IP68 rating, 125W fast wired charging, 50W wireless charging, Android 14 with 3 years of software updates, a telephoto 3x camera, and the world’s first Pantone-certified display and Pantone-certified camera. No, I’m not talking about a Rs. 70,000 flagship phone. I’m talking about this, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, which can be purchased for under Rs. 30,000 with discounts, of course. It sounds like an unbelievably good deal, right? There must be some catch. Wait till the end to find out more about the Edge 50 Pro.
Firstly, Motorola gets the sustainable packaging right because it doesn’t leave out the charger or the case; it’s entirely plastic-free packaging. In fact, this time around, there’s even a screen guard on top of the display. Nothing; please take notes. Now, there’s no doubt that this phone looks good, and I really like this lavender color as well. It’s basically an evolution of the vegan leather design that we saw first with the Moto H40 and the H40 Neo. Now this color has a vegan leather material, as does the black one. But there’s another special variant as well. And you know, it’s this acetate material used in this pearl finish. And in both of these materials, the phone is slim, it’s light, and it’s easy to hold and use as well. The in-hand feel is very good. Now, of course, there’s an IP68 rating, which is awesome. But what’s even more awesome is the fact that you get a USB Type-C port with USB Gen 3.1 speeds and display port support as well, unlike the Nord C4, which gives you the infrared blaster and the microSD support. You do not get that on the Edge 50 Pro, although when you compare a microSD card slot plus infrared blaster to the IP68 reading and USB 3.1, I prefer the IP68 reading and USB 3.1 on the Edge 50 Pro. This 6.7-inch curved p.o. led display has a peak refresh rate of 144 hertz. You get HDR 10+ support, and you also get 2000 mits of peak brightness. There’s no HDR playback on Netflix, but on YouTube, the HDR gradation has been done exceptionally well. So, I have the H50 Pro and my MacBook Air. Look at the quality, man. It’s merely identical. In fact, even right next to the way more expensive iPhone 15 Pro Max, the color accuracy and the HDR gradation are really good. Can we call it a flagship-grade display now? I think we can. That Pantone collaboration is definitely working. Is the display bright enough outdoors? It’s plenty bright outdoors. See this, right next to the Redmi Note 13 Pro Plus. Yeah, it’s pretty good. With the in-display fingerprint scanner, it’s very fast to unlock, no problem. But the haptic feedback could have been better. I found the motor slightly rattling. I think the Note CE4 has better haptic feedback. In fact, even the Redmi Note 13 Pro Plus has better haptic feedback. Now, my problem with the curved display is the fact that it is curved because there is a lot of discoloration around the edges, that’s for sure. The signature bloatware-free experience of Motorola is new now. My UX is out; hello, UI is in. And Motorola is also promising three years of software updates and four years of security updates as well. But of course, Motorola’s update cycle hasn’t been great.
And we told Motorola about it, and they said that they’re working on improving the cycle. So, fingers crossed. The UI looks slightly different now. Even when you pull down the notification shade, you can see the difference. You also get lock screen customization now. It’s not too exhaustive. There are a few clock styles and a few widgets that you can add. There’s a new generative AI feature called Tile Sync. This feature automatically generates wallpapers based on the clothes that you’re wearing. But it generates the same kind of wallpaper every single time. One with patterns, one with solids, and one with textures. By the way, Adobe’s DocScan is also built into the camera, so students will find it very, very useful. But one feature that’s coming soon is the Motorola Smart Connect feature. Now, this will help you use the phone along with a Windows PC and a tablet in unison. Therefore, you can cut and paste between these devices. But unfortunately, it’s coming soon, and we couldn’t test it. But we tried it at MWC. It’s nice. Finally, your staples like the Moto Gestures, Family Hub, Moto Unplugged, and Ready For are all there. The software experience with this new UI has been upgraded. Now, there are a couple of things that I really like about the Motorola H50 Pro. Firstly, the network performance has been absolutely fantastic. You get the Snapdragon X63 5G modem along with 15 5G bands. So, Airtel and Jio worked absolutely fine, and the call quality was really good too. And there’s support for the NFC as well. Secondly, despite having a smaller 4500mAh battery, the battery life was surprisingly good. Now, there is a problem with capturing screen time on stock Android phones because it is very erratic. For example, on one occasion, I got 5 hours and 33 minutes of screen time on time, but the software didn’t capture the fact that I actually played Call of Duty for about 20–25 minutes. And in the second run, I got 9 hours and 25 minutes of screen time on time. Of course, I was watching a lot of IPL, but, you know, that is the kind of chasm that I’m seeing. So we can take a median and average of sorts and expect about 7 hours of SOT or easily one day of usage on the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, which is really good for a 4500 mAh battery.
So the battery has been tuned well. Also, you get that 125-watt charger inside the box, which can charge the phone from 0 to 100 in our testing in 20 minutes. Plus, you can buy a separate 50-watt fast wireless charger as well, which will charge the phone really fast too. But one thing to note is that the 125-watt charger does make the phone hot when you’re charging it. So once you’ve done charging, keep it aside for a little bit, let it cool down, and then start using it. Also, one thing to mention here is that the base 8GB variant doesn’t have the 125-watt charger in the box; you only get a 68-watt charger. Now the Edge 50 Pro’s camera setup is rather good. There’s a 50MP primary camera that has an optically stabilized lens with an aperture of F by 1.4. There’s also a proper 13-megapixel ultra-wide lens with auto focus, so you can also use it for macro shots. And there’s a proper 10MP 3x telephoto camera with 30x hybrid zoom and a 50MP selfie camera as well. I’m sure that the Motorola H40 users are probably crying right now. The primary camera does capture a lot of details. There’s a slight bit of over-sharpening, but it doesn’t look too bad. Finally, Motorola has just improved the HDR tuning. Just take a look at this fantastic shot. The sun is peeking through the clouds, along with the details from the shadow region. It looks very creamy. I really like it. In fact, I even zoomed in 3x to take a look at the HDR performance at 3x, and it does look good. Even in low-light shots with a lot of artificial light sources, the dynamic range correction with the primary camera and the 3x camera are both really good.
The highlights are not blown out, and the shadows are well under control too. My only problem with this camera is that the shutter speed and the processing time are a little slow, so sometimes you will end up with blurry shots. What about the Pantone-validated colors? Well, they’re really good. They’re not entirely neutral, but they’re pretty close to what my eyes saw. Now with Pantone validation, I expected great color sense consistency, which is there between the primary and the ultra wide, but the primary and telephoto color sense consistency is not that great. In low light, the primary camera does a fantastic job of recreating the night. Also, the noise is well under control, and you can see a lot of details as well. Now, the skin tones are also Pantone-validated, but they’re not entirely accurate. They’re slightly warm, but they do look very good and very attractive. What’s even better is that, against the light, the HDR correction has been done well. The face doesn’t have any sort of bloom and is exposed correctly. Thank you, Motorola, for fixing this. Now, you can shoot portraits with the phone at 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm. Now, while the edge detection could have been slightly better, there were some misses somewhere, but the bokeh drop-off is really nice. However, there’s one problem. Did you guys figure that out? Well, basically, it is that you cannot shoot at the focal length at which the 3x camera shoots, which is basically 67mm.
Which is kind of weird to me because at that focal length, you would have gotten the right size of the face, and you would have gotten the most amount of detail as well. Having said that, the 85mm still takes good-looking portraits. The ultra wide takes good-looking shots in daylight, and of course there’s auto-focus, so you get tack-sharp shots as well. But in low light, the ultra wide does exhibit a lot of noise compared to the primary camera, as you can tell. However, with the ultra wide lens, you can also go close to the subject and capture macro shots, and the macros do look very crisp, and the upgraded 50MP selfie camera is really, really good. Every selfie that I took was replete with details; the HDR performance is pretty good too; even the portrait selfies look really nice; and what’s really surprising to me is that without even having a proper night mode for the selfie camera, the low-light selfies look very good. Now, video recording is possible at 4K 30fps using all the cameras: the primary, the ultra-wide, the telephoto, and even the selfie camera. Now, what Motorola has introduced is an AI-based smart stabilization, which I’m presuming uses EIS plus a gyroscope—all of that to judge the movement of the sensor so that it can cut that movement out. But the stabilization itself has some focus-shifting issues that I noticed, and it’s not tuned very well. I don’t think AI was required for stabilization here. Otherwise, the video quality and especially the sound quality are really good. This is the video sample shot using the primary lens of the Motorola Edge 50 Pro, shooting at 4K at 30 fps. In fact, the 4K 30fps video quality using the selfie camera was pretty good too. The front-facing sample of the Motorola Edge 50 Pro is being recorded at 4K (30 fps). And you know what? Motorola is trying to get a little versatile, so you get tilt shift and long exposure modes as well. This is easily the best camera on a Motorola phone that I’ve tested in a long, long time. However, detailed testing is definitely necessary, and a comparison is coming really soon. So I saved the performance for last because I noticed some issues. Of course, you have the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, but you get only UFS 2.2 storage, whereas the Nord CE4 actually has UFS 3.1 storage; it’s more affordable, and it has better read and write speeds as a result. Although we did get higher benchmark scores in both Antutu and Geekbench, which is good, and even the GPU doesn’t throttle as much as you can tell from the 3DMark Wildlife stress test that we ran, Although the CPU throttles a lot compared to the Nord CE4, But we tried out Genshin Impact, where we played it for 30 minutes at the highest graphics and 60 frames per second, and we got a higher average FPS on the H50 Pro, and even the device temperature was not as hot as the Nord CE4. So the gaming benchmarks are completely contrary to the synthetic benchmarks. There’s a lot of weirdness happening here.
Although in everyday usage, if you don’t care about these benchmarks, there’s nothing separating the two. Both are extremely fast and smooth as well. See, the Edge 50 Pro is definitely not a performance monster, but Mochala offers a more balanced usage experience. I really like the fact that Mochala has improved the cameras this time around. So much so that the H50 Pro’s cameras could be the best in its segment. But if you guys want a comparison, let me know in the comment section soon. Overall, I really liked my time with the H50 Pro, and I kept wondering if the H50 Pro was a Pixel phone. I’d pay Rs. 40,000 for it. You know what? We just shot the video, and Motorola has dropped a shocker. The phone is apparently going to be available for 27,999 for the base variant and 29,999 for the 12,256GB variant. But only for a few days, though. Keep that in mind. What do you guys think of this review? Do you like the H50 Pro? Let me know in the comment section below what other content you would like to see with it.
