Review: Motorola Edge 50 Pro

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro is an unexpected contender in the increasingly competitive midrange smartphone market. Boasting a triple-lens camera, silky screen, and lightning-fast charging in a compact, waterproof body, the Edge 50 Pro comes close to being great. But limited updates and a lack of processing power let it down.

It has been a decade since Lenovo acquired Motorola from Google. Its bewildering range of Motorola phones built a reputation as solid budget devices, but there has been a gradual uptick in its efforts to compete in the midrange with the Edge line. Sold globally (except for the US and Canada), the Motorola Edge 50 Pro costs £600 in the UK (€700 in Europe), and if that’s your budget, it is worth a look. (There will likely be a US variant of this Edge coming soon.)

Delicious Design

Grabbing this svelte slice of midrange Motorola from the box, I was immediately impressed by the feel. It's lightweight at 186 grams (6.6 ounces), with a textured fake leather back that feels grippy and resistant to finger smudges. My review unit is a dull black, but you can get it in lavender or the smoother “moonlight pearl” finish. The back of the Edge 50 Pro curves into a slim aluminum frame and is very comfortable to handle.

The curved 6.7-inch OLED screen is bright and buttery smooth, with a sharp 2,712 x 1,220-pixel resolution, a 144-Hz refresh rate, and a peak brightness of 2,000 nits for HDR highlights. It’s a lovely display for movies, games, or just browsing. Motorola claims the Edge 50 Pro’s screen and results from its triple-lens camera deliver colors validated by Pantone (of color chart fame). This means more accurate colors and skin tones rendered by the screen and cameras, but it feels like a tenuous tie-in, especially since the phone defaults to Motorola’s saturated, vivid color unless you switch the settings.

I am growing tired of curved screens—the frame is so thin at the sides it can be awkward to handle the Edge 50 Pro without occasional accidental screen touches. The in-display fingerprint sensor was mostly responsive but sometimes needed a couple of presses to unlock. The unit’s IP68 rating is unusual in the midrange and means you don’t need to worry about dropping it in a pool.

Moving inside the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, we hit our first real hurdle. The processor is the distinctly middling Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, though it is paired with a generous 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage. Swiping around, the Edge 50 Pro feels snappy, but play a demanding game and you can expect dropped frames. It can also take a beat longer than I’d like to load an app, but the lack of processing power is most keenly felt in the camera.

Sluggish Snapper

A respectable triple-camera system shows how much the midrange smartphone sector is improving. The main 50-megapixel shooter is flanked by a 10-megapixel telephoto lens capable of 3X optical zoom and a 13-megapixel ultrawide with a macro mode for close-ups. You can capture lovely shots in good lighting conditions, and the main camera has a large enough sensor (1/1.55-inch) and wide enough aperture (f/1.4) to perform pretty well in low light, too. It can also capture a lovely natural bokeh without resorting to portrait mode.

The telephoto is useful for distant subjects, and I can see folks using it quite a lot, whether you want to capture a boat sailing into the harbor or your kid on stage at the school play. It does need plenty of light, though. The ultrawide crams plenty in but cannot match the main camera for detail. I also found the macro mode awkward to use, and it turned out blurry shots more often than not.

Rounding things out is a 50-megapixel front-facing camera that is solid for selfies. It’s an impressive camera system for a midrange phone. But what came close to ruining the camera for me was the sluggish performance. The post-shot processing sometimes takes a second or so, preventing you from capturing several shots in quick succession.

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro has a 4,500-mAh battery, and it’s enough to see you through an average day. I once had to charge before bedtime after shooting several photos and videos. Charging is another surprising highlight, because you can use the 125-watt charger in the box to fill the battery in less than 20 minutes, though it does get warm. The Edge 50 Pro also supports wireless charging (up to 50 watts with the right charger).

While the Edge 50 Pro feels close to stock Android 14, there is a little bloatware (Facebook, TikTok, Bingo Blitz are all preinstalled). But I like Motorola’s added features, such as karate chopping the phone to turn on the flashlight or twisting it to launch the camera. It’s also easy to connect the phone to your Windows PC or laptop to wirelessly share files or double up as a webcam. Family Space is a handy option for parents with young kids, enabling you to lock down part of your phone before you pass it off to them.

Competition Crunch

Ultimately, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro is a good phone, and with a better processor and a longer commitment to software support it might have been great. With Google offering seven years of software support and Samsung matching, Motorola’s three years of Android updates and four years of security updates feel stingy. I'd love to see seven years become the standard.

The Edge 50 Pro’s most obvious competition comes from Google. The Pixel 8A is £100 less, and you can pick up the regular Pixel 8 for around £600 now. Both are better than the Edge 50 Pro. If you’re not a Google fan, you can find other options, like the OnePlus 12R, in our Best Android Phones guide. Even last year’s compact Samsung Galaxy S23 is not much more than the Edge 50 Pro now, and it has a surprisingly similar spec sheet but more processing power.