The Motorola Edge 40 might be good, its competition is (still) better

The Motorola Edge 40 Pro features the very best equipment. But hardware alone no longer does it today. Manufacturers have to invest a lot of work in software in order to play with the big dogs.

Brushed glass and four rounded edges

The brushed glass back of the Edge 40 Pro isn’t reflective and has a slightly better grip than smooth materials. Fingerprints are not immediately noticeable. The design is elegant on the one hand, yet inconspicuous and boring on the other. But maybe that’s just me, as I’ve seen this before on the Edge 30 Ultra.

The 6.67-inch OLED display convinces with strong, natural-looking colours. The 2400 × 1080 pixel resolution ensures a detailed image and the maximum refresh rate of 165 hertz is above average. However, there’s little visible advantage over 120 hertz. The brightness is strong enough to use the Edge 40 Pro in sunshine.

Its display isn’t only rounded on the long edges, but on all four sides. Pretty pleasant. However, this impression fizzles out as soon as I use a case with a high edge. On the long sides, the curvature goes too far for me in places. Especially when taking pictures, it’s difficult to see exactly what’s included. So far, the curve doesn’t bother me on the short edges.

The front and back of the Edge 40 Pro are made of Gorilla Glass Victus. It’s also the first smartphone for which Motorola obtained an IP68 certification. It can survive for one hour at a maximum depth of 1.5 metres underwater.

Same chipset, better than Samsung

Motorola equips the Edge 40 Pro with twelve gigabytes of working memory and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It’s currently the strongest chipset for smartphones, without equal. However, it doesn’t deliver the same result in all smartphones.

In a Geekbench 6 single-core test, the Edge 40 Pro relegates the Galaxy S23 Ultra to second place – even though Samsung uses a modified version of the processor. That one clocks at 3.36 instead of 3.19 gigahertz like with the Edge 40 Pro. Motorola’s advantage is minimal when a task requires all cores. In a test run by graphics interface OpenCL, the Edge 40 Pro falls surprisingly far behind the Galaxy S23 Ultra and the OnePlus 11.

You won’t manage to push the Edge 40 Pro to its performance limits in everyday use. Special apps would be needed for this. Most likely ones involved in rendering very large video files.

Helpful additional apps and a promise for quick updates

The Edge 40 Pro runs Android 13 from the get-go. Motorola provides Google’s operating system with a user interface called My UX. It includes numerous customisation options as well as several preinstalled apps from Motorola and third-party providers.

At least there’s only three of those annoying third-party apps preinstalled. Getting rid of them requires a little more effort than with other brands. It only works awkwardly via the app info. Motorola’s preinstalled apps can only be deactivated and not uninstalled. However, they are quite useful. With Family Space, for example, you can set up an area for children. They can then play with the smartphone without changing your data or settings. Ready For is a tool that lets you connect the smartphone to Windows computers and use a shared clipboard, for example. With it, you also display the smartphone on the monitor and can control apps with a mouse and keyboard.

Motorola promises three major Android updates for the Edge 40 Pro – meaning until Android 16. The smartphone should receive security updates for four years. Sounds good, but that’s one year less than Samsung promises, for example.

Quick charge battery

The battery on the Edge 40 Pro is a bit smaller than other top smartphones with its capacity of 4,600 mAh. But I still get through the day well enough. It helps that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 consumes less power than its predecessor.

Users short on time should be able to recharge for twelve hours of battery life in six minutes with the included 125-watt power supply. I didn’t check this, but in about 25 minutes, the battery was fully charged. A bit more patience is needed for wireless charging. It runs with a maximum of 15 watts and needs about two hours for a complete charge. The Edge 40 Pro can also wirelessly charge other devices with up to 5 watts. To do this, you need to enable battery sharing in the settings.

Cameras for ordinary subjects

Motorola stated it had expanded software development in Chicago in recent months. This should benefit its cameras equally in terms of image quality and functions. For videos, for example, there isn’t only image stabilisation, but also horizon alignment. This means that no matter how you turn your smartphone, the horizon always remains the same. Slight movements are still visible, but videos don’t follow the smartphone’s rotation.

And this is what a video taken with the Edge 40 Pro looks like.

The Edge 40 Pro has three rear cameras: a main and an ultra-wide-angle camera with 50 megapixels each and a telephoto camera with 12 megapixels. The front-facing camera even has 60 megapixels for selfies.

You have to set high resolutions in the camera settings. By default, the Edge 40 Pro uses Pixel Binning. In other words, it pulls four adjacent pixels together into one. This should increase light sensitivity and improve image quality. Accordingly, the main camera delivers photos with 12.5 megapixels.

Colour and details

In daylight, the Edge 40 Pro’s main camera takes highly detailed photos and delivers natural-looking colours. Works for me.

Wide angle and zoom

The ultra-wide-angle camera unsurprisingly shows more distortion at the edges than the main camera. Other manufacturers manage to reduce this using software. Given identical resolutions, I’m surprised that the ultra-wide-angle shots are less detailed than those taken with the main camera. Different sensor sizes and focal lengths are probably noticeable here.

The Edge 40 Pro camera app offers 2× zoom via an icon. The maximum is 16× magnification. There’s no icon for tenfold zoom. I have to select it by hand using a scale. In doing so, all the extra decimal points get on my nerves too often.

2x zoom is still presentable, but larger digital focal lengths aren’t convincing. They’re too pixelated.

Nighttime

I can select night mode after the sun goes down, producing some decent shots. On closer inspection, the detail could be even better, but I rarely look that closely on a smartphone.

I’m annoyed, however, that Night mode comes on in Automatic, even when I turn off scene optimisation. It also provides poorer image quality than manually selected Night mode. You shouldn’t rely on Automatic.

Selfies

Pixel binning is also at work on the front camera by default. This means that the 60-megapixel sensor delivers 15-megapixel selfies. However, combining several pixels delivers absolutely no benefits here, as can be seen in the pictures.

It starts with the software blurring my face – in particular, compare this with the following portrait shot using the main camera. I can’t find an option to turn off blur in the camera app settings. But my jacket and the flowers in the background look blurred and pixelated as well. The Edge 40 Pro isn’t (yet) suitable for selfie enthusiasts. However, Motorola’s developers can still tweak the software here.

Conclusion: great hardware, cool software ideas and a camera with potential

While the back remains rather plain, Motorola adds new accents with a display that’s rounded on all four sides. Other manufacturers are welcome to adopt these curves on the short sides in particular. In contrast, the installed hardware is off-the-shelf and still offers plenty of performance.

Motorola complements Android with some exciting and useful additional features. However, the promised update period is too short for me. There are also interesting ideas on the camera that I haven’t seen from any other manufacturer. Overall, however, the picture quality lags a bit behind other top smartphones. This gulf is even greater for selfies.

Overall, the Motorola Edge 40 Pro is a good to very good smartphone. However, I find it difficult to recommend. I can’t get past my current favourite, the Pixel 7 Pro. I’d also put the Galaxy S23 ahead of the Edge 40 Pro. But Motorola is on the right track. I think the manufacturer will be able to catch up with these top contenders in the near future.

Header image: Jan Johannsen