With the Edge 30 Ultra, Motorola is launching a flagship smartphone that is extremely well equipped. Among other things, it has a main camera with 200 megapixels and a display with a refresh rate of 144 Hertz. Nevertheless, with a price of 900 euros, it is cheaper than the iPhone 14.
It remains to be seen whether more is always a good thing, but with 200 megapixels (MP) the Motorola Edge 30 Ultra has the main camera with the highest resolution currently in the industry, according to the manufacturer. Motorola’s new smartphone flagship is also better equipped than most of its competitors, but at 900 euros it costs even less than Apple’s iPhone 14.
So that the 200 megapixels of the optically stabilized wide-angle camera (aperture f/1.9) can deliver correspondingly good images, Motorola distributes them on a 1/1.22-inch sensor. Normally, four of the 0.64 micrometer (µm) pixels are combined for optimized light output. This means that the recordings then have a resolution of 50 MP.
The ultra wide-angle camera (f/2.2) of the Edge 30 Ultra also has a high resolution of 50 MP. The telephoto camera with 12 MP and only twice the optical magnification is more of a normal one, but it should be used primarily for portraits. With an aperture of f/1.6 and 1.22 µm pixels, it is probably also very well suited for this. Motorola also packs a punch at the front, the front camera (f/2.2) has a resolution of 60 MP.
The 6.67-inch pOLED display with integrated fingerprint sensor offers a refresh rate of up to 144 Hertz, but with a pixel density of 394 ppi it is not quite as sharp as other high-end panels. Qualcomm’s current top chip, which can access 12 gigabytes (GB) of RAM, works underneath it with the Snapdragon 8 (1st gen.). The internal flash memory (UFS 3.1) is 256 GB.
The battery has a reasonable capacity of 4610 milliampere hours (mAh). It is unusual that it can be charged with 125 watts. According to Motorola, seven minutes on the power adapter is enough for a whole day’s runtime. The Edge 30 Ultra can also be refueled very quickly inductively with 50 watts.
A special feature are the edges of the smartphone, because they can light up in five different colors. This shows notifications, incoming calls and alarms.
In order to make the price of 900 euros possible, Motorola also has to save in one place or another. The device is only officially protected against dripping water according to IP52. It may be able to withstand more, but appropriate licensing costs a relatively large amount of money, according to “Nextpit” around $30 per device.
The Motorola Edge 30 Ultra comes with Android 12 and will receive two more updates to the operating system after the upcoming update to version 13. There are also four years of security patches.
