Motorola Edge 50 and Edge 50 Neo hands-on review

Design and build

Unlike the rest of the Edge 50 series, the Edge 50 Neo adopts a flatter design with next to no curvatures on the back and front. There are very subtle curves at the very edges near the frame, but it's nowhere near as pronounced as on its siblings.

This design choice makes the 50 Neo stand out from its siblings and feels a lot different in hand.

Motorola was able to trim the bezels around the display a little bit, so you get more screen real estate and shaved off a lot of weight. The Edge 50 Neo feels really light, which is refreshing in this market, filled with 200+g phones.

We wouldn't say the Edge 50 Neo feels small, the boxier design and the lack of curvatures does create the optical impression of a just slightly more compact than average device.

Motorola Edge 50 Neo

The vegan leather back is great as usual. It feels nice and smooth to the touch and you get four Pantone colors - Poinciana, Grisaille, Latte and Nautical Blue. You also get a color-matched case in the box that's entirely made out of plants.

Even though it's a budget device, the Neo surprises with the same MIL-STD 810H military-grade rating against harsh environments and offers IP68 certification against water and dust. The glass on the front is the Gorilla Glass 3, which isn't ideal in 2024.

Hardware and features

The 6.36-inch display uses an LTPO OLED panel with adaptive refresh rate going up to 120 Hz. We still haven't had the chance to run any tests but it seems that the display is plenty bright and vivid. It provides comfortable outdoor experience with no color or contrast shifting. Excellent job.

The SoC that drives all those pixels is the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 - a mid-range offering from this year. We have some experience with the SoC and although not the fastest in its class, our tests on devices running the same chip show excellent energy efficiency.

Here's how the phone stacks against its siblings and as you can see, it performs just as expected, scoring slightly higher than some other Dimensity 7300-powered handsets, even.

So despite the smaller-than-usual 4,310 mAh battery on board, we expect good battery runtimes. The handset also supports 68W wired charging and 15W wireless charging.

The memory options are 8 GB/256 GB and 12GB/512GB and both are quite generous in their respective price bracket.