This is the Motorola Edge 30 Neo, and out of the new Moto Edge 30 series, this is the most affordable and compact one of the bunch. Compact mid rangers aren’t that common to find, and besides the size, what does this phone have to offer?
Motorola Edge 30 Neo Overall
The Motorola Edge 30 Neo isn’t a high end phone like its siblings, but even so, there are some nice features to be had a snazzy compact design, super fast charging and a bright 120 Hz light on the front at just 155 grams, the phone is super lightweight and easy to wield, and the design here is pretty interesting. Despite being made of plastic, you get a dual tone accent on the camera bump and a nice frosted coating on the back panel that lends some extra grip. The finish here is a unique purple hue called Berry Perry. It’s Pantone’s 2022 color of the year. You even get a little plaque on the back just in case you forget. Motorola and Pantone have a new partnership, so we should see some interesting colors on future Moto phones. Another cool feature of the Motorola Edge 30 Neo is an Led ring around the camera island. It acts as a notification light and charging indicator. The phone also has ingress protection against dust and light splashes. On the front of the Motorola Edge 30 Neo is a 628 inch plaid display with a ten DP resolution and a 120 Hz refresh rate. The fast refresh rate helps the UI feel quite snappy and smooth when swiping around, and you can have it fixed at 120 Hz or Adaptive, where it will dial down to save energy when you stop interacting with it. We were impressed with the max brightness of the display it’s flagship grade. We achieved a maximum of 490 nits with a manual slider, and this can boost to 10 nits in auto mode when in bright sun. The panel is contrasting and sharp, and the color accuracy is also great here what’s missing is HDR support, but still the Motorola Edge 30 Neo has a pretty nice display for the price and under the display sets the fingerprint reader for Biometrics. It’s fast and responsive, though its placement takes some getting used to. For audio. The Motorola Edge 30 Neo has a pair of stereo speakers, one at the bottom and the other that doubles as the earpiece. They are quite balanced and have good overall loudness. The quality is decent too, with pretty clean vocals and some bass.
You get the choice of 128 or 256 gigs of storage on the Motorola Edge 30 Neo, but that’s not expandable through microSD, and the interface of the phone is the same as what you’d find on other recent modal phones a clean and very stock feeling Android Twelve UI with just a few mode features sprinkled in the Moto features are organized conveniently into the modo app. These include Personalization, through which you customize the appearance of the UI. There are quite a few custom gestures and shortcuts you can use if you want to. The Peak display is something like an always on display, showing you time and notifications, but it only lights up when you tap or lift the phone. There’s
support for Moto’s Ready Four too, a feature that allows you to connect the phone to other devices like a TV or monitor, and even a mouse and keyboard. One of the major differences you’ll find on the Neo model compared to the higher end ones is the chipset. Here you get a snapdragon 695 5G, which is far from flagship grade, and actually most competitors, even at this price point, are able to earn higher benchmark scores. Still, while the chipset performance is underwhelming in comparison, it’s solid enough for a mid ranger, and you get 5G connectivity as well. This chipset is also very frugal, so even with a 4000 miles How battery, battery life here is actually pretty good. Considering the compact size. The Motorola Edge 30 Neo was able to earn an endurance rating of 104 hours in our proprietary tests. What’s more impressive though, is the charging speed. With a bundled 68 watt fast charger, the Motorola Edge 30 Neo was able to charge from zero to 92% in half an hour, and you also get support for wireless charging on board. Finally, we have the cameras. On the back of the Motorola Edge 30 Neo is a dual camera setup consisting of a 64 megapixel main cam with Lis and a 13 megapixel Ultra wide camera which has auto focus during the day. The main camera delivers consistently good photos with great sharpness and plenty of fine detail.
Colors are punchy and dynamic range is pretty good, while the photos remain nice and contrast. Portrait shots are pretty nice if you have enough light. There’s plenty of detail and sharpness, and the colors look good. The Edge detection does a decent job too. At 13 megapixels, the ultra wide cam has an advantage resolution wise over most competitors. There’s a very good level of detail, good contrast and color saturation, and above average sharpness except for the corners, where we can even see lots of purple fringing. The dynamic range is a bit more limited than the main camera, and you often end up with dark shadows too. Since the Ultrawide has autofocus, you can make closeup macro shots. These aren’t amazing, but they’re much better than what you get from a dedicated two megapixel macro cam. In low light conditions, the main camera’s nighttime performance is quite decent. The photos come out well exposed and with good color saturation thanks to HDR. Highlights are well preserved too. Zooming in, however, reveals that there’s not much fine detail, and shadows are often quite dark. With night mode turned on, the results are a mixed bag. The shadows are brightened up and you get much better sharpness and reduction of fine detail. However, the colors change to quite unnatural hues and even appear washed out. The Ultrawide struggles to deliver usable photos at night. The images are quite colorful and have nice exposure, but only as long as you view them on the phone screen. Any sort of magnification reveals that they are in fact really soft, and fine detail is smeared. There’s no need mode available for the Ultra wide cam either. Selfies from the 32 megapixel front facing cam come out as eight megapixels, and they’re colorful, with decent sharpness and dynamic range. There’s not a ton of fine detail, though. The Motorola Edge 30 Neo chipset doesn’t have the capability for 4K video recording, so videos from the main camera are limited to videos are colorful and contrasts, but dynamic range is not the best, with some clipped shadows and highlights. The Ultra wide camera also does 1080p videos and produces about the same level of video quality, with nice and punchy colors and a decent level of sharpness. The contrast is even higher here, which hurts the dynamic range a bit more, but these videos are still good coming from natural white cam, so that’s the Motorola Edge 30 Neo. The light and compact form factor and attractive design are what sets this phone apart, as well as the bright OLED display and super fast charging. The stereo speakers and a decent battery life round off a pretty nice compact smartphone. Where it falls behind competitors
in its price range, though, is with its chipset, and that directly affects the camera performance, both with the night mode processing speed and the lack of 4K video. Still, even with that considered, the Motorola Edge 30 Neo is value packed mid ranger. That’s worth recommending if you’re looking for a compact phone.
