A certain scent wafts through me as I open the Motorola device box that’s landed on my desk. I’m certain it’s not my perfume. Turns out, Motorola has decided to make an impact with the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, even before I can get my hands on the device. They’ve added a scent to their smartphone boxes for this model.
Design
Art and aesthetics are front and forward with the Motorola Edge 50 Pro. I haven’t used a smartphone recently - or maybe ever - which has this particular finish and feel on the rear panel. Smooth, matte, soft vegan leather in a lovely ‘Luxe Lavender’ colour. There’s a classy Moto logo bang in the centre with the camera module making its presence obvious within a raised squarish island on the top left corner. As far as colour choices go, there’s also a pretty straightforward Black Beauty and a sleek Moon Light Pearl variant in acetate finish.
Display
The display is 6.7-inch pOLED, which despite being sizeable doesn’t feel that way. The build is narrow and the phone feels lightweight at 186 grams. The company says this is the first and (at the time of writing) only display validated by Pantone to reflect true-to-life colours and skin tones. The display offers up to 144 Hz refresh rate, giving it an edge over most smartphones in the market - both mid-range and high-end - which offer only up to 120 Hz. The display offers up to 2,000 nits of peak brightness so I really didn’t have to squint during these excruciating summer days outdoors. There’s also HDR10+ support which means compatible content looks more realistic and vivid on the display. The smartphone is built with
ambient lighting on its edges for notifications. I could personalise the colour options I wanted to differentiate between the lighting for calls, alarms, and notifications. I also had the voice of enabling this feature only when the smartphone was kept face down.
Camera
The Motorola Edge 50 Pro’s primary setup includes a 50 MP camera with OIS, a 13 MP ultrawide-cum-macro lens, and a 10 MP telephoto lens with 3X optical zoom and 30X hybrid zoom. The photos I took on the Moto device are some of the most vibrant I’ve seen. The device definitely favours warmer tones - be it indoor architectural shots or people portraits. On a bright hot Sunday afternoon, I captured a few cars parked under the sun. The red on the car was a little more amped up than it was in real life. Yellow windows and cool blue floors at a resort looked beautiful although it was obvious that both colours were just a touch more saturated on the smartphone. I have to say this effect is not unpleasant at all and makes objects appear like the best version of themselves, colour-wise. Sometimes, on bright days, the frame gets a little over-exposed by default, but nothing a quick new point to focus on or a little tweak to the exposure can’t fix. The camera also switches between capturing the background and blurring the foreground and vice versa quite well. The 50 MP front camera also gives fairly accurate results in terms of both skin texture and skin tone. I’d be surprised if that hadn’t been the case considering Moto also said that the camera is also validated by Pantone “for a vast range of human skin tones”.Both the front and the rear camera setups are equipped to shoot 4K videos. Videos taken in ample daylight gave some sharp, vivid results. Those taken in low light weren’t the best, with a fair amount of noise and artefacts, in limited light. There’s also AI Adaptive Stabilisation kicking in to control the shake in the videos recorded.
Tech Specs
The Motorola Edge 50 Pro runs on the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 and offers both an 8 GB + 128 GB variant as well as the higher-end 12 GB RAM + 256 GB variant. My review unit was the latter. The smartphone runs on Android 14 and Hello UI and comes with three years of OS upgrades and four years of security and maintenance updates. What I love about the user experience on the Motorola Edge 50 Pro is the limitless options to personalise my smartphone experience. Be it icons or font to fingerprint animations, there are more than enough options to choose from. What I don’t love is that some well-intended features such as the AI-generated wallpaper take their own sweet time (almost 15 seconds or so) to do their job. When I selected photos from the gallery that this feature could use to pick colours or patterns from and create new images/wallpapers the result was a mixed bag as far as aesthetics were concerned. Also, certain UI animations feel jerky. For example, when I take a screenshot and quickly dismiss the capture from the screen, the visual transition doesn’t look seamless. Even on the lock screen, the setting shortcut lies just on top of the fingerprint sensor - without me choosing that. As a result, half the time I instinctively keep hitting the settings icon on the lock screen instead of being able to unlock the smartphone.
Battery
The smartphone is powered by a 4,500mAh battery which kept me company for a full working day with ease. My main usage included watching videos, catching up on emails, reading articles and streaming Spotify. There’s a 125W TurboPower adapter which impressively charges the phone from zero battery to full in under 20 minutes. Do keep in mind that this is not the charger that ships with the 8 GB variant, which gets a 68 W charger in the box.
Verdict
As a mid-ranger, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro has a lot of wins in the bag. It has an excellent display, a hardware design that visually stands out and feels great in hand, has deep personalisation options without overdoing the UI design elements and offers lightning-quick charging. In this price range, that should check off most boxes on the consumer’s checklist for the ideal phone. The only area where it could have done better was video quality, especially in low light conditions but hey you can’t get perfect, not at least in this price range!
Price - ₹35,999
Pros - Aesthetic design, vivid photographs, bright display, decent battery life, superfast charging capability
Cons - UI transitions can sometimes take time or appear glitchy.