Motorola Edge 50 Pro review: stylish companion with endurance

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro is versatile. You can use it as a webcam, mobile desktop and handheld. Despite promising hardware – such as a great battery – it has its weaknesses.

Context: Motorola’s Edge 50 family

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro is somewhere in the middle of the new Edge series, with the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion below and the Edge 50 Ultra above it.

One new feature of the entire Edge 50 series is the camera and display’s Pantone validation. Pantone’s known for its colour standards, which are used in areas such as graphic design. The new Pantone validation’s intended to help reproduce colours and skin tones as realistically as possible. Does it work? You’ll find out in the camera test results below.

Design and display: style and comfort

The design of the Motorola Edge 50 Pro makes it stand out. Although it doesn’t feature the wood finish the Edge 50 Ultra had, the purple-coloured faux leather of my test device feels soft and grippy. Motorola also offers a pearl-coloured and a black version – also with an artificial leather finish. The rear camera module is organically integrated.

Combined with the rounded OLED display, this device has no hard edges. The 6.67-inch display offers a resolution of 2712 × 1220 pixels and features rich colours and a deep black. The refresh rate reaches up to 144 Hertz. The phone’s embedded in a housing with IP 68 certification. So if you accidentally drop your smartphone in (fresh) water, it should survive up to 1.5 metres.

Hardware: chip could be better

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro features a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 and 12 gigabytes of RAM. The upper mid-range chip, available since November 2023, is good, but neither the best nor the newest. It offers 512 gigabytes of internal memory. In my test with Geekbench 6, it didn’t perform as well as last year’s Edge 40 Pro. As a result, the naming could be a bit confusing.

The Motorola Edge 40 Pro’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is more powerful than the Edge 50 Pro’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 3. However, the Edge 40’s Mediatek Dimensity 8020 shows similar performance. In general, I’d say the Motorola Edge 50 Pro has a good chip. Everyday apps are no problem for it, but it struggles with powerful games. More about that later.

The battery’s one of Motorola Edge 50 Pro’s strengths. I use the PCMark software to test the device’s continuous load via a simulated video stream, reading documents and editing photos. The smartphone lasts a good nine hours. If I use the Edge 50 Pro in my daily workflow, I can get through the day without trouble. The 4,500 mAh battery’s charged in just under 25 minutes using the 125-watt power supply unit that comes with the phone. That’s impressive. Wireless charging is also possible with up to 50 watts.

I have to do without external storage, as the nano-SIM slot doesn’t offer any space for this. The device supports physical SIM and eSIM.

Software: many possibilities with «Ready for»

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro comes with the latest Android 14. Updates are available for three years – that’s until Android 17. The manufacturer also promises at least four years of security patches. That’s good, but nothing to write home about.

The Android software is paired up with Motorola’s own user interface HelloUI, numerous programs from the manufacturer and some third-party apps.

I use «Ready for» to connect the device to my Windows PC. Here’s my colleague Jan’s step-by-step guide on how to do this. This allows me to use my smartphone as a webcam, mobile desktop and more.

On top of that, I can customise it by setting gestures. A jerky movement, for example, can switch on the flashlight; turning the phone quickly can activate the camera. AI software comes into play if I set the optimisation mode when taking photos or if I want to create my own wallpaper.

Gaming works well, but it could be better. My benchmark is Genshin Impact. The graphics-heavy game automatically runs in downscaled mode (medium resolution setting), but performs smoothly. The downscaled mode means all graphical elements are set to medium instead of high to make sure the graphics card doesn’t overclock. The graphics are okay, but not outstanding. And yet, as the phone sits comfortably in my hand, I’m happy to spend quite some time gaming.

Camera: lots of software gimmicks

Up to 50 megapixels are available for photos. The software uses Pantone validation to ensure natural colour reproduction. However, in my opinion, the colours turn out too gaudy. Apart from that, the camera produces good snapshots. The camera app offers a whole playground of options. Here are the specifications:

• Main camera: 50 megapixels, f/1.4
• Ultra wide-angle camera: 13 megapixels, f/2.2
• Telephoto camera: 10 megapixels, f/2.0, 3x optical zoom
• Front-facing camera: 50 megapixel

Main camera: sky and meadow are too flashy

In my photos of the sky and meadows, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro really exaggerates the colours. Meadows look bright green; the sky’s far too blue. I’d have liked to see more natural colours. For comparison, I prefer the way the Google Pixel 8 depicts the colours – much more natural.

I can swap the optimised picture mode for a natural mode. However, the difference’s hardly noticeable. Even when the sky’s cloudy, the colours are too gaudy.

The 13 MP ultra-wide-angle camera offers the same quality as the main camera, but can squeeze more onto one picture. That’s great when you’re taking photos of landscapes and large buildings. The comparable quality is achieved by pixel binning, in which the 50 megapixels of the main camera are downscaled to 12. This minimises image noise in low light, for example.

The macro camera’s my favourite feature. I have a lot of fun with it and can get very close to the little creatures in my garden.

Telephoto camera: optical zoom works well

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro’s equipped with triple optical zoom. And it does what it’s supposed to. I can get even closer to my subjects with the 30x digital zoom. From 10x zoom upwards, however, the images already show a significant loss of quality.