Motorola Edge 50 Neo review

LTPO OLED on a budget

One of the most notable upgrades to this year's Edge 50 Neo is the display. Despite being a midranger, the 50 Neo is now rocking a higher-end LTPO OLED panel with a higher 1256 x 2760px resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. The Edge 40 Neo offered 144Hz, but that's hardly a downgrade in our books. The diagonal is now 6.4", coming from 6.55" on the older model.

Other premium-like features are available too - HDR10+ support and 10-bit color depth.

There's a substantial upgrade in the max brightness too. The newer panel reaches 573 nits in manual mode and can jump up to 1,473 nits in auto mode. Мore than enough for a comfortable outdoor viewing experience, even on a bright sunny day.

Refresh rate

The software has three refresh rate modes - Auto, 60Hz and 120Hz, all pretty self-explanatory.

Since it's an LTPO display, it can dial down to just 1Hz to preserve power when you are not interacting with the display. We tested it in various apps, and the panel comfortably boosts to 120Hz for all third-party apps and system menus. When playing video, the panel will resort to 60Hz, regardless of whether the video is 24fps, 30fps or 60fps. We confirmed via the YouTube app.

Battery life

The Edge 50 Neo is now running on a much smaller battery compared to last year's model - it's now 4,310 mAh, down from 5,000 mAh. Perhaps the additional camera, smaller screen and the added wireless charging coil have forced Motorola to make a compromise with the battery capacity.

However, the Dimensity 7300 chipset and the new LTPO OLED panel proved to be efficient enough to offset the loss in capacity. The Edge 40 Neo was never a battery champion either.

So in the end, the Edge 50 Neo scores a much higher 13:29h Active Use Score than its predecessor despite its smaller battery.

The 50 Neo's battery life looks great compared to competing phones. The video playback and call runtimes stand out in particular.

And even though it may seem like most direct rivals offer longer battery life overall, remember that they are all big-screen devices with larger batteries. Given the context, the edge 50 Neo's battery life is exemplary.

Charging speed

The handset supports up to 68W of fast charging over the Power Delivery 3.0 protocol. However, Motorola doesn't supply the charger, just the cable. If you don't have a compatible Power Delivery charger, you can buy one of Motorola's TurboPower models. (Amazon.com | Amazon.de | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.nl)

With Motorola's 68W charger, the Edge 50 Neo will charge completely in just 40 minutes, while the first 30 minutes on the charger will give you 80% of the charge, which is quite fast.

If you are concerned that fast charging might be bad for your phone's battery in the long term, Motorola offers a handful of software options to adjust how your phone charges. First, you get the option to turn off the Charge Boost (the fast charging) altogether.

Then, there is the Overcharge Protection option, which only allows the phone to charge to 80% of the battery capacity, which is handy if you keep the phone on a cable for prolonged periods of time and you don't want the battery to degrade from sitting constantly at 100%.

And finally, there is the Optimized Charging feature, which is meant to be used in overnight charging scenarios. It's supposed to pick up your regular routine, then charge the phone to 80% at night, and only fill up the remaining 20% about an hour before you are expected to unplug the phone from the charger.

Speakers

The Edge 50 Neo features a familiar hybrid stereo speaker setup, and judging by the results and how it sounds, it probably features the same speaker setup as its predecessor.

Overall sound quality is good, with a bit of thin bass. Then again, this is a small device, so we can't expect more pronounced bass like the Galaxy A55, for example. Loudness-wise, the device achieved a "Very Good" score of -24.1 LUFS.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.