Sep 10, 20224 min read

Motorola Edge 30 Ultra preview: Motorola enters the flagship battle stronger than ever

For many years now, Motorola has either been avoiding the flagship phones scene completely, or faint-heartedly dipping its toes and failing to make a noticeable dent. It seems, though, that there is a new light in the tunnel — the Motorola Edge 30 Ultra!

Unlike the Edge Plus (2022), the Edge 30 Ultra has much more going for it when it comes to justifying its premium price tag that starts at 899.99 euros. From a brand new design that gives the phone a slick and smart look, to high-end specs making it work as a 2022 flagship should.

After taking the Edge 30 Ultra for a quick spin during Motorola’s announcement event in Milan, we have quite a bit to say about Motorola’s latest flagship entry. So, let’s dive in together in this hands-on experience and see what this Motorola gem has in store for us!

Motorola Edge 30 Ultra Design & Colors

Motorola’s phones throughout the last few years have looked, well, just about alright, but they seldom had an eye-catching design. The Edge 30 Ultra, however, is here to change that.

Motorola Edge 30 Ultra color options:

Interstellar Black
Starlight White

Both color options look gorgeous, especially when hit by direct light under certain angles, making the phone shimmer like a piece of jewelry. Most of the time, though, the glass finish on the phone’s back appears as soft matte, so this eye-catching effect is not always in your face making it more subtle in its design.

Flipping the Edge 30 Ultra on its front side, you will find a large near-bezelless 6.67" curved-edge display, protected with Gorilla Glass 5 and covered with a fingerprint-resistant coating. In the top center of this beautiful screen, you have the familiar punch-hole cut out for the selfie camera.

The frame that is sandwiched between the beautiful front and back of the phone is made out of sand-blasted aluminum, and houses the volume and power buttons that are situated on the right side. All buttons feel tactile and amazing to click.

One point to make here, however, is due its amazing thin profile and the curved-edge display, the Edge 30 Ultra feels a bit sharp when you wrap your hand around it. This is only natural with a design like this, though, and it really depends on your personal preference whether it is an issue or not.

Motorola Edge 30 Ultra Display

As long as you don’t mind curved displays, then the 2400 x 1080 resolution pOLED display on the Edge 30 Ultra would probably satisfy your eyes. It comes with 144Hz refresh rate, HDR10+ certification, and 1250 nits peak brightness. And yes, it looks just as good as it sounds in real life too.

The HDR10+ certification is of some importance here, as it offers a degree of reassurance for the display’s color accuracy, color range, brightness, and contrast.

Making use of the extremely curved edges of the display, Motorola has added a feature for the edges to light up in one of five different colors, whenever you get notifications and the phone is lying with the screen facing down. Admittedly, this looks cool, especially in a dark environment. That being said, we still wouldn’t recommend placing your phone on its display unless it is on a soft surface.

Motorola Edge 30 Ultra Camera

Yet another front in which the Edge 30 Ultra vastly improves on is its camera system. With this Motorola flagship you get a 200MP main camera (industry first), 50MP ultra-wide, 12MP Portrait snapper (2x telephoto), and a whopping 60MP selfie shooter on the front! We are especially glad to see that there is no 2MP depth sensor on such a premium device, like we saw with the Edge Plus (2022).

The main 200MP camera can capture more light by combining 16 pixels (also called pixel binning) into one with the size of 2.56μm, which Motorola claims results in sharp and bright images even in dark conditions. Additionally, you get optical image stabilization (OIS) with the main camera sensor.

The 200MP sensor sitting behind the main camera also contributes to the Edge 30 Ultra’s ability to shoot 8K video and 4K HDR+ video, correlating perfectly with the phone’s support for HDR10+ content.

Moreover, the 50MP ultra-wide snapper can also function as a macro camera using the built-in Macro Vision mode, allowing you to go as close as 3cm to your subject. From our experience during the hands-on, however, we weren’t completely convinced about the overall image quality while shooting macro images, so we can’t wait to delve into that mode deeper during our review.

Motorola has also upgraded the portrait mode with the Edge 30 Ultra — you can now adjust the focal length and swap between wide (35mm), standard (50mm), or close up (85mm), to better frame your subject.

Keep in mind, though, that unlike the main camera, none of the others are equipped with OIS.

Motorola Edge 30 Ultra Performance

The Edge 30 Ultra comes with the latest and greatest chipset from Qualcomm — the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Motorola states that with this chip you get 10% better cpu performance and 30% more power efficiency.

You can get the Motorola Edge 30 Ultra in three different RAM/storage options:

8/128GB
12/256GB
12/512GB

Navigating the UI you can definitely feel how fast it is thanks to these top-notch specs, as we found out during our little time with the device. We will give you a much fuller picture, though, when we put the Edge 30 Ultra through our benchmarks during our review, so stay tuned for that.

Motorola Edge 30 Ultra Software

The Edge 30 Ultra comes with Android 12 straight out of the box, and you get 3 years of major software updates, and 4 years of security patches. This is probably the one place where we felt Motorola could have done better, as this is the bare minimum a 2022 premium phone should get.

Motorola Edge 30 Ultra Battery and Charging

One of the more outstanding features of the Edge 30 Ultra is its amazing charging speeds, both wired and wirelessly. You get a maximum of 125W fast charging via the USB-C port at the bottom of the phone, 50W wireless charging, as well as 10W reverse wireless charging.

According to Motorola’s tests, using the TurboPower 125W charger that’s included in the Edge 30 Ultra’s box, you can get power for the day in as little as 7 minutes of charging. As for the battery itself, it has a capacity of 4610mAh.