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The Motorola Edge 40 Pro, Motorola’s new premium phone, has top specs, a triple rear camera, a sharp display with a high refresh rate and one of the fastest charging rates among phones you can buy. That gives Android phone fans an alternative to Samsung, but only if they’re in Europe or Latin America, as Motorola hasn’t announced when (or if) this phone will come to the US.
The Motorola Edge 40 Pro has a starting price of 899 euros (roughly $980, £780, AU$1,440), pitting it squarely against top-tier phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus ($1,000, £1,049, AU$1,649). It’ll be available across Europe in the coming days, with a slower rollout to select Latin American markets in the coming weeks.
The Motorola Edge 40 Pro is a follow-up to last year’s Motorola Edge Plus 2022 (don’t mind Motorola’s confusing naming), a phone we felt was a good top-tier choice with a cleaner version of Android than other handsets. The new Edge 40 Pro improves on its predecessor in nearly every way, even if it may be tough to notice some of the incremental boosts to performance and screen quality.
For instance, the Edge 40 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, which Motorola says has 35% faster CPU performance and 40% better battery efficiency than the silicon in last year’s Edge Plus 2022. This should put it toe-to-toe with other top Android phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S23 series. It packs 12GB of RAM and comes with 256GB or 512GB of storage space.
The screen on the Edge 40 Plus curves around to the sides.
Motorola
The new Motorola phone’s big 6.67-inch display brings back the stylish waterfall-style curved edges, and has a maximum refresh rate of 165Hz, up from 144Hz in its predecessor, making gaming, watching shows and scrolling the internet or menus even smoother. It also supports Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10 Plus for a wide gamut of colors.
While the Edge 40 Pro’s main suite of 50-megapixel standard and 50-megapixel ultrawide cameras may not have changed from last year’s phone, it did swap out its predecessor’s 2-megapixel depth sensor for a 12-megapixel 2x telephoto lens. But instead of zooming in, it seems this will be used mostly to add depth in portrait modes. If you want a phone with zoom capabilities, you’ll want to opt for the Samsung Galaxy S23 series. Otherwise the Edge 40 Pro will likely take comparable photos to other premium phones; take a look at comparison photos in our review of its predecessor, the Edge Plus 2022 to get an idea.
The Edge 40 Plus’ camera bump.
Motorola
The Edge 40 Pro also inherits its predecessor’s 60-megapixel front-facing camera, though selfies should benefit from the new chipset’s Cognitive Image Signal Processor that uses AI to optimize different areas of each picture (subjects, buildings, background) separately for more true-to-life photos. Like the Edge Plus, the new phone can take video in up to 8K resolution or in 4K with HDR10 Plus for far more diverse color shades.
But one area the Edge 40 Pro could stand above its competitors is quickly refilling battery: It supports up to 125-watt recharging, just a hair faster than the 120-watt charger that comes with the Xiaomi 13 Pro. Qualcomm says its charger can fully juice up a dead battery in 23 minutes, or, in the time it takes to listen to a couple songs, get enough battery life to last through the day.
The Edge 40 Pro battery’s 4,600-mAh capacity is respectable and roughly equal to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus’ 4,700-mAh battery, but the latter is capped at 45-watt charging, so Motorola’s phone takes the lead on paper. The Edge 40 Pro also supports 15-watt wireless charging and 5-watt power sharing to charge up other devices.
