Motorola Edge 40 review

You may not know that Motorola phones are made by Lenovo these days, or owned by Lenovo anyway. Either way, it’s a good thing.

Google bought Motorola’s phone division in 2012 but did virtually nothing good with it. Just two years later it sold the famous company to Lenovo.

Fast forward to 2023 and we now get good smartphones from Motorola, such as the Edge 40 I’ve reviewed here as its predecessor. the Edge 30. The Android market needs solid competition to keep devices interesting and well-priced, and the Edge 40 is certainly both of those things.

It’s a well-designed, impressively lightweight phone with top quality software, a lovely screen, and good battery life. But at £529.99/€599 in the UK, the cameras are not as good as, say, the Google Pixel 7a, and with only three years of software support, Motorola is lagging behind direct rival companies.

That price is also a significant price rise compared to 2022’s £379 Motorola Edge 30 – though that phone had a cheaper plastic construction and worse cameras than the newer Edge 40.

It all means the Edge 40 is a good phone, and one I can recommend, but it’s shy of being a great one.

Design & build

• Vegan leather finish
• Amazingly lightweight
• Very slim

One of the Edge 40’s best traits is its design. It’s so light that when I first picked it up I thought it might be a dummy unit with no internal components. It’s only a feather shorter than the Pixel 7 Pro but is a very noticeable 45g lighter than Google’s phone at just 167g.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

It makes the Edge 40 one of the lightest phones I’ve used in a long time, all the more impressive given this isn’t a small phone. It has a 6.55in screen but is slim and light enough to easily use one-handed for a lot of tasks. At 7.6mm, it’s incredibly thin.

If you opt for the black or green version of the Edge 40, you get a soft-feel vegan leather back. I tested the black one, and it feels lovely while hiding all but the greasiest of fingerprints. It also covers the camera module.

There’s a blue model if you would prefer a glossy acrylic back (it’s not glass). All models have an aluminium frame, but I could have done without ‘Dolby Atmos’ being printed on the top edge. All the regulatory writing and ‘Made in China’ text is crammed onto the bottom edge around the port and speaker too, leaving the back free of this typical blemish.

The phone is fully water and dust proof with an IP68 rating, which is uncommon at this price point. Haptics are also great, with little sharp vibrating pips for the keyboard feedback, where other mid-range phones often rattle cheaply like an old tin can.

Screen & speakers

• Sharp 144Hz OLED
• 6.55in
• Punchy full speakers

The Edge 40 has a big, bright, curved 6.55in OLED display that I enjoyed using. It is well calibrated out of the box, but you can fiddle with the settings for a more natural or saturated tone.

It’s a Full HD+ panel with a 2400 x 1080 resolution. Text and images look pin sharp, and the screen has a rare 144Hz refresh rate, more than the 120Hz found on the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra or iPhone 14 Pro. But unlike those flagship displays it can’t scale down to 1Hz to save battery – you can set either 60-, 120-, or 144Hz, or an auto mode that bounce between 60- to 120Hz.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Add to that, support for HDR10+ videos and a zippy 360Hz touch sampling rate, this is a good quality, responsive screen.

While many tech reviewers abhor curved screens, I don’t mind them. They make large phones feel more manageable in your hand, and it makes sense with Android phones where you are constantly swiping inwards on either side to use the ‘back’ gesture, helping your thumb glide inwards.

The stereo speakers produce surprisingly full audio considering the slender phone itself. Playing music at full volume on Spotify doesn’t distort, and the system is great for gaming although my right hand blocked the down-firing speaker on the bottom of the device when playing landscape games.

Specs & performance

• MediaTek Dimensity 8020
• 8GB RAM, 256GB storage
• Very good performance

The phone runs on the MediaTek Dimensity 8020 chipset. When running benchmarks, this is a solid upper-mid-range chip that outstrips phones such as the Pixel 7a with its Google Tensor G2 and Samsung Galaxy A54 with its Samsung Exynos 1380.

It even holds its own against the £899 Pixel 7 Pro, which also uses the Tensor G2.

In day-to-day use, I did not feel the Edge 40 was a major downgrade from flagship phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 such as the OnePlus 11. It never ground to a halt on me and coped well with demanding mobile games Call of Duty Mobile and Asphalt 9. On the former, I played several rounds in a row with the gaming-specific performance mode on and the phone didn’t get too warm, even though it warns you it might.

That means the 8GB LPDDRX4 RAM and the 256GB UFS 3.1 storage is fast enough to keep things moving. There’s no microSD expansion and only one physical SIM slot, but you can add a second eSIM.

Connectivity is top spec, too, with WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, NFC for mobile payments, and 5G support.

Although the price is mid-range, the specs and performance of the Edge 40 make it feel like a more premium, expensive device.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Camera & video

• Main 50Mp f/1.4 sensor
• Solid but oversharpens
• Ultrawide and selfie cams serviceable

The more expensive Motorola Edge 40 Pro has triple rear cameras, but on the Edge 40, you lose the optical telephoto lens and are left with two at the rear. These main and ultrawide sensors are good, but not great. If you want the very best phone camera for this price, there are better options.

The Edge 40’s main camera is a 50Mp f/1.4 sensor. This is an impressively fast aperture for a smartphone camera and means it lets in more light with a view to improving low light photography results.

In a nutshell, the Pixel 7a has a better camera than the Edge 40 and costs less. But if you prefer the design on the Motorola you should be pleased with the main sensor, particularly in broad daylight. Images are sharp and colours pop nicely, though if you zoom in there’s not a lot of detail. Results are also usually over-sharpened, lending the images a bit of a harsh tone that isn’t true to life.

The ultrawide camera is serviceable but the quality dips as it’s using a 13Mp f/2.2 camera with a 120-degree field of view. Zoom in and you’ll see a fair bit of noise, but it’s perfectly good for capturing landscapes or fitting in more of a scene you’re up close to. It can also be used to shoot up close with a macro mode that works well.

A 32Mp f/2.4 front facing camera is quite good for quick selfies and group shots or video calls – all you’ll likely need it for, after all.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Battery life & charging

• A full day’s power
• Fast charger in box
• Wireless charging

Battery life on the Edge 40 is pretty decent. The 4400mAh cell lasted me a whole day consistently with no issues but did tend to drain quite quickly when I was using it a lot. That’s to be expected, but I found it a little erratic.

It’s certainly not a two-day phone on one charge, and it only lasted eight hours and 51 minutes in our standard battery test – but in real life, it’s better than that.

There’s a 68W charging brick and cable in the box, not always a given in 2023. I got it to charge to 47% in 15 minutes from flat, which is very quick. In 30 minutes, it was at 87%. This is a good deal faster than the Galaxy S23 series and the Pixel 7 series in a phone that costs less.

It also can wirelessly charge at 15W, and I got it charging successfully on a few Qi charging pads, including Apple’s MagSafe charging puck. There’s no reverse wireless charging to top up other peripherals off the back of the device.

Software & updates

• Excellent, thoughtful software features
• Only two years of Android updates
• Only three years of security updates

I am frustrated by the software of the Edge 40, but not in the way you might expect. In fact, this is amongst my favourite flavours of Android you can get your hands on. It is expressive without changing too much, and Motorola adds useful things that even Google Pixel phones don’t have.

The most annoying thing is Moto is only giving this phone two years of Android software updates and just three years of security patches.

Google gives three years and five years respectively, while Samsung offers four and five. People are, rightly, holding onto their phones longer now, and for a phone that costs more than £500/€500, Motorola should be doing far better than two OS updates.

I like the Moto-only font the phone ships with, but you can change it in the settings along with a ton of other things you’d expect to be able to tinker with given this is an Android phone.

I particularly love the thoughtful touches such as PIN pad scramble that randomly scrambles the position of the numbers every time you enter your lock screen PIN number so potential thieves and fraudsters can’t work out your PIN quickly from glancing at the usual position of the numbers.

You can also open the camera with a quick double flick of the wrist, while a double chop turns on the torch.

Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry

Price & availability

The Motorola Edge 40 costs £529.99/€599, available in the UK and several European countries.

In the UK you can buy it direct from Motorola or John Lewis.

In Europe it’s available direct from Motorola.

This puts it in direct competition with fellow Android phones the £449/€509 Google Pixel 7a and £449/€499 Samsung Galaxy A54. I would pick the Edge 40 over the A54 but would choose the Pixel over the Edge 40 for Google’s combination of superior camera and software support.

You might also want to pay a little more to get the regular £599/€649 Google Pixel 7 that has better cameras still, or save money and get the excellent £369/€399 all-rounder OnePlus Nord 2T.

Verdict

The Motorola Edge 40 is a good phone at a reasonable price. The vegan leather-backed version is one of the most attractive and nice feeling phones I’ve ever used, all the more improved by its incredibly slim and lightweight build.

Clever software additions such as the gestures for opening the camera or the peek display to use the always-on function to preview or open notifications really add value to Android and are a good reason to pick this phone over others in its price range.

It’s frustrating that the phone will only get two Android platform updates and only get security support until 2026. This isn’t long enough when the phone will be good enough to keep going for at least five years.

If this doesn’t bother you then it’s a solid choice in the mid-range market.  

Specs

• 6.55in, FHD+, 144Hz pOLED display 
• MediaTek Dimensity 8020
• 8GB RAM 
• 256GB storage 
• 4400mAh battery 
• 68W wired charging 
• 15W wireless charging 
• Cameras: 
  • 50Mp, f/1.4 OIS main camera 
  • 13Mp, f/2.2 ultrawide camera 
  • 32Mp, f/2.2 selfie camera 
• IP68 
• 158.4 x 72 x 7.6 mm 
• 167g 
• Android 13