Motorola is mostly known as a mid-range and budget smartphone maker these days thanks to its product line such as the Moto G, but Lenovo’s division still makes flagship smartphones. The latest is the Motorola Edge 40 Pro, which the company says will ship to Europe in a few days and Latin America in a few weeks. The US has been left out, but Motorola’s latest blog post also promises to “expand its family of peripherals in North America this year.”(Supposedly, Lenovo’s flagship phone in the US should have the interesting ThinkPhone branding, but it hasn’t been released yet despite being announced three months ago.)
In Europe, the Edge 40 Pro costs €899.99, or about $982, so this phone should be on par with the best Android phones. The specifications are close: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of UFS 4.0 storage. The OLED display has a unique feature lineup of 165Hz at 2400×1080 resolution – typically flagships have a 120Hz display at 1440p resolution. The battery is smaller than expected at 4,600 mAh, while most phones of this size pack 5,000 mAh.
It has IP68 dust and water resistance, Android 13, Wi-Fi 7 support, NFC, an in-screen fingerprint scanner, and 15W wireless charging. The standout feature is 125W wired charging, which Motorola says charges the phone in 23 minutes. In terms of cameras, Motorola has included a “high-definition triple camera system”that includes a 50MP main camera, a wide-angle camera, and a 12MP telephoto lens with 2x zoom on the back; There is a 60-megapixel selfie camera on the front.
Many phones fit stereo speakers with a single speaker on the bottom edge of the phone and then the speaker doubles as the top speaker, but Motorola has gone in a unique way by cutting out the speaker at the top edge of the phone as well as the bottom. Other than that, there’s nothing special to distinguish the design, and it’s barely distinguishable from the bunch of mid-range models that Motorola releases every few months. It has a curved screen, metal frame, glass front and back panels – everything is as usual.
Motorola still loves the idea of a phone that can turn into a desktop, and this phone includes Motorola’s “Ready for “software. The phone’s USB-C port supports DisplayPort, and connecting the phone to a monitor will boot into a Windows-style desktop mode where you can use the phone’s screen as a trackpad.
Software support is an important reason not to buy Motorola phones as the company is the worst Android OEM when it comes to after sales software support. You don’t have to look far to find disappointed customers. Motorola has not announced an official upgrade plan for this phone. When we last heard from the company, Edge 2022 promised three years of OS updates and four years of bimonthly (every other month) security updates. The problem is, when will these updates come? This phone’s predecessor, the Motorola Edge 30 Pro, is onlystarted getting Android 13 for some countries last month. So it’s about seven months after Android 13 arrived, and that frequency is good for Motorola. Also don’t be surprised if a company skips some of these security updates for months.
Listing image from Motorola