Motorola Edge 50 and Edge 50 Neo hands-on review

Design and build

The Motorola Edge 50 has a familiar design and build, similar to the already released Edge 50 phones. The back is covered in vegan leather, while the front has a 6.7-inch curved OLED panel.

The leather back has three colorways - Jungle Green, Koala Grey and Peach Fuzz. We had the chance to see all of them in person. They appear rather mild and easy on the eye.

Keep in mind that the Koala Gray version, although still vegan leather, has a slightly different finish. That's why Motorola named this paint job Koala Gray - Vegan Suede.

Motorola Edge 50

In hand, the device doesn't feel all that different from the Edge 50 Pro series, for example. It's a big phone with curved edges that help with handling, while the vegan leather finish is not just nice to the touch, but improves the grip even further.

Motorola made the device quite durable too. The chassis complies with the MIL-STD-810H military-grade standard for harsh environment resistance and is also IP68-certified for protection against water and dust.

Motorola Edge 50

The display protection isn't all that impressive, though. We've got a dated Gorilla Glass 5 sheet on the front. The internal aluminum frame structure, on the other hand, boosts the durability.

Hardware and features

The Edge 50 proper runs on a Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 AE chipset, which is a rather dated SoC from early 2022. Admittedly, the silicon here is slightly revamped as the main Cortex-A710 cores are now clocked at 2.5 GHz, instead of 2.4 GHz. Hardly of any significant real-world difference, though.

The good news is that the handset is paired with 8GB/256GB of memory by default.

The vanilla Edge 50 also borrows the Pro and Ultra's 6.7-inch display. All three phones have the same 1220 x 2712px resolution and 20:9 aspect ratio, but the standard Edge settles for 120 Hz refresh rate, while the higher-tier Edges can go up to 144 Hz.

On the other hand, the standard Edge 50 has a bigger 5,000 mAh battery with 68W wired charging. It also supports 15W wireless charging, though, which is a nice bonus for the asking price.

Motorola is particularly proud of its AI smarts too, which seem to be tailored toward better camera experience overall. The moto AI umbrella of features includes AI-aided image processing, adaptive stabilization, 30X Super Zoom and Long Exposure.

The Style Sync and Magic Canvas AI features are for creation. The former creates a wallpaper based on your outfit while the Magic Canvas creates the wallpaper from scratch based on your prompts.