Motorola challenges Pixel 6a with 144Hz mid-range phone

Motorola, somehow ranked third among U.S. smartphone makers behind Apple and Samsung, is battling the Pixel 6a. The company has announced the Moto Edge 2022 (not to be confused with the $1000 Edge+), and at $500 the average phone goes right up against Google’s latest phone. The two companies definitely have different approaches to the $500 price tag.

Motorola spends the bulk of its budget on a mind-blowing 6.6-inch 144Hz, 2400×1080 display, which is a powerful spec item compared to the modest 60Hz display in the Pixel 6a. The SoC is a brand new MediaTek Demensity 1050, the phone has 8GB RAM, 256GB storage, an in-screen fingerprint scanner, a 5000mAh battery and 30W charging.

This MediaTek SoC is an interesting choice. It’s a 6nm chip with two ARM Cortex A78 and six Cortex A55 processors so it won’t set the world on fire. It’s not out yet, but Geekbench pre-tests scored 2142, making it slightly slower than Google’s flagship Pixel 6a Tensor SoC (around 2850). Leaving aside the question of whether you need a 144Hz display in a budget phone, can this Mediatek SoC display Android at a solid 144fps? Motorola is no stranger to dropping its fast displays with low-powered SoCs, so this should be a major concern if you’re considering 144Hz as a selling point.

Another “do you really want this in a mid-range phone?”the consideration is to enable 5G mmWave support. mmWave was heavily promoted by carriers at the start of the 5G era in 2018, but four years have passed and short range and finicky signal characteristics make mmWave deployment prohibitively expensive. Most carriers have less than 1 percent mmWave coverage and claim that mmWave will never be widely adopted. MmWave isn’t just a dead end technology, it’s also expensive to pack into a smartphone, and extra antennas (at least from Qualcomm) raise the handset’s MSRP from $50 to $100. And poor MediaTek: Demensity 1050 announced in May is the first in the company’s historyChipset compatible with mmWave. I am sure that many years ago, when development began, this should have been a triumphant achievement.

Luckily, the phone has NFC and you get Wi-Fi 6E support. There’s no significant water resistance, which is a bummer. The phone has three rear cameras: a 50MP main camera, a 13MP ultra-wide angle camera, and a 2MP macro/depth camera. It also ships with Android 12, and while Motorola has promised three years of OS updates and four years of bimonthly security updates, the company’s history suggests that these updates will arrive very slowly.

The phone will be available soon on T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon in the US. There will also be an unlocked version on Best Buy and Amazon, although Motorola says the $499 price will eventually be bumped up to $599.