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Motorola Moto Edge 30 Pro Review

Written By Louie Diangson
Published • May 5th, 2022
Gadget ReviewsMobile
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The Moto Edge 30 Pro is one of the most impressive Snapdragon 8 Gen1-powered smartphones in the Philippine market. It’s got a beautiful design, powerful specs, and a competitive price tag. It can even go head to head with other popular brands known for producing high-end devices at lower prices. Is this the best you can get for under PHP 35K or are there better options? Find out in our review.

Table of Contents

Design and Construction

The Moto Edge 30 Pro is a pretty tall device at 163 mm and chunky at 8.79 mm, which can be attributed to the large screen and big battery. It’s still easy to grip at 75.9 mm, cool to the touch, and feels very premium with an IP52 rating for dust and water resistance. It also has a decent heft at 196 g.

Motorola Moto Edge 30 Pro

The front houses the 6.7-inch OLED screen with a punch hole at the top for the 60MP selfie camera. Protecting the screen is Gorilla Glass 3. Placed above the screen are the earpiece and loudspeaker.

The device features an aluminum frame with a glossy metallic finish. Placed on the right side are the volume buttons and the power/lock button which also serves as the fingerprint scanner. The button feels good, although placed at the upper part of the frame so you need to stretch out your fingers just to reach it.

Up top, we have the secondary microphone.

Down below is the SIM card tray for two nano-sized SIM cards, a USB-C port, the main microphone, and a loudspeaker.

Flip it on its back and you will see the camera module that houses three cameras, consisting of the 50MP main, 50MP ultra-wide, and 2MP depth, and the LED flash.

The back panel is my favorite part of the Moto Edge 30 Pro. It uses Gorilla Glass 5 with a frosted finish. The result is a very smooth, powdery texture that hides smudges and fingerprints well.

The unit that we have sports the Cosmos Blue color which exudes a glowing light effect of blue and green. Overall, it’s a beautiful device that looks and feels sleek and premium.

Display and Multimedia

Even at 6.7-inches with Full HD+ resolution, the Moto Edge 30 Pro’s screen is sharp at 393ppi. It’s OLED, so we can observe deep blacks and punchy colors. The viewing experience is also great and immersive as the screen has thin bezels and supports HDR10+.

If you want smooth animations and transitions, the 144Hz refresh rate will satisfy you. You can bring it down to 60Hz to conserve battery life or put it to Auto and allow the device’s AI to choose the optimal refresh rate given the activity. The touch sampling rate is decent as well at 360Hz. It also has stylus support but you’ll have to purchase it separately.

The audio quality is good. The stereo speakers are loud and crispy. There’s not a lot of bass to go around but it doesn’t sound cheap. Simply put, it sounds great for a smartphone speaker and is enough for gaming and watching videos.

Cameras

The Moto Edge 30 Pro is equipped with hi-res cameras. We’re talking about the triple-rear cameras with a 50MP main, 50MP ultra-wide, and 2MP depth. That’s one of the highest ultra-wide camera resolutions in the smartphone market. And for selfies, we got a whopping 60MP.

Images produced by the rear cameras are of good quality. They’re sharp with punchy and accurate colors and a high dynamic range. Low-light performance is also good enough to illuminate the subject but the details are not as sharp.

The front camera performance is underwhelming, though. It’s not as fast and clear as we expect it to be. It’s also prone to noise and blur. Even though it has a 60MP sensor, it shoots at “15MP Quad Pixel” by default to improve performance. If you want to take one at full resolution, you’ll have to adjust it in the settings.

When it comes to video recording, the main camera can record up to 8K at 24fps and 4K at 60fps, while the ultra-wide camera can record up to 4K at 60fps, with video stabilization. If you want to record with HDR10+, you’ll have to lower the resolution to 4K at 30fps. Watch the sample below.

OS, Apps, Features

Running the software side is Android 12. One of the things we like about Motorola is that it keeps the operating system as stock as possible. It has a few Motorola apps installed but the rest is all Google. It even uses Google apps as its default for basic functions like Phone and SMS.

One of the best features we discovered on the Moto Edge 30 Pro is the ‘Extend to devices’ feature, which allows you to connect the phone to your Windows-powered laptop and allow you to access mobile apps, and share files between devices. There’s also Instant sharing which instantly shares screenshots, pictures, and copied text from your phone to the clipboard of the connected PC.

Moreover, there’s a webcam mode where you can use the Moto Edge 30 Pro as a high-quality webcam, and you can also connect the Moto Edge 30 Pro to an external display via wireless Miracast, or HDMI or USB-C cable for a desktop experience. It’s like Samsung’s DeX mode and offers Mobile Desktop mode, TV mode (shows streaming apps like YouTube and Netflix), Video chat mode (if you have Zoom and Google Meet), and Game (turning the device into an Android console).

Performance and Benchmarks

Powering the Moto Edge 30 Pro is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset with an octa-core CPU clocked at 3.0GHz, an Adreno 730 GPU, 12GB LPDDR5 RAM, and 256GB UFS 3.1. As expected, performance is great and we didn’t experience any issues like lags, random reboots, or app crashes. You can run games at their highest graphics settings. Warming can be felt but nothing unusual. It’s a flagship device and performs like so. Check out the benchmarks below.

• AnTuTu v9 – 986,370
• AnTuTu v9 Storage – 1,343.4 MB/s (Seq. Read), 970.0 MB/s (Seq. Write)
• 3D Mark – 7,494 (Wild Life), 44.90 fps, 2,541 (Wild Life Extreme), 15.20 fps
• PC Mark – 14,543 (Work 3.0)
• Geekbench 5 – 1,199 (Single-Core), 3,637 (Multi-Core), 6,299 (OpenCL)

Connectivity and Battery Life

The Moto Edge 30 Pro supports dual-SIM with 5G connectivity, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, GPS, and USB-C with DisplayPort 1.4 support. It’s a complete set of connectivity features worthy of a flagship.

For the battery, it has a 4,800mAh capacity, which is decent. It would have been nicer if Motorola went for a clean 5,000mAh, but maybe we’re just nitpicking. Still, it’s a decent capacity for a smartphone of this caliber and was enough to last a whole workday and more left for the night. Our video loop test got us 20 hours and 45 minutes of playback, while PC Mark’s battery test rated it at 12 hours and 2 minutes.

Charging takes an hour and a half with the 68W fast charging and has support for 15W wireless charging. You can also charge other devices with its 5W wireless power-sharing.

Conclusion

The Motorola Moto Edge 30 Pro almost has all the qualities we’ve been looking for in a flagship smartphone: a beautiful and premium design, a sharp and vibrant screen with a high refresh rate, powerful hardware, complete connectivity, a big battery, and nifty software features. The cameras are good but not as great as we expected. Then lastly, the price, at PHP 34,995USD 596INR 50,554EUR 568CNY 4,343, it’s a very attractive offering considering Snapdragon 8 Gen1-powered devices that launched earlier costs 40K and above.

However, this kind of advantage is no longer unique to the Moto Edge 30 Pro as other manufacturers are already releasing similarly powerful smartphones at the same price range. Some are even priced lower. Still, the Moto Edge 30 Pro is a welcome option and even has some features that its competitors do not have. So, if you do end up getting this device, we can say that you won’t regret it.

Motorola Moto Edge 30 Pro specs:
6.7-inch FHD+ (2400 x 1080) OLED display, 393ppi
144Hz refresh rate, 360Hz touch sampling rate, HDR10+
Gorilla Glass 3 front, Gorilla Glass 5 back
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC
Adreno 730 GPU
12GB LPDDR5 RAM
256GB UFS 3.1
Triple-rear cameras:
• 50MP F1.8 main
• 50MP F2.2 ultra-wide
• 2MP F2.4 depth
60MP F2.2 front camera
Dual-SIM
5G, 4G LTE
WiFi 6
Bluetooth 5.2
NFC
GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, BDS, GALILEO
USB-C, DisplayPort 1.4
Dual-stereo speakers, Dolby Atmos
Fingerprint scanner (side)
Android 12
4,800mAh battery w/ 68W fast charging, 15W wireless charging, 5W wireless power-sharing
IP52 water-repellent design
163 x 75.9 x 8.79 mm
196 g