Motorola edge 50 pro review: A premium phone worthy of consideration in every way

In Barcelona earlier this year I listened in at a briefing from Motorola as they outlined their strategy, design philosophy and flagship smartphone range for the year. I took notes with great interest because the “Edge 50” series for 2024 seemed to me to be ticking a heck of a lot of boxes.

Fast forward a few months, and the local Aussie motorola team have brought two of the three edge 50 devices to market, and I’ve been using the edge 50 pro to see how it stacks up.

The “pro” sits in the middle of the “Edge” range this year, with an Ultra, and Fusion either side. Australia won’t get the Ultra – a device which basically takes all the specs and features of the pro and raises them up a notch. It would probably sit in a price point making it far too close in price to mid-range Samsung and Apple products to really make it worthwhile at this point of Motorola’s journey in Australia.

The company has claimed the #3 spot in the Aussie market, according to their Head of Motorola, Greater Asia Pacific Kurt Bonnici who spoke with me last week on the EFTM Podcast.

I’ll leave a detailed look at the camera performance of the edge 50 pro to Scott who will compare it to a bunch of key contenders for 2024 real soon. But, I’m super impressed.

One of the things that I noticed in the shots I did take was a level of clarity in the zoom. I really think smartphones while amazing that they can zoom, do seem to bring artefacts into most zoomed images.

It’s a 50megapixel main camera, with a 3x optical zoom which is probably one of the standout optical zoom lenses in smartphones – not just at this price point.

And year, there’s 30x there if you really wanted it.

Speaking of which, I should mention, this is a $999 phone. So in the mid-range, that’s at the top end. Consider there’s great options from Google and Samsung it’s at the tougher end of the mid-range.

But I genuinely think there’s value here – if you took this at face value, on the look, quality, design and performance, you’d consider this easily alongside phones priced $1500 and more.

Design wise this is a curved edge screen – like Samsung did way back with their S7, Moto has been doing with the edge series, rounding off the left and right of the screen to make the edges almost disappear. Doing so does give a real sense of a “just screen” device, but it also make it “sharper” on the edges and with more phones than ever doing squared edges it’s an unusual feeling to get used to. You do though.

Personally, it’s not for me, there were a couple of times when I felt like the UI of an app put the back navigation button right on the tip of that curve and it was harder to touch.

Around the back it’s a really nice look and feel to this device. Because it’s not glass like so many others it certainly feels better, but also isn’t going to smash when dropped. Motorola has curved the back up the camera island for what I think is a far better way to represent the camera array – it’s a sleek look.

Performance wise, there’s nothing to be worried about here. Having come from several phones in the sub $600 price point, there’s a really nice noticeable app launching, and general use snappy performance to the motorola edge 50 pro.

Again, I’m sure in some clinical benchmarking it doesn’t compare to phones at $1500 or more, but for real people on regular days, doing 99% of what we all do on smartphones, you’re going to be be very happy with how this performs.

Interestingly, motorola has also added “scan” to the camera photo menus. This allows you to simply point at a document and have it identify, photograph and align the shot as an image you can then save as a scan.

It works really well every time.

What fascinates me most about that is that Motorola did this now, and Apple announced it as part of the new iPad range just weeks ago. The industry must know how frustrated we all are in document scanning!

A genuine, serious and frankly remarkable feature of the motorola edge 50 pro is charging. Not just that it can charge fast, but that in the box you’ll find everything you need to take advantage of it.

125W fast charging. You read that right. In the box is a power brick capable of 125W output and the cable to suit too!

As an example of how that works, in a well depleted battery (Let’s say you’re at 12% or something like that) – plug in, get the full 125W, and then motorola reckon you’ll get about 12 hours of battery life in just 5 minutes.

Heck, if you’ve got a 50W wireless charging stand, it’s capable of that too!

I struggle to fault the edge 50 pro – yet another prime example of why we don’t need to spend more than $1000. AT $999 it’s not cheap – but it performs exceptionally well for the price.

One thing motorola seem utterly committed to is giving you the chance to see this actual phone. They have real working models on display in major retailers – which I think is critical for a $999 smartphone. It’s well worth a look.