Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Motorola’s affordable smartphone takes flight

Motorola might not be as big a name in flagship smartphones as it once was, but it still wants to show that it has plenty to offer consumers. Enter the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, one of the three new Edge 50 releases coming from the company, focused on being an affordable AI feature powerhouse.

While the U.S. gets its own Moto Edge 2024 model, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro is part of a three-pronged European/global release. It's the middle model between the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra and the Edge 50 Fusion, with all three phones promising the latest AI features.

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro's long battery life and midrange price help it appeal to anyone looking for a less expensive but still reliable smartphone, with the features added by MotoAI adding an extra sweetener to the deal. However, this is all held back by the screen’s width and curve, and an overall quality issue with the camera that arose during our testing. 

Let’s have a look at all the features in more detail and find out exactly what you can expect based on our Motorola Edge 50 Pro review.

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Specifications

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Price and availability

Currently, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro is available across select Europe and Latin America. There are also plans for the phone to roll out across Asia, Oceania and North America at some point in the future. In the U.K., you'll pay £599 for the Motorola Edge 50 Pro; a purchase currently nets you a free pair of Moto Buds Plus wireless earbuds. 

I found the price to be a little steep given what's offered, but the inclusion of the earbuds does somewhat make up for it. Still, the Pixel 8a has more features and power while costing £100 less. Meanwhile, for just £50 more, the OnePlus 12R delivers more power than the Motorola's handset.  Sadly, people in the U.K. have no options when it comes to storage options sothe 512GB on board the Motorola Edge 50 Plus is what you get. 

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Design

The Motorola Edge 50 looks like a blast from the past when it comes to Android phones. The device sports a curved screen and cuts a narrower profile than other phones on the market these days. When looking at the phone head-on, the display is the only thing you’ll see.

Overall the Motorola is a beauty to look at, hold or even keep in your pocket. However, the inclusion of a curved screen comes with its issues.

The rounded sides mean the Edge 50 Pro sits comfortably in the hand, but it also feels a little too narrow. When holding the phone, I found that I could overlap my fingers, something that’s harder to do on a phone without the curve. This meant that when I had to hold the phone slightly away from my palm to avoid covering up anything.   

The back of the Motorola Edge 50 Pro is covered by vegan leather, and it's as soft as one could hope. This same leather covers the camera block as well, giving the entire phone a seamless look.

There are three color options available — Black Beauty, Luxe Lavender and Moonlight Pearl. The vegan leather covers makes any of these colors look great, as you can see in the photos of our lavender test unit.

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Display

The 6.7-inch display for the Motorola Edge 50 Pro doesn't first appear all that impressive, but the pOLED panel offers some impressive visuals. The phone promises more than 1 billion shades of color (with validation from color-matching company Pantone) and a peak brightness of more than 2,000 nits. That matches the listed peak brightness for the both iPhone 15 and Pixel 8, which would put the Edge 50 Pro in some impressive company. To my eye, Motorola's display did seem slightly brighter than my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5, although that might be down to the darkening of the screen around the edges.

I can believe the promise of 1 billion-plus colors as images and videos pop on the screen, although I did encounter an issue where the whites appeared to have a slight grey tint around the edges compared to the same images on a Galaxy Z Fold 5. The Edge 50 Pro also seems to have a slight delay when moving from app to app to the degree that it looked like the screen had lingering images. 

The Pantone-approved coloring also helped content on-screen stand out. However, at lower brightnesses, hues started to look more washed out.

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Cameras

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro certainly offers a lot of camera hardware for a relatively cheap smartphone option. The main rear camera uses a 50MP in resolutio and offers great image quality with clear lines and colors. 

Meanwhile, the 13MP ultra-wide lens and the 10MP 3x optical zoom lens offer plenty of chances to capture images and videos from several different angles and distances. On the clunky side of things, I found I could only pinch-to-zoom to a 2.9x close-up; from there, I had to manually swap to the 3x zoom option. This is presumably to let the phone know it needs to swap from a zoomed-in main camera view to the telephoto, but I found it cumbersome.

For photo comparisons with the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, I turned to a Pixel 8 Pro since it uses the same 50MP main camera on the Pixel 8 that Motorola's phone competes against. 

Testing out the main camera in a photo of some statues depicting an animal dinner party the overall definition is pretty much the same in both images. I think the Pixel 8 Pro shot is slightly darker than what the Edge 50 Pro produces, but the Pixel has deeper, warmer colors. Its slightly darker lighting lends more definition to the photo. 

I used the Edge 50 Pro's telephoto lens to take an image of a statue of Paddington Bear, comparing it against the 3x lens on the Galaxy S24. As you can see, the definition of the statue is clear in both images, but the colors appear slightly washed out in the Motorola shot. It appears greyer than the Galaxy S24 image, which shows a much warmer color profile. 

The ultrawide camera on the Motorola Edge 50 Pro had the same issue as the main lens when I took a photo of Paddington Station. Once again, the colors appear slightly washed out, even compared to a shot by the OnePlus 12R. The paving stones appear slightly more grey, with the OnePlus camera adding a bit more depth of color than what you see in the Edge 50 Pro shot. It also appears like the Motorola Edge 50 Pro's image is more distorted, with the lines on the floor appearing more diagonal than they do in the OnePlus 12R photo.

The final test involved the front selfie camera. I tested the Motorola Edge 50 Pro camera against the OnePlus 12R again and the results were surprising, Whereas the prior test showed the Motorola to be slightly greyed out, the image captured by the phone's front camera appeared darker than what the OnePlus 12R produced. The OnePlus camera gave me a lighter skin tone, and my droopy eye was slightly less obvious. 

In capturing video, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro stutters a bit while trying to focus. While running the camera at 4K resolution, the focus shifted on occasion rather than remaining constant. This means that some of the videos appear unsteady. The phone does come with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), but it doesn’t appear to offer much aid in this case.

The front camera had the same issue with video, as its constant effort to focus made any movement on the video appear blurred. It’s less pronounced than the shakiness on the back camera, but that may also be because of the different backgrounds when I took these samples.

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Performance

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro comes with the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset, the most recent entry in the intermediate-level Snapdragon 7 series. While that silicon doesn’t offer quite as much power as the flagship Snapdragon 8 series, a phone powered by the chipset should play games and run movies quite well, although the Edge 50 Plus stutters when pushing anything more strenuous. 

When we ran the Motorola Edge 50 Pro through the Geekbench 6 CPU test, it came out with an average single-core score of 1135 and a multicore score of 3166. Compared to rival phones like the Pixel 8a and OnePlus 12R, that’s not great.

However, Geekbench scores do not tell the whole story, and the Motorola Edge 50 Pro will comfortably perform most actions with little issue. I could comfortably watch YouTube videos at 1080p 60 FPS with no stuttering, and I played games with no real drop in quality. The phone was quite slow when performing certain tasks, like heavy-duty video editing, but other than that I didn’t see much that would turn me away.

The other way we test performance is to run the phone through 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme Unlimited GPU test, which tests how smoothly it runs graphically intense scenes. The scores for the Motorola Edge 50 Pro were disappointing, struggling to compare with phones like the OnePlus 12R and the Pixel 8a. However, it was able to outcompete the recent Galaxy A55, although that phone costs more than £100 less. 

This lack of processing power was also apparent when trying to transcode a video at 1080p from Premier Rush. For reference, the OnePlus 12R was able to export the video in 59 seconds, but the Motorola Edge 50 Pro took nearly 2 minutes on the same task. This also means that the Edge 50 Pro takes longer than the Galaxy A54 5G, which means even cheaper phones can exceed Motorola’s latest phone.

The 512GB of storage the Edge 50 Pro gets by default (at least in the U.K.) is a generous amount for this kind of phone and will likely be more than anyone needs with added cloud storage options. However, with only one model to consider, customers in the U.K. lack the RAM options available elsewhere.

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Battery and charging

The 4,500 mAh battery in the Motorola Edge 50 Pro isn’t the biggest around, but the phone has a surprisingly long life. In informal testing, the phone only dropped 15% while watching 3 hours of a YouTube video at 1080p. Meanwhile, the Galaxy A55, which comes with a 5,000 mAh battery, dropped by 22%, with the Pixel 7a dropping by 18%. Given Motorola's strong reputation for battery life — five Motorola phones rank among our best phone battery life top 15 — we have every reason to believe the Edge 50 Pro lasts a long time on a charge.

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro offers 125W charging with the charger supplied in the box. It also supports up to 50W wireless charging and 10W reverse wireless power. 

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro's refuelling speed when using the charger supplied in the box is, frankly, astounding. A fully drained Motorola Edge 50 Pro managed to reach 75% power after only 16 minutes, and then 100% after 25 minutes when using the 125W charger in the box. However, it should be noted that this made the phone very hot, so I wouldn't recommend using that regularly. 

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Software and special features

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro runs Android 14 with Motorola’s new Hello UI skin. Android 14 was already a strong OS, and the Hello UI adds a bit of color to it while not cluttering up the basic OS with extra features. 

Motorola promises three OS updates and four years' worth of quarterly security patches. This is a disappointing number, especially for a midrange smartphone. For instance, the Samsung Galaxy A55 came with four years of updates and five years of security while the Pixel 8a has seven years of OS and security updates. 

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro brings a host of AI abilities to users, although most work behind the scenes. One unique example is pattern-generated AI wallpaper called “Style Sync,” which takes a photo of a pattern, such as your outfit, and then generates several wallpaper options based on it, so you and your phone can match. However, the feature worked unreliably for me whenever I tried to test it; that said, when it did behave, it produced some attractive patterns.

Moto's unique bundle of gesture controls returns from previous models, letting you control certain functions of the Edge 50 Pro through hand gestures, facial expressions and tapping patterns. For instance, the screen can be unlocked simply by picking it up, the flashlight turned on with a chopping motion, and screenshots can be taken by tapping the screen with three fingers. For the most part, these controls worked fine, although the swipe-to-split feature never quite worked right for me.

On the photo-editing side, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro has access to all of Google Photo’s AI features like Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur and Portrait Light help. These features help to add a bit more substance and definition to the images that are captured by the generally lackluster cameras. 

Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: Verdict

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro has plenty of features to offer users, and it could arguably be enough to draw some people back to the idea of a curved screen. However, the issue is that there are smartphones currently on the market that offer more processing power and AI features for less money, such as the Galaxy A55 and the Pixel 8a. 

While the performance of the Motorola Edge 50 has its issues, there is still a decent phone here for the right person. If you like a phone that is a little different and offers a fantastic-looking screen, while not caring about overall power, then this could be the device for you. It should also be mentioned that the Motorola Edge 50 ships with the Moto Buds Plus at the moment, which arguably makes this a better deal if you don’t already have a pair of Bluetooth headphones.