Motorola Edge 60 Fusion review: A midranger that misses the mark

Motorola has been a known quantity in the budget-friendly smartphone for as long as I can remember. If you're strapped for cash, the G-Series is as close to a going concern as these things get. It ain't flashy, but it'll get the job done.

It's little shock that the brand has looked to use that success as a springboard to move up into the more expensive end of the market. That's usually how these things go. What's more, last year's Motorola Edge 50 Fusion was a standout success on that front. It was a thrifty device that made smart use of the opportunities presented by modern trends in the flagship space.

The inevitable follow-up tries to capitalise on this format but ends up complicating the story in the worst possible way.

It'd be pretty easy to mix up this year's Motorola Edge 60 Fusion for its predecessor. The biggest differences here are the easiest to miss. That's not to say there aren't any noteworthy upgrades, though. The newer handset comes with a smaller 6.67-inch display with a slightly lower 120Hz refresh rate and a higher 1.5K resolution.

All told, this tinkering didn't exactly add up to a significant difference in the overall experience offered by the display found on last year's Motorola Edge 50 Fusion. Sure, the screen on this year's device is a little sharper than I remember, but it's also smaller, so it feels like these changes largely come out in the wash.

Fortunately, the gains on the durability front are easier to grasp. The front of the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 7i protection and the rest is covered by an IP68/IP69 rating for water and dust damage. The former offers 1 meter of drop protection. The latter covers dust and other solid particles, high-pressure water jets as well as liquid immersion of up to 1 meter.

Even if the overall form-factor and feel aren't a huge departure from what came before it, the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion is lightweight to hold and handle. That's not a bad thing, but the likable design doesn't really do much to offset the asking price involved. Where the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion felt like a steal at $599, the follow-up can't help but pale in comparison at $699.

There are a few other familiar bells and whistles to be found in the hardware here, such as a vegan leather back, an in-display fingerprint sensor, and Dolby Atmos stereo speakers. These are welcome, but largely what you'd expect at this point.

Where Motorola's latest mid-range does differ is that it comes with a bagful of AI-powered tricks. You can tap twice on the back of the device to summon moto AI. Once you've done so, Motorola's take on things like Gemini, Siri and Galaxy AI offers up a number of familiar functions with fresh names. You can get it to record and transcribe conversations, offer notification summaries, create playlists, generate images and create image-based reminders with additional context.

I'll have more to say on this later, but safe to say that the one area where the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion is most visually different from its predecessors is the rear camera setup. There's a 32MP selfie shooter on the front. On the back, it features a triple-lens rear camera that combines a 50MP main lens and a 13MP ultrawide lens. 

At a glance, that setup looks more advanced than its predecessor. In reality, it's a match to the one found on last year's Motorola Edge 50 Fusion. As such, the results that the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion's camera fall afoul of the same issues I encountered with its predecessor.

Daylight snaps looked sharp enough, but as soon as any low-light or movement entered the picture then the quality of the images taken began to vary for the worse. If camera quality matters to you, then you're unlikely to regret up-selling yourself to something like the Pixel 9a.

Under the hood, the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 processor, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 5200mAh battery. On paper, it's hard to see where that formula could go all that wrong.

For the most part, Motorola's less modest mid-ranger ran fast and smoothly. Multitasking wasn't an issue nor did the device have any issues with more graphically-intensive games like League of Legends: Wild Rift, Diablo Immortal and Zenless Zone Zero.

However, as opposed to last year's Motorola Edge 50 Fusion and the many other budget phones I've reviewed by the brand in the past, the software setup you get out of the box with the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion leaves a lot to be desired.

There's a noticeable amount of bloatware that comes preinstalled with the handset, from the Bookings.com app to a handful of random mobile games. I'm less concerned with the specific apps that Motorola has chosen to load this thing up with than the fact that the volume of that bloatware is made more noticeable by the fact that older devices haven't been as bad on this particular front.

Worst still, the reason that budget devices like this one come with bloatware of this kind is that there's usually money involved, which doesn't make the $100 increase in RRP attached to the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion any easier to swallow.

More than just apps you don't want or need, Motorola's version of Android now features a Taboola news feed built into its app drawer. As someone who believes that the company's reputation for being the "chumbox" of the internet is well-earned, I find it particularly egregious that Motorola would inflict this on its customers. For what it's worth, this "feature" can be disabled if you delve deep into the settings menus, but the fact that it's an issue at all is bad enough.

And all this is before Motorola's own AI functions even enter the equation.  At this point, I doubt there's a single smartphone brand that isn't trying to push some sort of AI hook but Motorola's approach is by far the most in-your-face and off-putting I've experienced to date. If you somehow miss that a moto AI shortcut is built into the app drawer, don't worry, there's an avalanche of notifications waiting to nudge in its direction.

Samsung's Galaxy AI might under-deliver, but at least it has the wisdom to stay in its lane. If you're at all enthused about AI, it's all stuff you've probably already seen before. If you don't care, well, at least Motorola has gone to the trouble of putting everything you want to ignore in a single app.

The functionality that moto AI does deliver is very much in line with the alternatives. You can ask it to generate garish AI art for you. You can get it to put together playlists for selected music streaming services. It can also transcribe and summarise meetings for you and synthesise your unread notifications into a short and sweet "catch-up" synopsis. I've seen it all before and, at this point, you probably have too. Safe to say, I wasn't particularly impressed with what moto AI had to offer.

To add insult to injury, the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion comes with worse software support than cheaper devices like the Moto G75. Out of the box, the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion comes with three years of OS updates and four years of security updates. 

The Motorola Edge 60 Fusion doesn't support wireless charging, but if you pair it up with the right charger, then the 68W fast-charging via USB-C is a decent consolation prize. In practice, I could comfortably make it through two days of regular usage with the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion on a single charge. Burned down via streaming video from YouTube over Wi-Fi, the device took 21 hours and 37 minutes to go from a full charge to zero.