Motorola Edge 50 Neo 256GB/8GB RAM Dual-SIM grisaille-grey

The box is heavily perfumed but luckily the smell wears out in a few days. And the fragrance is unisex and does not offend anyone.

It is what you would call nowadays a compact phone that has a plastic body with the front covered in Gorilla Glass 3 and is IP68 water and dust resistant. You will find a hard plastic case in the box.

The back is a vegan leather made as colab with Pantone.

The display is LTPO and close to 2k definition. If you put a Full HD display next to it, you will notice immediately that the Moto display is better. The screen is bright indoors and outdoors, with great HDR and perfect details. The screen also has flicker prevention. Flagship grade display, no doubt.

In terms of Biometrics, the phone has an optical fingerprint scanner which is accurate and responsive, though placed a bit low. The vibration motor is strong but a bit loose. You won't find that tight buzzes when you are typing such as on the Pixel phones.

The phone is equipped with a very loud stereo Speaker setup. The profile favors treble but you can change the sound a bit using Dolby Atmos.

The Moto Edge 50 Neo is equipped with a Mediatek Dimensity 7300. It is my first encounter with this chip that also beats inside phones like CMF Phone 1 or Oppo Reno 12 and I am not sure if this is how it behaves in general, or this is Moto’s magic, but I could not overheat this small beast, no matter what I’ve tried. I ran benchmarks with the phone at 20 degrees and then 30 degrees, and then one after the other without leaving the phone to cool down. I ran CPU throttle tests with the screen at full 120Hz, not auto and it still stayed under 37 degrees. It is similar to the Snapdragon 695 but with a lot more power. I am really impressed. One of the most consistent SoCs that I’ve ever tried. You might say that the scores are not impressive, but you can use all that power for hours, not for 10 minutes. The GPU is not great. It does not throttle at all, but it is not the best for heavy games.

The Edge 50 Neo will have 5 years of OS updates which sounds very good.

For a compact phone with a smaller 4310 MAh capacity, the battery life is sufficient. The processor is very efficient and in standby, the power consumption is 2% overnight. Unfortunately Motorola does not show the SoT so I ran a battery drain test against my Pixel 7 that has a similar sized battery.

So, in indoor scenarios you can easily get more than 7 hours of SoT, because it is not very likely you will film in 4K for an hour or run a CPU Throttling test for an hour, as well.

The camera app is very nice and Pixel like in simplicity and processing. It has 4 focal modes for portraits, a full 50 MP mode for the main sensor and a Pro mode for photo.

The processing is quite aggressive with a lot of lifted HDR and sharpening. The colors are Samsungy but overall the pictures turn out very pleasant. The zoom camera has a slightly different color profile. The night mode kicks in by itself. In some instances, this phone beats the Pixel 7 in detail and clarity.

However, when it comes to the video, it has some limitations due to the processor. It has no 4k 60 FPS, and you cannot change the cameras when filming. You have to end the video, choose a new lens and restart.

I highly recommend this phone.

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