First things first - here's a link to my nitty-gritty review of the Motorola Edge 50 Neo from October and another for the Motorola Edge 30 Neo, from November 2022 - as I say, my best pick phone of 2022. Even if you don't know me, listen to our podcast or read what I write on my blog and in our Phones Show Chat MeWe Group, you'll have got the impression by now that I really like what Motorola does with Android. I am an official Motorola MOTOvator (which means that they send me stuff to review) but even if I wasn't, I'd be spending my own cash on Moto gear too. And do!
As good as the Edge 30 Neo was in 2022, when the Motorola Edge 50 Neo landed this year, it felt like Motorola had 'arrived'. The boxes that were not ticked, the stuff we'd whined about being not so good over the years, (very nearly all) fixed - and the whole Moto 'thing' was a, well, 'thing' at last! Not since the demise of the Moto Mods had I been so encouraged. I'll get to the highlights of that shortly. In the middle of these two was Moto's 2023 Edge 40 Neo, with which, Moto seemed to change emphasis a bit, dropping some key features and making it bigger. It was a good phone but in the recent 'Neo' line, it felt a bit of an outlier.
First and foremost, this, along with the Motorola ThinkPhone25, represented something of a turning point with the firm's commitment to software updates. Some of the flagships had previously got up to 3 Android updates and 4 years of security, but these two devices were the first to come with a commitment of 5 Android OS updates and the same for Security. So in the case of the Neo which arrived on Android 14, it will be updated to Android 19 and get Google Security patches until August 2029. This has been a long time coming and represents the first clear highlight here.
2. Always on Display
If you discount the Razr 50 Ultra (Razr+ in the USA), this is also the first Motorola phone to get a 'proper' AoD. They've dabbled with Peek Display for many years (which was very good) but have finally arrived with this feature. There's not much control over it, like you'd get with a Samsung/Good Lock setup, but at least it's here - and it's fairly attractive. There's a big 'hollow' clock and underneath it the day, date and weather icons. Towards the foot of the screen there is a row of Notification icons (which behave much like Peek did), a fingerprint scanner and battery percentage readout. When a notification comes in, the 'hollow' clock fills itself in so you can see the difference. So that's a big and developed feature.
Yes indeed - instead of 'nano-coated' internal components or 'splash resistance', the phone has a formal rating for both of these compliances, so reassurance for the user. This has been done before by Moto, but not in this mid-range up to now.
4. Design, Size, Panel, Colour
Yes, a big tick for all of these. A range of interesting Pantone colours with a kind of grippy 'silicone polymer' back (for those who don't want to use the supplied - at least in this market) case. I have the red one and think it's by far the best. Poinciana! The phone has gone back down to 6.36" instead of last year's 6.55" and it really is dinky in the hand, very similar to the Pixel 9 in height/width. Like most recent Moto phones it really feels nicely designed, too, with that sloping camera island. The front panel is flat, too, with a P-OLED, bright, colourful, vibrant.
5. 68W TurboCharging, Battery and Qi
Now this is not the 125W charging of this year's Moto flagships, but it's perfectly fast enough, 0-100% in under 40 minutes. And wireless is back too after being missed on last year's Neo. It's 15W, so again not the 50W of the bigger brothers, but perfectly good for overnight charges. The battery is 4,310mAh which is not the biggest, but in my tests and ongoing use here, performs superbly well, like a Pixel 8/9, given the following efficiency with chipset.
6. Decent Chipset, Storage and RAM
The Dimensity 7300 is perfectly good for almost all users with the added benefit of sipping at the battery. In tests here, it's surprisingly quick and consistent in use, even with middling-to-high gaming demands. The 8GB RAM is perfectly good, even for running the Smart Connect stuff. There's 256GB Storage supplied - and in some regions, 512GB so again, no complaints.
Yes, what Moto used to call 'Ready For', the full suite for when connecting wirelessly with PC or telly. There's no HDMI-Out support so cabling up is not supported, but when the latency is this unnoticable over the air, I'm beginning to wonder about the need for a cable - at least in my domestic situation's network.
8. AI and HelloUI
Some of this AI has crept in too - with Magic Canvas wallpaper - so some teasers of what is possibly coming later, all within an envelope of the latest HelloUI and re-worked front-end, making an already-decent 'launcher' with bunch of handy Moto tools into a prettier, polished-up and more useful one, whilst sticking largely to a 'vanilla' flavour of Android.
9. Audio Options
The phone has decently loud and qualitative stereo speakers and Bluetooth, for getting the sound out to connected equipment, is top-notch as we'd expect these days. No complaints here. Solid.
10. Security
It has access to the Motorola Security suite of apps and services, a home-baked solution added to what Google supply, much like Samsung have done with Knox. It seems to work well, is fairly unobtrusive and gets the job done quietly. There's face unlock which works really well and an optical, under-glass fingerprint scanner which, again, works decently well-enough.
The phone even has a 3x Zoom camera on the secondary shooter and a faster-than-most f1.4 aperture on the main 50MP unit. Close-up shots with the wide-angle lens are excellent with the auto-focus in attendance and even the Selfie is 32MP. I have no complaints, again, for the average demands of the average user in the photography department.
What could be better
Well, it's probably nit-picking time here but the Gorilla Glass 3 on the front panel could have been a higher-rated version, I guess it could have a 3.5mm audio-out socket and perhaps a microSD Card facility. It could have an UltraSonic (or capacitive) fingerprint scanner. There could be a 68W TurboPower charger in the box (though I understand that in some regions there is). It could also come with no bloat - especially that annoying MotoApps thing which, after every update needs to be disabled again as they try to push a bunch of absurd games onto users.
My Best Phone of 2024
Taking all of the above into account though, I do declare this my phone of the year - especially when you consider that it started out in the summer at £399 in the UK and can now, at year-end, be found fairly widely at £329 or less. For that price, for what you get - feature-for-feature as depicted in this appraisal - it simply can't be beaten in my view. You can get cheaper phones, of course, with some of the features - but nothing that I can see out there with all of this in one package. Especially for the person who doesn't want a whacking big phone!
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