The Motorola Edge 30 Neo has a strong screen but struggles in other areas.
Motorola Edge 30 Neo: Two-minute review
The Motorola Edge 30 Neo is the baby of the Edge 30 family. It’s a fairly petite and light phone that does not cost a fortune and has some great everyday ease of use features like super-fast charging.
However, compare it to its siblings, the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion and Motorola Edge 30 Ultra, and you have to conclude a lot of the most interesting stuff has been snipped out. The Motorola Edge 30 Neo loses the higher-end build elements, the true high-end camera hardware, and a processor powerful enough to coast through high-end games.
Display quality is the Motorola Edge 30 Neo’s main strength. The P-OLED panel has exceptional outdoor visibility and, as usual, an OLED panel leads to a punchy and colorful appearance.
That is worth some kudos points, but the Motorola Edge 30 Neo can’t compete elsewhere with some of the ultra-aggressive phones available for similar money, like the OnePlus Nord 2T, Nothing Phone 1, and Google Pixel 6a.
Those phones take much better low-light photos, play 3D games at higher frame rates, have classier body designs, and capture far higher-quality video.
When you take the high-quality screen away, the Motorola Edge 30 Neo doesn’t actually have all that much going for it in this crowd. However, it still holds real appeal for the less techy phone user.Motorola Edge 30 Neo review: price and availability
Launched in September 2022
Cost £349 / AU$599 (around $375) at launch
Now reduced to £299.99 in the UK
The Motorola Edge 30 Neo was announced as part of the second wave of Edge 30 phones of 2022, in September 2022, alongside the Edge 30 Ultra and Edge 30 Fusion.
It launched for £349 / AU$599, which is roughly equivalent to $375 in the US, although at the time of review the phone was not officially on sale in the US. Since launch, the phone has dropped in price in the UK, with the Motorola Edge 30 Neo being widely available for £299.99.Motorola Edge 30 Neo review: specsMotorola Edge 30 Neo review: design
Funky Pantone color panel
Fairly petite plastic body
Very basic IP52 water resistance
Successful phone designs have to seem deliberate, each part chosen carefully. You can do this with a very distinctive ‘look’, as in the Google Pixel 7 or Samsung Galaxy S23. Or you can use high-end materials like curved glass.
Motorola has instead evoked the mighty color company Pantone, putting a virtual swatch of one of the company’s colors on the back of the purple model. The message: this isn’t just a color, it’s a Pantone-certified color. There are a few different options available, namely Very Peri, Ice Palace, Black Onyx, and Aqua Foam, and it’s the first of those that we used for this review.
“Very Peri helps us to embrace this altered landscape of possibilities, opening us up to a new vision as we rewrite our lives,” says Pantone, which calls Very Peri Color of the Year 2022.
Sure thing. A lovely purple it is too, but the reason for the figurative medal on the back of the Very Peri model is partly to distract from the Motorola Edge 30 Neo’s prosaic build.
Its back and sides are plastic, lacking the high-end feel of the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion and Edge 30 Ultra. The screen covering is glass, of course, but Motorola does not specify it as Gorilla Glass, which usually means it uses a cheaper form of toughened glass from another brand.
The purple is nice, the lightly sparkly finish on the plastic rear looks good. And, from what we can tell from online images, the other green, white and black shades look good too. But this is actually one of the less impressively-built phones in this class. Vivo, OnePlus, Google and Nothing all offer at least some use of glass or aluminum outside of the display panel at this level.
However, the Motorola Edge 30 Neo is at least light and pocketable. It weighs just 155g, and is around 7.8mm thick. Thin and light. Motorola also includes a slim snap-on case in the box, rather than the much floppier silicone kind it usually bundles with its phones.
The Motorola Edge 30 Neo has no memory card slot or headphone jack, because it’s self-consciously not a true budget model. And it also has an in-screen fingerprint sensor, not the side-mounted kind used in most cheaper Motorolas.
This is one of the slowest in-screen fingerprint sensors we’ve used recently though. While that means it takes maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of a second to work, it’s still noticeable. And it is also more picky about the position of your finger than others, sometimes requiring a concerted press – presumably to ensure the thumb/finger is fully covering the pad area.
Motorola says the Neo is water resistant to IP52, a form of protection so weak you should treat it like it has no water resistance rating at all. Finally, the Motorola Edge 30 Neo has stereo speakers, and they are fairly loud and tonally solid, although the highest frequencies can get a little sharp when maxed. Still, a decent array.Motorola Edge 30 Neo review: display
Brilliantly bright screen
Good color
120Hz OLED delivers smoothness and excellent contrast
The Motorola Edge 30 Neo’s design may seem better from afar than in your hand, but the screen is an unexpected smash. It’s a petite 6.28-inch P-OLED panel with class-leading outdoor visibility.
Indoors the screen is capped to around 475 nits of brightness, enough to make the Motorola Edge 30 Neo slightly painful to look at in a dimly lit room. Outdoors on a sunny day it will hit up to 923 nits, which is extremely high for a lower mid-range phone – for almost any Android phone, actually, despite so many manufacturers claiming their screens are capable off 1,300-nit brightness.
