Motorola Edge 50 Neo Review: Budget Camera vs iPhone 16 Pro

We also review smartphones now and start with the Motorola Edge 50 Neo. This is an exciting mid-range phone with an elegant design and a 6.4-inch OLED. I tested the four cameras in particular and compared them with the iPhone 16 Pro. Sounds unfair, yes, but the results are surprisingly good for Motorola, especially if you can get it for around 300 Euros or Pound. It’s not available in the US at the moment.

Design & Build Quality

I’ll get to the cameras in a moment, but first let’s take a look at the design. The back is made of faux leather and can be ordered in five different Pantone colors. My test device is Poinciana red, a reddish orange. I think the design is pretty nice, but my girlfriend thinks it looks old. Well, that’s a matter of taste.

The frame is made of plastic and it’s 8.1mm thin and weighs 171g. Gorilla Glass 3 sits on the top, it’s protected against water and dust according to IP68 and should be shockproof according to the MIL-STD 810H standard.

A fingerprint reader is located below the screen and works quickly and reliably. At the very bottom, we then get a USB C port, but unfortunately it’s only USB 2.0. So you cannot connect external monitors and the data transfer speeds are slow.

It can be charged with up to 68W and it can also be charged wirelessly. I tried a Qi2 Power Bank and it works, but the magnets are not as strong as Apple’s MagSafe.

A MicroSD card slot is missing, but you can use a nano-SIM and eSIM at the same time.

Display & Speakers

The Edge 50 Neo’s display is exactly 6.36 inches and offers a resolution of 2670 x 1220 pixels, so at 460ppi it’s very sharp. Sharper than pretty much any tablet, by the way. And I especially like that the display bezels are very narrow.

It is a pOLED display and that makes blacks really black, the contrast is good and colors look nicely saturated. It supports up to 120Hz and can even get up to 3000nits bright. Compared to tablets that we usually review, these specs are amazing. And for a phone, they’re great, but not that special either.

In any case, the display is great for watching movies, TV shows and YouTube, of course. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for the speakers, where I was shocked in a negative way.

Music and videos sound very tinny and lack a decent bass. But okay, that’s something that’s always cut back on in low-priced devices. I definitely recommend headphones. Using Bluetooth or USB C, because there’s no headphone jack.

Camera: Photo Comparison

At the front sits a 32-megapixel camera and on the back we get three cameras and an LED flash. The main camera offers 50 megapixels, an f/1.8 aperture and an optical image stabilizer. Then we have a 13 megapixel wide-angle camera with f/2.2 and a 10 megapixel telephoto camera with f/2.0 and also an optical image stabilizer. It offers a 3x zoom.

I visited the Brandenburger Gate in Berlin with the Motorola Edge 50 Neo and the iPhone 16 Pro and took photos with the standard camera apps and standard settings. In a direct comparison of the main cameras, it’s immediately clear that the iPhone has more natural colors and less contrast. Motorola is much more aggressive with its post-processing and sharpens much more. If you compare the photos on a phone screen, many might prefer the 50 Neo for this reason.

I don’t like unedited photos from the iPhone that much, because I think that Apple overexposes shadows too much or makes them much too bright. This results in a loss of contrast. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that the iPhone has more details. Especially when we look at the bottom of the roof of the Brandenburger Gate, there are significantly more details. If you want, you can add contrast and sharpness to make it look more like the Motorola, only with more details.

With the ultra-wide-angle camera, Motorola has once again significantly increased the sharpness, and the iPhone looks more natural. But it actually has fewer details than the Neo.

The iPhone’s telephoto camera is much, much better than the Motorola’s. The latter looks very soft this time and lacks details. At least in these sample photos at the Brandenburger Gate. In the studio and in RAW format, the Neo’s telephoto camera has quite good details, even at high ISO. At the Brandenburg Gate, Motorola has applied the noise reduction too much, resulting in lost details.

I also used the telephoto cameras to photograph Santa. This time we can see details on Santa and he is quite sharp. And first glance, compared to the iPhone, it looks surprisingly good. But when we look at the roof of the church, Motorola’s heavy post-processing is at work again. The roof tiles were subject to noise reduction and have completely disappeared.

In the studio, I also compared the Edge 50 Neo’s 50-megapixel mode with the iPhone 16 Pro. Here, too, the iPhone has significantly more details than the Motorola. Even in high-resolution mode.

Both front cameras are well suited for selfies. Here, Motorola offers higher resolution, but more details are visible on the iPhone again. However, it’s good that Motorola doesn’t overly sharpen selfies.

The iPhone also performs better in low light and significantly more details are visible. But the Edge 50 Neo usually reduces noise quite well with the main camera, even though the ISO value is even higher than with the iPhone. Thanks to the noise reduction and aggressive re-sharpening, photos in the dark don’t look too bad as long as you don’t zoom in.

Ultimately, however, the photos on the iPhone 16 Pro are better and more detailed. You can get a lot more out of them, especially if you want to edit photos yourself. This is no longer possible with the Motorola’s. Once a photo has been over-sharpened, it’s hard to undo.

Camera: Video comparison

The heavy post-sharpening is also the reason why videos with the Edge 50 Neo look significantly worse compared to the iPhone. We’re still at the Brandenburger Gate and the sky is full of artifacts resulting from a mixture of noise reduction and re-sharpening.

By contrast, the sky is completely clear on the iPhone 16 Pro. The difference is especially clear on a large screen.

I know the comparison is a bit unfair, but it also shows how good the cameras can be on such an affordable phone these days. The iPhone is more than three times as expensive and I don’t think the photos are three times better, at least not in good light. What do you think?

Hardware & Performance

The Edge 50 Neo is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 chipset with 12GB RAM and 512GB internal storage. It will take some time before we have built up a good portfolio of reviewed smartphones for comparisons. And it’s no surprise, of course, that the Edge 50 performs significantly worse than the iPhone 16 Pro in all benchmarks from Geekbench 6 to the 3D Mark tests.

That’s why my gaming test is more interesting. Fortnite is still one of my favorite titles and it’s not fun at the highest settings, because I measured between 10 and 18 FPS. Even with high graphics and 3D resolution set to 75%, it still runs at under 20 FPS. But it consistently achieves 30 FPS after I set the graphics to “medium” and the 3D resolution to 50%. That’s also fun. You can’t select 60 or 90 FPS.

Diablo Immortal runs beautifully with high graphics settings and is quite smooth. You can’t select ultra settings.

Otherwise, the Edge 50 Neo performs quite well in everyday use and also handles multitasking well. I edited a few RAW photos in Adobe Lightroom and it handled that well, too. Unless you’re a hardcore gamer, most people will be satisfied with the performance.

Software

The Motorola Edge 50 Neo runs Android 14 out of the box and I think it’s great that the interface has only been customized a little bit. Ultimately, we get pure Android and I always think that’s great with Lenovo and Motorola. There is some bloatware preinstalled, but you can just throw it out. Motorola promises to release five Android version updates

Battery life

The battery life is pretty good and I can get by for a good two days on a full charge – well, unless I play tons of Fortnite, then it’s less. When I played an HD YouTube video in an endless loop at maximum brightness, the battery lasted a full 15 hours.

Motorola Edge 50 Neo Review: Final Verdict

The Motorola Edge 50 Neo offers a pretty design and display and I also think the cameras are great at this price. The only thing I really dislike are the speakers, although that’s normal in this price range. I think the minimum asking price of 500 euros or 400 pound is too expensive, but currently you can get it for around 300 euros and at that price I think it’s pretty good.

When we review tablets, I always recommend alternatives. That’s not the case this time because we first have to test more phones. And you should never recommend a device based on specs alone. More phones are on their way to us, so feel free to subscribe to the channel for more reviews.