Personal Review of Motorola Edge 30 Pro (Very long, please avoid if you are busy)

So I bit the bullet and exchanged an unused old LCD phone (for very little price) and bought Moto Edge 30 Pro. I have now used it for 3 days to write a rather long personal review, a total of 6 observations.

Previously: I have used iQOO 7 Legend (12-256, SD888, 39k bought on the very first day of release) through the last year (along with an old iPhone 8 from 2017). I bought a Realme X7 Max (12-256, MTK1200, 23k on BBD or some other sale) for my mom which I have some experience in handling. And I had bought a Xiaomi Mi 11X (8-128, SD870, 20k on Diwali) which I eventually gave my cousin (in exchange of money, slightly less than buying price).

1 Performance: It's humanly impossible to separate performance of SD870-SD888-MTK1200-SD8G1. Just impossible. Except some artificial benchmarks. All apps look and behave similarly across the entire range of medium and high end Android smartphones, because they are designed to work on the lowest common denominator (like a Jio phone for example). Games, once their quality settings are set, look exactly the same across all phones for same settings. None of the SOCs mentioned shows lag, jitter etc.

2 Display (and Audio): Display refresh rate and brightness, Samsung's AMOLED, LG's pOLED etc are paper specs, as long as you keep Automatic Brightness switched on like a sane person and keep the refresh rate on Auto, all the phones (listed previously) with AMOLED looks great indoors, and thankfully, are visible outdoors. Of course you can burn your retina looking at #FFFFFF on your phone at full brightness or buy light meters (Luxmeters) to separate things like some YouTube tech reviewers, but otherwise, sadly enough, your human eyes will betray you. Watching Netflix (with 199 plan)/Hotstar/Prime Video was similar across phones, may be if I had higher priced plans for Netflix, I could see some difference, but sadly, I don't. I used noise cancelling TWS with all phones, can't say anything about audio quality. I could hear phone rings on all phones across rooms without a problem. 

3 Camera: Camera quality especially Pixel count is long established as a complete myth, but your eyes can be tricked to make you believe some photo quality is better than others: a) higher brightness, b) slightly increased contrast, c) slightly upped sharpness, d) increased color saturation, e) brightening areas in pic which are in relative darkness (like shadow), this is know as HDR, f) higher details, g) lower noise, etc. Now all of these can be achieved by a combination of good camera optics and software. Google, at least since their launch of first Pixel phone in 2016, believes in computational photography and doing tricks in post-processing by taking quick successions of as many as 50 underexposed pics and merging them with depth information coming from artificial intelligence and slight hand shake. They have been charting top ranks in DXOmark with pretty passable optics (and only one camera) with this strategy. So while better optical system is desirable, one can get away with better tuning and software and one of the hundreds of GCam apps with correct config file (it is a chore and a very cumbersome exercise to find right app version and even more difficult to find a suitable config file) can do this for you. Having said that, Realme X7 Max's Sony IMX682 is better than iQOO 7 Legend's Sony IMX598 which in turn is better than Moto Edge 30 Pro's Omnivision OV50A40. This is after using best available GCam app and config from XDAdevelopers.

4 Software: When you work on a laptop and you have 20 applications open all at the same time and all are working at the same time and you can switch to one of your 80 tabs open on Chrome without Chrome refreshing the page is not something how phones (and even Android tablets) work. Phone software, the custom ROM/skin on top of Android OS is trying to balance at least 4-5 different things at any point in time a) save battery, b) keep SOC cool (phones have small footprint, no heat vent and no fans), c) ensure smooth performance by keeping RAM available (historically phones had much less RAM than PCs), d) keep apps that you are actively using (like music, picture in picture videos, note etc) in the memory even when they go to the background, e) keep running highest priority services that is required to keep the phone functioning (the most critical being the kernel, then network, home app, and hundreds of other absolutely essential services), etc. So how your phone software works depends upon how manufacturers implemented their custom ROM, if they have created unnecessary services running in the background (for example, just Facebook is three services Meta App Manager, Meta App Installer, Meta Services), antivirus, memory and other monitoring services, unnecessary animations, continuous weather update, lock screen service, tracking your physical activity and hundreds of other services, which they have switched on in your phone without your express permission, your phone will be slower and draining more battery. Even things like face unlock, tap to lock/unlock, raise to wake/flip to silent requires critical background processes like camera to be always on stand by and the entire screen scanning for touch even when it is off, gyroscope data etc. The least tinkering on the original OS is thus mostly better, you'd not get many fancy services, but you trust Google to do a better balancing with essential services and background apps. In this scale, Moto Edge 30 Pro is miles ahead of iQOO 7 Legend and Realme X7 Max, both of which have the same custom ROM with slightly altered skin and which in turn is so far ahead of Mi 11X that standing at where Edge 30 Pro is Mi 11X looks like a point in the distant horizon.

5 Heating: SD870 does not heat all, MTK1200 heats slightly, SD888 makes things warm, SD8G1 is toasty. After 30 minutes of gaming, you'd feel like resting SD8G1 because you don't want it to burst at your beautiful face. The worst part is heating is palpable when capturing videos. And while charging, it is warm like a comforting casserole. It is not just an inconvenience, heating while charging will scare you. So much that I am charging Edge 30 Pro using a 18W PD charger instead of 68W charger that came with it. Honest to God. 

6. Battery and Charging: Mi 11X lasts a long time charged up to 80-85% (very surprising given how awful the custom OS is), easily a day and a half. With Realme X7 Max, you are confident taking the 80-85% charged phone with you, it will not betray you. With iQOO 7 Legend, it's a hit or a miss, you are definitely packing your charger if you have a long day at work. Moto Edge 30 Pro is definitely going to need a charger, the battery usage graph drops almost vertically while playing a game. I don't have any confidence that it would last through a day. All these with same apps installed and same usage pattern which is very basic, online retail, some social media, some communication, phone-message, 30 minutes gaming, banking and other finance apps across all phones. Mi 11X with 33W charging is slow (but not like iPhone 8's 20W charging, which is really slow), Realme, iQOO and Moto all have 67W odd charging which is fastest in iQOO. As I said, I switched to a 18W PD charger for Moto and it is good enough, pretty close to Mi 11X. 

Conclusion: If you have a phone with has SD865-SD870-SD888-Dimensity1200 or higher with an FHD AMOLED display with 90 Hz or higher refresh rate, you should not upgrade right now to any phone (Moto or othwewise). You'd not see any difference no matter however hard you try. If you are getting excited about improved camera in newer phones, try installing correct GCam in your existing phone instead. If battery life of your current phone is depleted, a newer phone (with SD888/SDG1) will do even worse job than your existing phone, keep only necessary softwares, disable Facebook/Instagram and such rogue processes, tinker with background data access/background battery usage of some less important apps, turn on power saving (which stops background app refresh) when you are out or have a long day without access to a charging station. Do not lust over 120W, 240W, or 5KW charging, you do not want a ticking bomb in your physical proximity and 10 minutes saved in charging does not matter, . 

Unwarranted and Unnecessary Advice: Next time while buying a phone, consider buying an iPhone, even if they are more expensive, in the long run, you'd be happier than everyone else who have Android phones stuck at the same OS version it came with and you have the latest OS immediately after Apple has ended their presentation. My 2017 iPhone 8 is on iOS16 (with developer profile downloaded from betaprofiles.com). I don't think Google cares similarly about their Pixel lineup or provide OS updates for years, but then, I am not sure. Sorry for this advice, you may kick my @ ss for this paragraph, I'd understand. Sorry.