Motorola Edge 50 Ultra: The high-end smartphone finally features an optical zoom camera

The top-of-the-range models from Motorola's Edge series always try to be slightly more affordable flagships in order to attract a wider audience. In the past, this also meant making a few compromises. For example, they didn't use to have an optical zoom camera or as extensive storage options.

The Motorola Edge 50 Ultra also doesn't have that many storage options. In Europe, there is only one variant on offer, but what an offer it is: 1 TB storage and 16 GB RAM should serve you well for ages. Even so, the Edge 50 Ultra can be had for around US$1,000.

Motorola has also thought of a periscope zoom camera this time, resulting in an extremely flexible camera system which can zoom from ultra-wide angle to up to 100x. Of course, its high zoom levels are purely software calculations, but this feature is great to use in lieu of a pair of binoculars. We generally like its photo quality a lot—even if we noted some minor flaws such as chromatic aberrations or issues depicting text in our night-time studio setting.

A few things have been done to save money, for example, you can't record 8K video and several AI functions have been axed. This year, Motorola hasn't installed the absolute top-of-the-range SoC (Snapdragon 8 Gen 3)—instead, it has gone for the slightly slimmed-down Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. It has a considerably weaker graphics unit in particular, but it should still be more than enough to run the vast majority of mobile games at 60fps.

Its battery is a little on the small side, too, but the phone's runtimes are still okay. And as a result, the phone is quite lightweight and features a slim silhouette. Its modern connectivity including WiFi 7 and UWB support is also impressive, as is its super-fast USB-C port that offers transfer speeds of up to 10 GBit/s.

If you would like to learn more about the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra, then we would recommend taking a look at our detailed review, which features a wide variety of test results.