the board. Is this enough to make it stand out from the competition which includes popular phones such as the OnePlus Nord CE4 (review) and Samsung Galaxy A35? Let’s find out that and more in my detailed Motorola Edge 50 Pro review.
Motorola Edge 50 Pro Review: Build and Design
If you’re looking for a stylish and opulent smartphone on a budget, look no further than the Motorola Edge 50 Pro. Everything from the soft vegan leather rear panel finish to the classy curvature of the phone’s body screams luxury. The camera module juts out but the transition isn’t harsh; rather it gently slopes into the protrusion. The Motorola branding sits smack in the middle of the rear panel and looks quite classy.
The phone is available in three gorgeous “Pantone-curated” colours – Luxe Lavender, Black Beauty, and Moonlight Pearl. The Moonlight White variant features a hand-crafted acetate finish. I got the Luxe Lavender colour variant for review and I absolutely adore its stunning pastel shade. Moreover, Motorola has even added a subtle scent to the box and phone which adds to the unboxing experience. There’s also a colour-matched case and a 125 W charger in the retail box, which is brilliant.
Coming back to the Motorola Edge 50 Pro’s design, the phone has an aluminium frame which, once again, is colour-matched to the rear panel – a nice touch. The phone is merely 8.19 mm thick and weighs 186 g. While this is still extremely slim and lightweight, do note that it is a fair bit bulkier than the Moto Edge 40 which was merely 7.6 mm thick and weighed only 171 g.
Either way, the in-hand feel is exquisite – the curved design means that the phone is extremely comfortable to hold and the rear panel is quite grippy as well, giving me the confidence to ditch the case and flaunt the gorgeous back.
Additionally, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro is also rated IP68 dust and water-resistant. This means the phone is completely resistant to damage from dust and it can withstand full submersion in water up to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes.
Motorola Edge 50 Pro Review: Display
Motorola has heavily promoted the Motorola Edge 50 Pro as the first smartphone to feature a Pantone-validated display and Pantone-validated camera. While we will delve into the camera portion later in the review, let’s talk about the display. The phone features a 6.7-inch pOLED display with 144 Hz refresh rate and 1.5K resolution. It also packs HDR10+ support, 10-bit colour, and DCI-P3 colour. So, it’s a fully loaded display.
In real-life usage, the display proved to be exceptionally immersive. The colour reproduction is very close to my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, which is excellent (when set to the Natural colour profile). Being a 1.5K resolution display, clarity is top-notch as well. Add to that excellent viewing angles, and you’ve got a display that leaves very little room for complaint. The curved screen did cause some accidental touches, but other than that, the display experience is stellar.
The phone’s display is rated at 2,000 nits and in my testing, I got a reading of 1,278 nits using a LUX meter under bright sunlight, which is fantastic. The 144 Hz refresh rate screen also feels very smooth and can automatically dial down the refresh rate all the way to 60 Hz depending on the app you’re using at the time. You also get Dolby Atmos-certified stereo speakers to compliment the display experience. These speakers sound full and warm; they also get pretty loud. All in all, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Motorola Edge 50 Pro is one of the best smartphones under ₹35K for content consumption.
How does it perform?
The Motorola Edge series phones have never been champion performers. Can you get more powerful phones at the same price? Definitely. However, that doesn’t mean that the performance isn’t adequate for most casual users. The Motorola Edge 50 Pro houses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor. It comes with 8 or 12 GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256 GB of UFS 2.2 storage. The storage speeds are a bit underwhelming compared to the competition such as the OnePlus Nord CE4 and Realme Narzo 70 Pro. I hope Motorola kits out their Edge phones with at least UFS 3.1 storage going forward.
Coming to benchmarks, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro showcases decent scores. In AnTuTu, it scores 831,690 which outperforms the Samsung Galaxy A35 and OPPO Reno11 but falls short of the cheaper POCO X6 Pro by a huge margin. The same pattern is repeated in both the GeekBench Single-Core and Multi-Core tests. In PCMark Work, its score is very close to the POCO X6 Pro, which proves it is capable of handling day-to-day tasks with ease.
In GPU benchmarks, the phone does a good job and outperforms the Samsung Galaxy A35 and OPPO Reno11 in 3D Mark Wildlife and GFXBench tests by a convincingly wide margin. However, the OnePlus Nord CE4 with the same chipset beats its GPU scores. So, when it comes to objective tests, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro finds itself somewhere in the middle of the pack. However, my daily usage experience was extremely smooth in most cases. I only faced some lag and random app shutdowns in the camera app – specifically when using Portrait Mode. Additionally, I did experience some frame drops while gaming, particularly after 15-20 minutes of continuous play.
As for the UI, Motorola has bid adieu to MyUX in favour of the new Hello UI. This is based on the latest Android 14 and Motorola has promised three years of OS updates and four years of security updates, which is pretty impressive for the price. The design has been completely overhauled with new fonts, colours and icons. In my opinion, the new UI looks a bit childish but they’ve added tons of utility and customisation options, which is a plus.
Additionally, there’s no bloatware in the form of third-party apps – only some preinstalled Moto and Google apps. You also get access to some Motorola-specific features such as Moto Unplugged, Moto Secure, Smart Connect, and Family Space.
Are the cameras any good?
As I mentioned before, Motorola is generating a lot of buzz about the Motorola Edge 50 Pro having the world’s first Pantone-validated camera. The phone also bagged the Pantone SkinTone Validation and has added an array of AI-assisted camera features. The rear camera array is headlined by a 50 MP primary camera with a wide f/1.4 aperture, OIS support, and laser autofocus. It also features a 10 MP 3x telephoto shooter with OIS and a 13 MP ultrawide camera with autofocus, which allows it to double as a macro shooter. Once again, a fully loaded camera configuration, but does it impress? It’s a mixed bag.
Let’s start with the good. The phone’s camera definitely impresses with its crisp photos in both daylight and low light. The detail retention is solid, especially in low-light conditions given the wide f/1.4 aperture which pulls in plenty of light. The dynamic range, however, is a bit of a hit-or-miss. The highlights are usually well-exposed but shadows are slightly crushed. Additionally, against direct sunlight, there is some HDR blooming issues when clicking pictures of human subjects.
The colour reproduction is warm, with high contrast levels. The camera’s shutter speed is also slightly slow, which could cause you to miss some shots during intense action, leaving you with a blurry shot instead.
In portrait images, the Indian skin tones are not well-represented. They always come off looking more orange or red than reality. The edge detection is decent but does miss a stray hair or two at times.
One gripe in my portrait mode is the inability to shoot with the dedicated 3x telephoto shooter. The phone allows 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm focal length portrait shots, but none of these leverage the telephoto shooter’s 73mm focal length, which is a bewildering decision since that would provide a more detailed shot compared to the zoomed-in 35mm, 50mm and 85mm shots. General 3x shots from the telephoto lens have a noticeable colour shift compared to the primary lens too.
The 13 MP ultrawide camera clicks good shots in daylight, but the detail levels take a hit in comparison to the primary lens but the colour consistency with the primary camera is good. There is slight distortion at the edges of the ultrawide photos though. Macro pictures are quite impressive since the 13 MP shooter has autofocus.
The phone has a 50 MP selfie camera which generally produces well-exposed, detailed pictures, but there were some instances where the exposure levels were a bit too high.
The phone does introduce some AI camera features such as AI Photo Enhancement Engine, Smart Motion Capture, Smart Colour Segmentation, and more. However, I think Motorola needs to focus on fixing the camera tuning on priority instead of gunning hard for more AI features. Hopefully, the camera inconsistencies can be fixed via an OTA update; we’ll keep you updated here.
Motorola Edge 50 Pro Review: Battery Life
The Motorola Edge 50 Pro sees a slight bump in battery size compared to the Motorola Edge 40. This one packs a 4,500 mAh battery, which is still modest compared to the competition (the OnePlus Nord CE4 features a massive 5,500 mAh battery). The phone supports 125 W wired charging and 50 W wireless charging – a rarity at this price. It also has 10 W reverse wireless charging which comes in handy to charge TWS earbuds.
Sadly, users who purchase the 8 GB RAM model will only get a 68 W charger inside the box, unlike the 12 GB RAM version which ships with a 125 W charger.
The Motorola Edge 50 Pro has decent battery life – not the worst we’ve seen, but certainly not the best. In my usage, I got about 4-5 hours of screen-on time, which is a bit underwhelming. However, if you’re not a heavy user, you should be able to get to the end of the day with some juice to spare. In our 4K video loop test where we played a 4K video on VLC on loop, the phone lasted a little over 13 hours. In contrast, the OnePlus Nord CE4 lasted nearly double the time.
As for charging, if you’re lucky enough to get the 125 W charger in the box, the phone charges from zero to full in merely 23 minutes, which is blazing fast.
Should you buy the Motorola Edge 50 Pro?
The Motorola Edge 50 Pro is a nearly perfect mid-range smartphone. For the features on offer such as IP68 dust and water resistance, 50 W wireless charging, and a 144 Hz pOLED display, it has been priced competitively starting at merely ₹31,999. The Motorola Edge 50 Pro also has one of the most gorgeous designs on the market in its price segment – the colour-matched aluminium frame, the soft vegan back, and the delightful colour choices make it a treat for the eyes. You also get a colour-accurate display, decent performance, and super fast 125 W charging speeds.
However, the camera experience is a chink in its armour. The camera array, while impressive, hasn’t been tuned exceptionally well leading to some issues with skin tones and general colour reproduction. The slower UFS 2.2 storage and frame drops during heavy gamers are minor complaints I have with the phone as well. However, if Motorola fixes the camera issues, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro could very well be the perfect mid-range smartphone in India.
Motorola Edge 50 Pro Key Specs, Price and Launch Date
| Release Date: | 03 Apr, 2024 |
| Market Status: | Launched |
Key Specifications
Storage
256 GB
-
Battery capacity (mAh)
4500
-
Rear Camera Megapixel
50 + 13 + 10
-
Screen size (in inches)
6.7
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Dhriti Datta
Perpetually sporting a death stare, this one can be seen tinkering around with her smartphone which she holds more dear than life itself and stuffing her face with copious amounts of bacon. View Full Profile
