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As much as you want to avoid it, the holiday season is upon us. This means that you have to start thinking about presents to get for your loved ones. There are a ton of different devices that you can buy for the tech-savvy person in your life. However, the issue is that there are so many options out there. Two options are the Motorola Moto Edge 2023 and the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE. These are fantastic phones, and they will make great gifts.
However, which one should you choose? Which one will give that special someone the best experience to kick off the New Year? Well, that’s what I’m here to explain. I personally tested and reviewed both of these devices, and I’m going to give you my honest opinion of which one you should buy.
I’ll be going over key aspects of each device including the display, build quality, camera, speaker quality, performance, gaming performance, battery performance and software. Maybe you’ll find one device objectively better than the other; maybe it’s a toss up and you just wanted to know a little bit more about each device before making your decision. In any case, you’re going to hear the good, the bad, and everything in between. So, without further ado, let’s dive into this comparison!
Moto Edge 2023 vs. Galaxy S23 FE: Design and build quality
Starting off with the very first impression that you get from these phones, it’s clear that Motorola and Samsung went in completely different directions with the designs. Samsung went for a very over-the-top, premium, and flashy design. The outside of the phone is clad in reflective glass. Everything is accented with bright metal from the frame to the camera package. This is the kind of phone that’s meant to stand out. It blends flashy materials with a simple design. Also, it’s meant to look just like its more premium counterparts.
Where the Galaxy focuses on flashy flamboyance, Motorola focuses on understated elegance. The phone is covered in a rubbery leathery material. In my review, I said it looks like the smartphone equivalent of James Bond; a dashing, debonair, business suit-clad spy. It’s like a phone wearing an Italian suit.
In terms of thickness, the Galaxy phone is a behemoth compared to the Motorola. The S23 FE is extremely thick and sits heavily in the hand. It’s one of the thickest phones that I’ve ever reviewed. As for the Moto edge 2023, this phone is incredibly thin. Think about phones like the Galaxy S6 from back in the day; back when there was a race to make phones as thin as possible. It’s razor thin by phone standards.
Build quality
While the Motorola phone is very thin, it does not mean that it’s poorly built. Picking it up, I didn’t get the sense that it was thin, I got the sense that it was dense. Everything is tightly packed so it still feels like you’re holding a solid device. All the components used to make the phone are high quality. The frame is made of metal, the glass is sturdy and heavy, and the back material feels nice and high-quality. While paper-thin, it does not mean that Motorola skimped on the materials.
That’s not to say that the Galaxy S23 FE is a slouch either. It doesn’t feel quite as dense as the Motorola handset, but it uses premium materials like sturdy glass and a metal frame. These give it an extremely premium feel in the hand. Also, it sits very heavily in the hand, letting you know that you are holding a well-built phone that will last you a while.
Just like with the designs, the companies focused on two completely different angles for the build quality. For Samsung, the bigger the better. This is a huge phone, and it’s meant to feel big and heavy to give you that security. With Motorola, less is more. It has a thin design that sits comfortably in the pocket but still feels like a quality solid piece of technology.
Moto Edge 2023 vs. Galaxy S23 FE: Display
When it comes to the displays between these two phones, I had a hard time comparing them. They’re both just so damn amazing! Okay, let’s get the obligatory technical details out of the way. Catch me if you heard this before: they come with OLED displays which mean more saturated colors, deep blacks, and better contrast; *yawn*.
Both of these phones use similar screen technologies, but it all comes down to the calibration between them. I expected the Galaxy S23 FE to deliver the punchiest colors. The screen on the Galaxy A53 5G from last year was incredibly packed with color. This year, I felt that Samsung toned the colors down just a bit. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of juice. However, I felt that they could have gone just a step further with the colors. There are points where the display felt just a tiny bit bland for Samsung’s standards.
However, the Moto Edge 2023 display took those extra steps and delivered an amazing balance between saturated and oversaturated. The colors are very juicy, bright, and warm. Everything I saw on this screen just jumped out at me. The Motorola Edge+ 2022 from last year didn’t really wow me with its colors. Sure, they were punchy at points, as per standard OLED performance, but I didn’t feel that the display itself was of high quality. That $1,000 phone’s display was beaten by the Galaxy A53’s display, and that phone was about half the price.
So, in terms of colors, I prefer the Moto Edge 2023’s display. It gave me a truly cinematic experience. Watching movies and shows was just more pleasant on this phone than with the Galaxy S23 FE. This wasn’t just because the display was more saturated, however. It also came to how the display handles them. They were saturated, but they were also very balanced, and there was a certain warmth to them that made them seem much more pleasant.
Brightness
Brightness is another important factor of a display, and this is another area where I struggled to compare these two phones. I feel like the peak brightness of both of these displays is about the same. They both boost their brightness when they’re in direct sunlight, and they brighten to the point where I can read everything on the screen perfectly fine. I think that when it comes to brightness, these phones are pretty much neck and neck.
Additional settings
Both displays have options for additional adjustments. You can adjust the color temperature in the overall color profile of the Motorola display, but Samsung takes it a bit further. You’re able to dial in the exact red, blue, and green values of the display along with the color temperature.
Overall, if you want a more colorful and punchy experience for watching your favorite movies, I will definitely go for the Motorola. Its display is big, bright, and beautiful. However, that’s not to say that the Galaxy’s display is a slouch by any means. You’re still going to get an incredibly colorful and pleasant experience.
Moto Edge 2023 vs. Galaxy S23 FE: Speakers
Moving on to the speaker quality of these two phones, there is a winner in my book. Both phones come with Incredible speakers with great bass, great focus on the highs, and an overall balanced sound. Also, both phones have a suite of adjustments that you can make to the sound along with Dolby Atmos integration.
One main difference between these phones is the fact that the Moto Edge 2023 has Dolby Atmos enabled by default, and there’s no way to disable it. That wasn’t really an issue for me, however.
So, when it comes to the actual speaker quality, both phones are amazing. But, which phone won? I give the title to the Motorola Edge 2023. While listening to the Galaxy’s speakers, everything sounded great, but I did wish that there was a bit more punch in the low end. Also, the vocals just did not have as much bite as I wanted. The singer’s voices tended to blend with the rest of the music for the most part.
In the case of the Moto Edge 2023, the company managed to find an astounding balance between the high and low end. While listening to music, everything sounded extremely balanced. The low end supported the high end perfectly, and the high end kept from being too loud and shrill. Additionally, the sound was so extremely detailed that I could hear extremely fine details in the instruments while listening to classical music. I could literally hear the texture of lower string instruments. Also, the voices sounded extremely crisp and clear and did not blend with the rest of the music.
Motorola blew me away with the speaker quality on this phone. The Galaxy S23 FE has incredible speakers, but I think that the Motorola Edge 2023 just took it a few steps further. Both phones have an incredible Suite of tools to adjust the sound. With all of the adjustments made, I still feel that the Motorola phone just did a better job at creating a little balanced sound.
Moto Edge 2023 vs. Galaxy S23 FE: Camera
So, while both phones performed admirably in this regard, there is one clear winner. I chalked this one up to one key aspect of the cameras, and it’s a pretty big one.
Overall, both cameras produced great pictures with nice contrast, solid exposure, and good details. I couldn’t really find a clear winner in any of these respects, because those are pretty subjective aspects of the camera experience. Not as much for the details, but I did find that both phones produced a similar level of detail with their cameras.
In terms of low light performance, both phones also did a great job, though I did feel that the Galaxy phone delivered more consistent results. Some of the low-light pictures from the Motorola phone turned out extremely blurry. However, that wasn’t too often.
So, which phone is the winner? Well, we haven’t talked about color reproduction yet. Samsung has long been the company known for boosting its colors to infinity and beyond. Its phones usually offer more color saturation than other phones. You can naturally assume that that’s the case with this comparison, but it’s not.
I have no idea what Motorola was thinking with this camera, but the colors were pushed far past what could be considered acceptable; they were overly cartoonish and punchy. It’s as if the phone took each picture, rendered them, and then boosted the saturation to 100% in Picsart. Each picture added so much more color than what the scene produced.
The sky had an impossibly blue tone that doesn’t occur in nature. Flowers almost seem to radiate, and even pictures of dull environments had a pop of color that changed the mood of the scene. I think that the Galaxy did a much better job with restraint. The pictures It produced were very well balanced in the color department. I tip my hat to the Galaxy S23 FE’s camera.
Moto Edge 2023 vs. Galaxy S23 FE: Performance
In terms of General performance, I feel that both phones did a great job. While using either phone, I did not experience any stutters or lag throughout the software. Any instances that did happen were few and far apart and negligible. Both phones glide in and out of apps smoothly with no hiccups. Also, both phones have snappy performance, and you will not have a bad time with any of them.
Gaming
Now, let’s talk about gaming. This is where the Galaxy S23 FE pulls ahead. The Motorola Edge 2023 is an admirable performer when it comes to playing most games. It was even able to hold its own pretty well with intense games such as Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. The performance was decent.
However, while Motorola was decent, Samsung was exceptional. Using the Moto Edge 2023, I was able to play these games at the highest graphical settings with an acceptable amount of stutter and drop frames. At worst, I was able to get around 30fps.
However, with the Galaxy S23 FE, I was able to pretty much get a consistent 60fps performance. The phone never slowed down when playing these graphically intensive games. So, if you’re more of a mobile gamer, then you will definitely appreciate the performance of the Galaxy S23 FE more.
However…
The Galaxy S23 has a pretty major problem when it comes to the heat performance. Using the Motorola phone, it definitely got warm. After playing Genshin Impact for a bit, I could feel the screen heating up a bit.
However, I was still able to enjoy my time playing it. In the case of the Galaxy S23 FE, this phone heated up immensely. After about five minutes of playing Genshin, it started heating up to the point where it became uncomfortable to hold. I chalk that up to the heating issues with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
Moto Edge 2023 vs. Galaxy S23 FE: Battery
In terms of battery life, both phones gave me admirable performance. Using both of these devices, I was able to get about a day and a half of battery life with moderate to light usage. I didn’t feel that any phone was exceptionally better or worse than each other. My usage consisted mostly of casual social media scrolling, a fair amount of video watching, a fair amount of gameplay, and a bit of camera use.
I would end the day with a good amount of battery power left in the tank. I’d say that the S23 FE will give me just a bit more juice at the end of the day. It’s negligible, however. The battery performance of these phones is pretty neck and neck, and you won’t have a bad time either way.
When it comes to charging speed, the Motorola Edge 2023 has a clear advantage. The Galaxy S23 FE caps out at 25W for charging, and it does not come with a charger in the box. However, the Moto Edge 2023 comes with an included 68W charger. This will charge the phone in just under an hour.
Yes, I know that faster charging speeds degrade the battery faster over time. However, you still have the option for faster charging with the Moto Edge 2023. It’s your choice to choose faster or slower charging to conserve battery longevity. However, having the option for faster charging is still a plus.
Moto Edge 2023 vs. Galaxy S23 FE: Software
This is an area where most casual Tech users might not be the most passionate. However, it’s still worth noting. Do you want a more vanilla Android experience, or do you want a more customized Android experience? Samsung’s One UI software is a heavily customized and skinned version of Android. This has Samsung’s optimizations in the software, and that gives it its own unique feature set.
Motorola has long kept pretty close to stock Android with its software. It’s basically stock Android with a few of Motorola’s specific features added. So, when it comes to the software, it all depends on whether or not you want an experience closer to what Google offers with its Pixel phones. If you want a more stock Android experience, then you may want to go with Motorola. However, if you want a more customized version of Android, then you will want to go with the Galaxy S23 FE.
Final Verdict
So, which one should you choose? Overall, I think that when it comes to objective departments, the Galaxy S23 FE takes the cake. Things like color reproduction with a camera, low light consistency, and performance are pretty objective, and these are areas where the Galaxy S23 FE grabs a victory from the Moto Edge 2023.
The Moto Edge won my heart when it came to the display, but that’s a very subjective matter. Also, I prefer the feeling in the hands of the Edge 2023, but that is also pretty subjective. I’d say the main objective victory that Motorola snagged was the speaker quality. The low-end performance was much better and the sound was more detailed with better vocals.
Overall, if you’re looking for a Christmas gift to buy that tech-savvy loved one of yours, then you may want to opt for the Galaxy S23 FE. It costs $599, just like the Moto Edge 2023. It’ll offer better gaming performance and a better camera experience.
However, that’s not to say that the Motorola Edge 2023 is a slouch at all. You can still expect an incredible experience with this phone. Also, if you’re a Motorola fan, and you are more familiar with the software, then you may want to opt for this phone, as it’s still an amazing device.