Motorola Edge 50 Neo Review: Motorola's Best Value Edge Phone

The Motorola Edge 50 Neo sits at the lower end of Motorola’s Edge 50 series of phones – but it might just be its best Edge phone this year.

Pros	Cons
Good battery life	Vegan leather is just… aargh
Telephoto isn’t common at this price point	30x telephoto pushes it way too far
5 years of Android OS and security updates	Comparable price models have better CPU/GPU performance

Score: 4/5

	Buy The Motorola Edge 50 Neo!	Buy On Amazon

In this review

Motorola Edge 50 Neo Specifications
Motorola Edge 50 Neo Design
Motorola Edge 50 Neo Camera
Motorola Edge 50 Neo Performance
Motorola Edge 50 Neo Battery
Motorola Edge 50 Neo Conclusion

The Motorola Edge 50 Neo landed on my review desk at the exact same time as the slightly more expensive Motorola Edge 50. It sits at the bottom of the current Motorola Edge hierarchy, and typically that’s a space where the compromises for price – or the features held back to make the pricier models seem more fancy – lead to less than exciting phones.

That’s not quite the story for the Motorola Edge 50 Neo, a phone I like a lot more than the Motorola Edge 50. At this price point you do have a lot of choices, however, so it’s well worth shopping around and considering which phone is right for you.

Also read:
Motorola Moto G85 Review
Motorola Edge 50 Pro Review
Motorola Razr 50 Ultra Review
Motorola Edge 50 Fusion Review

Design

Where many of Motorola’s Edge phones differentiate themselves from their cheaper Moto G counterparts with curved edge displays, the Motorola Edge 50 Neo keeps it simple with a fully flat 6.4 inch pOLED 120hZ display. Measuring 154.1 x 71.2 x 8.1mm, it’s a compact phone, and at 171g it’s also nicely light in the hand and easy to slip into a pocket.

Here in Australia, the Motorola Edge 50 Neo is available in three colour choices; Poinciana, Grisaille or Lattè.

Yeah, me neither.

They’re the Pantone names for particular shades of Red, Grey or Tan, and it’s the Lattè version that Motorola sent my way for testing. There is a fourth hue, “Nautical Blue” in some international markets, but not down under. Somebody at Motorola Australia must know how much I like blue phones and be taunting me by not making them available.

Maybe that’s because they also know how much I dislike Vegan Leather finish backs, and that’s unavoidable across all three colours of the Edge 50 Neo. Yes, this is a deeply personal observation, but I am grateful that you get a slender colour-matched case in the box so that I don’t have to spend too much time interacting with that vegan leather feel. The case is on the slender side, however, with no protection on the sides, so it would still pay to be careful.

One nice touch here that I didn’t expect to make it all the way to the bottom of the Edge 50 range is the inclusion of proper water resistance. The Motorola Edge 50 Neo is rated as IP68, which means accidental water spills shouldn’t send it to an early grave. As always, however, caution is wise; don’t go deep sea diving with it if you want it to survive.

Also read:
Why your waterproof phone isn’t actually “waterproof” the way you think it is

The Motorola Edge 50 Neo utilises the near-standard arrangement of a right hand side power button beneath volume controls, while unlocking is primarily handled by an in-display fingerprint reader that’s worked nicely throughout my testing period.

Camera

As the lowest tier of the Motorola Edge family this year, I was ready for some compromises on the camera front, especially relative to the Motorola Edge 50 that I was testing concurrently.

At a hardware level, I was greatly surprised to discover that despite the $100 price gap between the two, they share the same essential camera hardware. That means you get a 50MP primary wide lens, 13MP ultrawide and 10MP Telephoto 3x lens at the rear, plus a 32MP front-facing camera.

In the mid-range, getting any kind of telephoto lens is a rarity, but especially a 3x telephoto lens. Like its bigger sibling, this is reasonably well handled at up to 3x native zoom, though it does fall apart if you push it much harder.

Rocks are excellent telephoto subjects, because they tend not to run away between shots. (3x telephoto sample shot)

Motorola’s taken the odd decision to push its digital hybrid zoom all the way up to 30x on the Motorola Edge 50 Neo, and the results are not particularly pretty.

Rocks at 30x digital hybrid zoom are, however, not pretty at all in any way.

I do appreciate the flexibility of having a telephoto lens at this price, but otherwise the Edge 50 Neo slots pretty neatly into what I’d expect out of a camera phone at this price point. You can very much expect good performance in regular daylight, dropping down just a touch if you’re shooting in darkened conditions or need fast action shots. It’s a sign of just how far camera phones have come that you can get this kind of quality at this price point, really.

Motorola Edge 50 Neo Sample Photos

Most mid-range phones can shoot decent nature shots in daylight -- and the Motorola Edge 50 Neo is no exception.

Portrait shots are handled reasonably well, even for non-human subjects. Hey, they're Dwarves -- completely different species. Ask Tolkien.

Close-up shots are OK, but not great.

Portrait effect can work nicely on other subjects too.

Though portrait filters can do nothing to make me prettier. It is what it is.

Obligatory cat photo. Have you really tested a phone's camera without taking a cat photo? I think not.

Performance

Where the pricier Motorola Edge 50 gets a Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, Motorola technically steps down to a MediaTek Dimensity for the Motorola Edge 50 Neo. I say technically because historically that’s how it’s gone between Qualcomm and MediaTek’s processors, but the reality in the mid-range is that it’s been a bit more of a true battle than it used to be in the past.

The Edge 50 Neo specifically gets a MediaTek Dimensity 7300, paired up with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage, though there’s no space in the SIM card tray for microSD expansion.

At a benchmark level, the Motorola Edge 50 Neo has some quite stiff competition at or around the $699 price point, and here the Dimensity 7300 tries hard, but doesn’t entirely impress:

The one upside in those results is that it’s very close to the Edge 50 in performance terms, and that’s a phone that costs $100 more. The Edge 40 is, at the time of writing, available at the same price as the Edge 50 Neo, which is why I’ve included it in this comparison.

It’s much the same story if we look at GPU benchmarks:

Being last here isn’t a great selling point for the Motorola Edge 50 Neo, though the reality of its use is that it’s still decently responsive for a mid-range phone. Throw heavier duty Android apps at it and you’ll wait a little longer for them to load, but like just about every other mid-range phone out there, you’re not likely to be hit with too much lag.

I’ve long liked the way that Motorola’s approach to Android has been to deliver a fairly clean and uncluttered UI experience, save for the predictable “Moto Actions” (chopping the phone twice to launch the flashlight, twisting it to launch the camera) and that’s all nicely present here.

I’ve also long been a critic of the fact that Motorola often drags its heels when it comes to Android OS and security updates, with many phones only offering a couple of years worth of OS coverage. That’s largely the case for the Motorola Edge 50, which has 2 OS upgrades and 3 years of security updates coming to it, but not the Motorola Edge 50 Neo.

Here you get five years of OS upgrades and five years of security updates, delivered every two months. That’s impressive work, Motorola, because comparatively, the Samsung Galaxy A55 only offer four OS upgrades. Keep it up Motorola!

On the networks front, the Motorola Edge 50 Neo supports a single Nano SIM plus one eSIM, a nice combination at this price, with 5G support for sub-6Ghz bands. Your network experience will vary by location, but I typically find in the Sydney region for this kind of phone that I hit between 200-400Mbps down at peak on the Telstra 5G network – and that’s precisely what the Motorola Edge 50 Neo delivered.

Battery

Most Android phones these days ship with 5,000mAh batteries, but that’s not what the Motorola Edge 50 Neo is packing… and I’m really not sure why. It’s not super-slender in the style of the bigger Edge 50, but still it’s got just 4310mAh of battery power to play with.

Battery endurance is always variable depending on your usage, so to comparatively test that, I turn to my standard YouTube battery test. This involves a fully charged phone running a 1080p video at maximum brightness and moderate volume for an hour to give a comparative figure. Any phone that falls below 90% in this test is likely to struggle to last a day, with every percentage point above 90% pointing to potential extra hours of battery endurance.

Here’s how the Motorola Edge 50 Neo compares:

While the Edge 50 sneaks ahead – and that’s not entirely surprising, it’s got a full 5,000mAh battery to play with – the Edge 50 Neo does a decent job here, and that’s one that does play out in day to day usage. Like any phone, you can send the Edge 50 Neo flat if you hit it hard enough with consistent app usage, but for most users, it’ll be a fine all-day prospect.

On the charging front, the Motorola Edge 50 Neo is one of the lowest-cost phones to include Qi wireless charging that I can think of, though naturally that will be on the slower side. If you want faster charging, there’s a 68W USB-C charger in the box with the phone.

Motorola Edge 50 Neo: Alex’s Verdict

The Edge 50 Neo ought to be the compromise model in the Edge family, because it’s the one that Motorola wants the least money for. However that really hasn’t happened, because Motorola’s stuffed pretty much all the best bits of the Motorola Edge 50 into the Edge 50 Neo while shaving $100 off the price.

That leaves me with a rather nice compact phone with a decent camera and good battery life. Sure, it could be a touch faster – if you want that, the Galaxy A55 would be the best bet at this price point – but it’s otherwise hard not to see the Motorola Edge 50 Neo as a really strong mid-range choice.