Motorola Edge 60 Fusion: A few thoughtful features make it stand out

The Edge 60 Fusion starts at ₹22,999 and features an IP69 ingress protection rating, as well as MIL-STD-810H standard testing for enhanced durability. This time around, there is a significantly improved OLED display (with Gorilla Glass 7 protection), a larger battery capacity, increased storage, a microSD slot (for those who still use it), a refreshed chipset, and faux vegan leather finishes in three different Pantone colours; Slipstream, Amazonite and Zephyr.

Let's talk design and display

Let’s start with the design and its vegan leather finish. The design doesn’t veer too much from its predecessor. The device features a soft-touch vegan leather back, a thin plastic side frame, a curved front panel, and a small, minimalist camera island that doesn’t protrude significantly. Thanks to a larger battery, the smartphone is slightly thicker, but the difference isn’t noticeable in day-to-day usage.

The Edge 60 Fusion comes in at 180g light and 8.2mm thick. In fact, it’s lighter and thinner than the recently launched Nothing Phone (3a). It now boasts a military-grade certification for durability, as well as IP68 and IP69 ratings for water and dust resistance. In this price segment, it’s one of the most durable smartphones available. The bezels are slim, and there’s just the Motorola logo at the centre of the back panel. The handset offers a good in-hand feel, with one-handed usage being very much achievable. The only quibble I’d have is that the in-display fingerprint scanner is placed too low for convenience.

Also read: This summer, bond with your kids in a no-Wi-Fi getaway

The 6.7-inch pOLED panel is identical to its predecessor but offers a higher 1.5K (1220x2712p) resolution and a significantly improved peak brightness of 4,500 nits, one of the highest in this price segment. The refresh rate has been reduced from 144Hz to 120Hz, but for daily usage, the latter is more than sufficient. Curved displays may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they do add to the premium feel of the device. The colours are vivid, the text is crisp, and the contrast ratio is excellent.

Couple this display with stereo speakers (with Dolby Atmos), and you have a winner in the segment. Outdoor usage is comfortable, and you needn’t squint, thanks to 1400 nits high-brightness mode. The display does exhibit a fair amount of reflections and the viewing angles aren’t the best (just in case you want to watch the latest IPL match with your co-passenger).

It's worth noting that the display is equipped with ‘wet touch technology’. It works even when used with wet fingers.

Under the hood

The smartphone has transitioned from Qualcomm to MediaTek. The Edge 60 Fusion is powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 7400 processor, with up to 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB of USFS 2.2 storage. While the smartphone excels in day-to-day tasks, it stumbles while gaming. Motorola just hasn’t optimised the chipset for gaming. Many games are locked at 60 FPS, while similarly priced smartphones can achieve 90 or even 120 FPS. Thankfully, the smartphone never gets too hot to handle.

Multitasking is handled with aplomb, and if you’re a camera enthusiast, you’re in luck. The smartphone features a microSD slot, allowing for storage expansion of up to 1TB. This is rare in the mid-range phone, and I’m glad Motorola has kept the flag flying high.

Battery life is the Edge 60 Fusion’s strongest suit, as the larger 5,500mAh battery shines. I easily got around 8 hours of screen-on-time with my medium-to-heavy usage pattern, and I didn’t have to charge the smartphone until lunch on day two. With the 68W fast charger (included in the box), the smartphone can be juiced from 0-100 percent in approximately 44 minutes.

Motorola includes a 68w fast charger in the box, allowing you to charge the Edge 60 Fusion from 0-100 percent in approximately 48 minutes.

Less than perfect

Yes, even after praising the smartphone extensively, there are things I didn’t like about it, and I hope they will be improved in next year’s successor.

Those stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos are merely good on paper. It’s acceptable to watch an IPL match with 60 percent volume. Anything above that, or anything with bass and heavy vocals, will get distorted.

The cameras are truly a mixed bag. The camera setup is nearly identical to that of its predecessor. There is a 50MP (Sony LYT-700C) primary lens. A 13MP ultrawide lens flanks it. The device features a 32MP front-facing camera. This time around, Motorola has introduced a 3-in-1 ambient light sensor to help with exposure and improve white balance.

The problem is not much the camera hardware and the processing. It’s with the buggy camera app. It’s laggy, unresponsive, and crashes at times. The experience is far from smooth, but something that can be easily fixed with a software update. With the Edge Fusion 60’s primary camera, you get photos with punchy and vibrant colours, a good amount of sharpness and good details. It’s the post-processing that can oversharpen the image a tad too much.

 

Processing takes a little longer than you’d expect. There are Natural and Enhanced styles of processing. With Natural processing, white balance is mostly fine. Enhanced is essentially unusable, mainly because it takes too long to process and offers no meaningful improvements.

The ultrawide is good. It has a narrower dynamic range, and the photos are sharp and vibrant, similar to those from the primary camera. I used the ultrawide a lot more than I thought I would, and I came away impressed.

During low-light photography, I noticed that the noise was under control, but the details were missing. There’s a lot of oversharpening here, and it feels like Motorola isn’t optimising the software to take full advantage of the sensor at hand.

Portrait mode shots are decent, with good edge detection (though not perfect) when shooting in daylight. Selfies are acceptable for sharing on social media, but videos appear off because of the colour reproduction (Motorola uses the ancient Rec.601 colour space).

Software is something I haven’t touched upon because it's nothing to write home about. Hello UI (based on Android 15) offers good customisation and theming options, along with a sprinkling of AI features, but it needs a smoother experience to succeed in this space truly. Bloatware is still present in some places, although it has considerably reduced from previous versions. While most AI features are standard and present across Android smartphones, there is one notable exception: Catch Me Up, a Motorola exclusive that has the potential to be useful. It’s there to provide a summary of all the notifications you may have missed but doesn’t discuss the notifications you’ve dismissed. Then there’s Pay Attention, Remember This, Canvas AI and more.

Motorola has promised three years of OS updates and four years of security patches.

Verdict

There’s the Poco X7 Pro, with its superior performance, which is the Edge 60 Fusion’s biggest competition. The only other alternative I can think of is the Nothing Phone (3a), which comes with a unique design and a dedicated telephoto camera.

Also read: Nothing Phone 3, 3a review

Still, at ₹22,999, the Edge 60 Fusion has all the makings of a solid choice for a good budget smartphone. There’s the premium build (with IP68+IP69 ratings), excellent battery life, AI chops, and a base variant that comes with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. The pOLED display is bright and vibrant with sharp text, and the camera is good (barring the video quality) for this price segment. Performance is good, and only gamers should look elsewhere.

Motorola’s Edge 60 Fusion is a solid all-rounder, and as they say, it just gets the job done. It’s a no-frills smartphone with a premium design, smooth experience, and reliable battery life.