Motorola Edge 40 Pro Intro
Motorola is not the first name that comes to mind when you think of top-tier phones, but this year, the company wants to change that and it’s weapon of choice is the new Motorola Edge 40 Pro.
This incredibly sleek phone not only looks good, but packs some serious power too. It has the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip as other premium Android flagships in 2023, but spices things up with a 165Hz refresh rate and adds a few very cool features like 125W fast charging, all while keeping the price quite reasonable for a flagship at 900 euro.
And yes, we say euro because Motorola is first bringing the Edge 40 Pro to Europe and Latin America, and while the phone is also expected to come to North America, Motorola does not say when.
What’s new about the Motorola Edge 40 Pro
- Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 inside makes this a top performer
- 165Hz 6.7″ screen
- 4,600 mAh battery is smaller than on others, but performs well
- 125W fast wired charging and 15W wireless charging
- Three years of OS updates, 4 years security updates
Table of Contents:
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Unboxing
The Motorola Edge 40 Pro comes with a bigger box than most modern phones and you can find plenty of useful items included in the box.
What’s in the box:
- Phone
- Silicone case
- 125W fast charger
- USB Type C to Type C cable
- User Manual
It’s so nice to have the charger included in the box and it’s not just any charger, but a very powerful 125W one that tops up the phone fully in about thirty minutes, but even a quick 15-minute top up provides enough juice for a whole day of use.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Specs
Every bit as premium as other flagships
| Specs | Motorola Edge 40 Pro |
|---|---|
| Size and Weight | 161.16 x 74 x 8.59mm, 199g |
| Display | 6.7″ OLED, 165Hz refresh rate |
| Processor | Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 |
| RAM, Storage and Price | 12/256GB for 900 euro |
| Software | Android 13 |
| Cameras | 50MP wide camera, f/1.8 aperture, 1/1.5″ sensor size 50MP ultra-wide camera, f/2.2 12MP 2X zoom camera, f/1.6 60MP front camera |
| Battery Size | 4,600 mAh |
| Charging Speeds | 125W wired charging 15W wireless charging reverse wireless charging |
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Design & Colors
Tapered sides make swiping so comfy!
(Image Credit – PhoneArena) Slim and lightweight, and that finish on the back is really nice and soft
Motorola has done a very good job with the design of the Edge 40 Pro, and you immediately notice how each of the four sides of the front of the phone are ever so slightly tapered, which makes swiping gestures incredibly pleasant.
It helps that the silicone case that Motorola includes with the phone for free does not cover the bottom part of the phone, so the common swipe up to go home gesture is uninterrupted.
For all else, this is your typical modern smartphone: Gorilla Glass Victus back, aluminum frame, solid build quality.
We do have one complaint though: the power and volume keys! They are way too close to each other, way too tiny, and the power key wobbles a tiny bit on our unit and does not feel nearly as clicky as on other phones. For a button that is supposed to be pressed literally thousands of times, this should be mentioned.
Also, don’t forget that this is still a bigger phone. Motorola has done a great job making the Edge 40 Pro one hand use friendly with the narrow body and the curved sides, and it is also much lighter than a Galaxy S23 Ultra or iPhone 14 Pro Max. But it’s still a tall phone with a 6.7-inch screen.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Display
(Image Credit – PhoneArena) This screen gets very bright outdoors
Speaking of that screen, we have a 6.7″ OLED panel with a 1080 x 2400 pixel resolution. This is not quite as sharp as 1440p screens on some phones, but the difference is negligible in our opinion.
Motorola treats us to an absolutely buttery 165Hz refresh rate, more than most other flagships and everything indeed feels so smooth.
You have a punch hole front camera that does not take up much space either.
Display Measurements:
As you can see above, the screen did well in our lab tests, scoring over 1,000 nits of max brightness, so it is easy to see outdoors on a sunny day.
You can pick between a “Saturated” and “Natural” color modes, and while we usually recommend the “Natural” mode, in this case we went with saturated colors as the natural looked way too bleak.
For biometrics, we have an optical type fingerprint scanner that does an excellent job: it is fast, reliable, we had no issues with it.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Camera
Better than we expected, but not quite great
(Image Credit – PhoneArena) A triple camera system clears the flagship bar
Making a great smartphone camera is no easy task, and that is why we had our doubts whether the Motorola Edge 40 Pro will have a camera worthy of its price tag.
Thankfully, the camera system here clears the bar with mostly pleasing colors, fast speed and a reliable performance, even if it is not as good as the best camera phones out there.
You have a 50-megapixel wide camera, which uses quad-pixel binning, meaning that you effectively get 12-megapixel shots out of it. Those who want to get the maximum 50MP resolution, however, can select the high-res mode. This is nice to see, but we would prefer to have that option easily accessible in the photo mode rather than having to switch to an entirely different mode, but that’s just us.
Main Camera – Day
One issue we saw in daytime photos, however, was how the phone tends to lift up the shadows way too much, and images lose a bit their natural dynamic look because of that.
Zoom Quality
Having a 2X zoom camera is great for portrait mode shots, but as you can see above you don’t really get a ton more detail compared to just the digital zoom on the Galaxy S23 Ultra.
And finally, 10X zoom is just too much for the camera on the Edge 40 Pro as at this level of zoom detail is missing badly.
Portrait Mode
You have three options for portrait mode: 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm. Having three different focal distances for portraits is great and these are exactly the most popular ones for portrait shots, so Motorola has done a really good job with this.
The Portrait Mode effect seems to work very well, notice how it cuts me out from the bacgkround very accurately, you don’t see any artifacts, job well done.
Ultra-wide Camera
The utlra-wide camera again captures decent looking shots.
As with so many phones out of China, we have a ridiculous amount of processing on images shot on the front camera of the Moto 40 Pro. The skin is artificially smoothened and you have this fake, plasticky look to selfies that is just this… fake (and that’s with the face beauty effect at OFF, imagine the processing if you enable that additional effect).
Video Quality
You can record up to 8K video at 30fps on the Moto Edge 40 Pro and with no crop at that, which is great to see.
However, because of the sheer size of the files and convenience, we think most people should stick with 4K that can be recorded at either 30fps or 60fps.
The quality as you can see is mostly good, and unlike cheaper phones, the Edge 40 Pro actually has quite good video stabilization. One annoyance, however, is that once you start recording at 1X, you cannot switch to the ultrawide camera during the recording. If you want to record 4K video with the ultra-wide camera, you have to first select that camera before hitting the record button, a quite ridiculous limitation.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Performance & Benchmarks
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 power!
(Image Credit – PhoneArena) Motorola has done a great job optimizing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for gaming
We were very happy with the fast and smooth performance of the Motorola Edge 40 Pro.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip inside, 12GB of RAM, and support for 165Hz refresh rate all come together nicely and everything feels buttery smooth and zippy.
Performance Benchmarks:
Benchmark results only confirm our real-world experience with the phone.
The 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme test that runs for 20 minutes straights simulating a real gaming session typically shows other phones throttling quite a lot after 5 or 10 minutes of gaming. The throttling on the Edge 40 Pro only starts after 10 minutes and it is quite minimal, so this phone actually has a fastest prolonged gaming performance than a Galaxy S23 Ultra or a OnePlus 11, an impressive achievement, considering how thin and lightweight it is.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Android version and Software
The Edge 40 Pro software is mostly great in that it is as clean as it gets and as zippy as it gets.
No bloatware, no unneeded apps.
The features that Motorola adds on top of the interface are mostly the gestures, which are really cool. Twist the phone to launch the camera, double chop to start the flashlight, and even simply things like lift to wake work as they should right out the gate.
And lock screen notifications are just so well done! You can read them easily, dismiss them, all with just one easy gesture.
At the same time, there are a few annoyances that have left us frustrated. Our biggest complaint has to be that the font used throughout the system looks broken in some languages, and there is no easy way to change it. This is an absurd thing to see on a phone in 2023.
Smaller complaints include the less optimized UI than say a Galaxy phone. We are used to having the screen brightness slider come to the bottom of the screen where it’s easy to reach and adjust the brightness, but not on the Motorola Edge 40 Pro where it stays at the top.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Battery
Color us surprised
(Image Credit – PhoneArena) 4,600mAh battery inside
When we saw that the Edge 40 Pro comes with a 4,600mAh battery, which is some 8% smaller than the 5,000mAh battery on most other flagship Android phones, we thought to ourselves that Motorola had prioritized the sleek design rather than a giant battery.
But after using this phone for a while, we can say that battery life has been surprisingly good.
This phone often lasted a day and a half between charges, it doesn’t overheat, it’s all good.
PhoneArena Battery Test Results:
On our web browsing test where we load up a script with webpages and it scrolls around to simulate a typical browsing session, the Motorola scored on par with the Google Pixel 7 Pro, in the “good” category.
Finally, on the 3D Gaming test, the phone scored nearly 50% lower than an iPhone 14 Pro Max or a Galaxy S23 Ultra.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Charging Speeds
A 120W charger in the box is a luxury few other phones have, and charging speeds are indeed insane on the Edge 40 Pro.
A full charge takes around 25 minutes, and even a quick 15-minute top up gives us more than 80% of charge. Impressive speeds!
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Audio Quality and Haptics
The Edge 40 Pro even has the Dolby Atmos logo stamped on the top and it uses a dual loudspeaker setup with one speaker firint upwards and one bottom-firing speaker, for a slightly better defined stereo effect.
Audio quality is quite good for a smartphone, but you don’t get quite the depth of the base of the iPhone 14 Pro series, and of course, the Motorola loudspeakers are no threat for the current king of smartphone speakers which is the Asus Rog Phone 7 Ultimate.
In terms of haptics, nothing ground-breaking here. The vibration feedback is quite nice but not quite as tight as on the OnePlus 11 or iPhone 14 series.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Competitors
This being a full-fledged flagship, its competitors are the best phones out there.
Motorola Edge 40 Pro Summary and Final Verdict
(Image Credit – PhoneArena) The best Motorola flagship in a while
Motorola has made its best flagship in years: the Edge 40 Pro definitely feels fast, it defies expectations with longer than expected battery life, and even the camera is quite solid.
But we feel Motorola should have done more to convince users it will actually support this phone. The number one complaint against Motorola phone is not about their design or performance, it’s about the lack of timely software updates and support. The three years of major Android updates no longer cut it as Samsung and OnePlus have stepped up to four years, plus users need to know Motorola will actually deliver these updates on time.
The slight deficits in the camera department prevent us from recommending this to photo buffs specifically, but if you are not one of them, you should definitely take a closer look at this exciting new phone.
