Motorola takes on the Pixel 6a with a 144 Hz mid-range phone

Enlarge (credit: Motorola)

Motorola, somehow the #3 smartphone manufacturer in the US after Apple and Samsung, is taking on the Pixel 6a. The company announced the Moto Edge 2022 (not to be confused with the $1,000 Edge+), and at $500, the mid-ranger is going right up against Google's latest phone. The two companies are definitely taking different approaches to the ~$500 price tag.

Motorola is throwing most of its budget at an eye-popping 144 Hz, 6.6-inch, 2400×1080 display, which is a powerful spec-sheet line item versus the lowly 60 Hz display in the Pixel 6a. The SoC is the brand-new MediaTek Demensity 1050, and the phone has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, an in-screen fingerprint reader, a 5000 mAh battery, and 30 W charging.

That MediaTek SoC is an interesting choice. It's a 6 nm chip with two ARM Cortex A78 CPUs and six Cortex A55 CPUs, so it's not going to set the world on fire. It's not out yet, but pre-release Geekbench tests turned in a score of 2142, which makes it quite a bit slower than the Pixel 6a's flagship-class Google Tensor SoC (around ~2850 points). Putting aside the issue of whether you even want a 144 Hz display in a budget phone, is this Mediatek SoC able to render Android at a stable 144 FPS? Motorola is no stranger to negating its fast displays with underpowered SoCs, so this should be a major concern if you view 144 Hz as a selling point.

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