Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review

Verdict

The Motorola Edge 50 Fusion is another excellent budget-focused phone, boasting a 144Hz display, 68W wired charging, and a sleek design with IP68 water resistance.

Introduction

After years of churning out cheap, solid, but ultimately quite boring Moto G phones, it feels like the Motorola brand has rediscovered its edge – quite literally.

Last year’s Motorola Edge 40 line-up offered strong specs and killer designs at competitive prices, and the most impressive of the bunch was the entry-level Motorola Edge 40 Neo. Motorola has rather annoyingly messed around with its naming convention this year, but you can essentially think of the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion as the Neo’s direct successor.

It’s another sleek, flagship-flavoured phone at a lower mid-range price, albeit with a slight £50 price bump to £349.99. Does it still offer the ultimate budget package?

Design

• Stylish curvy design
• IP68 dust and water resistance
• 6.7-inch 144Hz pOLED display

We were quite taken aback by how good looking last year’s Motorola Edge 40 Neo looked and felt, and if anything the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion is a step forward.

It evolves the Neo’s design language in keeping with the wider Edge 50 line-up, with the signature addition of a body that curves out to encompass the camera module. It’s a nice touch.

Once again the body and frame are all made of plastic, though the rear finish differs among the three available colours. While my Forest Blue model offers a nice frosted plastic finish, which is slightly silky to the touch, the Hot Pink model offers up vegan suede and the Marshmallow Blue model has vegan leather.

It’s the kind of attention to detail that few other mid-range manufacturers are offering right now. One detail that’s been lost is the Edge 40 Neo’s Pantone branding, though that always felt a bit gimmicky. It’s been put to better use on the Edge 50 Pro and Ultra models, which both have Pantone-validated screens and displays, but there’s nothing of the sort here.

At 161.9 x 73.1 the Edge 50 Fusion has got a fractionally larger footprint than the Edge 40 Neo, reflecting its larger display. It’s just as svelte at 7.9mm thick, however, and weighs only a couple of grams more at a tad under 175g.

This is as pleasurable a phone to wield as it is to carry around in your pocket, while an IP68 rating makes a welcome return for a flagship level of dust and water resistance. That beats even the mighty Pixel 8a, which is selling for about £150 more.

Motorola continues to offer some of the most distinctive and appealing packaging, too, with recyclable cardboard. The company also sprays each box with a powerful fragrance, which makes unboxing the phone a real multi-sensory experience.

Screen

• 6.7-inch curved pOLED display
• 144Hz refresh rate
• No HDR10+ support
• Stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos support

Motorola has bumped the size of its mid-ranger up for the second year in a row, this time topping out at 6.7 inches. It’s still a vibrant 1080 x 2400 (FHD+) pOLED panel, and it can still be cranked up to a 144Hz refresh rate.

The latter is smoother than most flagship phones, though it continues to feel like a bit of a gimmick. Most people would need to be side-by-side with a 120Hz screen to tell the difference, and even then they might struggle. Still, we’re not complaining at having more smoothness on tap, and you can switch to a lower rate in the interest of power conservation.

As well as the size, the peak brightness has been upped to 1600 nits. This is actually some way short of flagship level these days, and falls a little short of the Poco X6 Pro too, but it’s still plenty bright enough in most scenarios.

Colour accuracy is strong here, with several presets to match your preference. It defaults to a rather forthright Vivid calibration, but switching over to Natural brings things down to a more sRGB-friendly level.

It’s a shame that the Edge 50 Fusion doesn’t have HDR10+ support, especially when you consider the Edge 40 Neo did have such a thing. It means this is the only phone in the Edge 50 line-up not to support any advanced HDR formats.

My other small complaint about the display is the fact that it curves off at the edges, which is generally the way Motorola rolls with its Edge line. It’s all there in the name. With that said, I don’t know if it’s the thicker frame or a slightly less pronounced curve, but I didn’t run into the same false input issues that I did with the Motorola Edge 50 Pro.

It’s a subtle enough curve that full-screen landscape content isn’t massively distorted at the top and bottom edges, either. All you’re really left with the is the issue of greater vulnerability, though I didn’t attract any dinks in the week or so I ran with the phone. It probably helps that you’re getting Gorilla Glass 5 rather than the Neo’s Gorilla Glass 3.

All in all it’s a strong screen, though I’d take the I’d take the Poco X6 Pro screen’s sharper resolution, higher peak brightness, flat shape, and HDR10 support over the Motorola’s 144Hz refresh rate.

The Edge 50 Fusion’s screen is flanked by stereo speakers. With Dolby Atmos support also included, it makes for a solid audio experience – albeit a slightly thin, reedy one that could do with a little more low-end.

Camera

• 50MP LYTIA primary camera
• 13MP ultra-wide and 32MP selfie camera
• Natural and Auto-enhance options

Motorola has once again equipped its classy mid-ranger with a strong main camera sensor, this time a Sony LYTIA LYT-700C. With all-pixel instant focus technology and OIS, it can hone in subjects quickly and accurately even in lesser lighting conditions.

I took a couple of Night mode shots with the Edge 50 Fusion alongside a couple of its direct rivals – the Samsung Galaxy A35 and the Poco X6 Pro – and the Motorola produced shots with greater sharpness and less noise, though the difference wasn’t what you’d call night and day (no pun intended).

Surprisingly, it was in general well-lit shooting conditions that the main Motorola Edge 50 Fusion camera impressed me the most. It can produce shots that really pop with colour and clarity.

There’s a choice to be made over just how much of that colour pop you want. The camera defaults to Natural mode, which sure enough yields more muted, ‘as seen’ shots.

Switch to Auto-enhance mode, and it’ll ramp up the processing time (though I didn’t notice a pronounced difference) for greater contrast and dynamic range. It’s a matter of personal preference which you go for, and Motorola’s processing algorithm doesn’t always make the best exposure choices, but Auto-enhance is definitely handy for those tricky extreme HDR scenarios at least.

All of the shots featured in the gallery above were taken with this Auto Enhance mode on. I’ve included some side-by-side comparisons to show you the effect of sticking with Natural below.

As you can see, Auto-enhance is also helpful when shooting with the weaker cameras, whether that be the 13MP ultra-wide or (as featured above) the 32MP selfie camera. I found that it injected a little more life into shots that were otherwise poorly exposed, lighting shady foregrounds better on bright days. The trade-off is that such shots also tended to adopt a slightly unreal look.

As that suggests, the 13MP ultra-wide camera is way off the quality of the main sensor, though it still produced pleasing enough results in decent lighting. There’s no telephoto camera here, but the main sensor and Motorola’s image processing chops are of a sufficient standard to make 2x shots look pretty decent.

The video recording provision further breaks any flagship vibes, with a fairly modest 4K at 30fps or 1080p at 120fps limit. It’s a decent enough performer for the money though, with OIS making for sufficiently steady footage.

Performance

• Snapdragon 7s Gen 2
• 12GB of RAM
• Decent performance

Powering the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chip, which is paired with a generous 12GB of RAM.

It’s enough to power the phone along through most tasks, and for that 144Hz display to never miss a beat. I didn’t pick up any instances of stuttering during my review period. In gaming terms, I managed to get Wreckfest running at maxed out settings, though the frame rate took a dip in busier moments of on-track action. It’s a smooth runner when such advanced 3D games are bumped down somewhere between medium and high settings.

In CPU benchmark terms, it’s a fairly modest boost over the Motorola Edge 40 Neo with its MediaTek Dimensity 7030, with only a slightly higher Geekbench 6 multi-core score for the newer phone to boast about. Our GPU tests point to roughly the same level of graphical capabilities too. That’s not a massive complaint, as last year’s Neo was a strong performer, but it would have been nice to see more of a bump – especially given the higher price tag.

Just as importantly, it’s also a match across the board for the Samsung Galaxy A35, which is arguably its main competitor in the £350-ish category. The Nothing Phone (2a) is marginally slower in CPU terms, but trumps the Edge 50 Fusion on GPU performance.

Of course, if it’s lower-mid-range performance you want, the Poco X6 Pro hammers everything at this price. You’ll have to sacrifice a fair amount of class elsewhere, mind, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

Elsewhere, you’ll get 256GB of storage as standard, which is a strong provision. It would have been nice to have a few more options, or at least the provision of a microSD, but I can’t imagine many potential Edge 50 Fusion customers bumping up against such a generous limit.

As with last year’s Edge 40 Neo, the vibration motor feels more than a little mushy, but that’s par for the course with cheaper phones.

Software

• Very clean take on Android 14
• Thoughtful Motorola tweaks
• Bloatware starting to encroach
• 4 years of security updates, 3 Android versions

Motorola’s take on Android 14 is one of the very best in the business. It’s smart enough to know not to tinker with Google’s slick UI too much, and where it does make minor tweaks and enhancements, they largely pay off.

You can access most of Motorola’s additions through the slick Moto app, which smartly talks you through them all.
It’s through the Moto app that you can access Motorola’s well-established Gestures. Some of these are active by default, such as the double-twist to activate the camera, or the double-chop to activate the torch – both really handy when your other hand isn’t free.

Quick launch is another default gesture, enabling you to bind regular tasks to a double tap of the back of the phone. It’s set to open TikTok by default, likely in honour of the phone’s intended youthful audience (the same gesture backs up to the home screen on the flagship Motorola Edge 50 Ultra), but you can change it here. Whatever the binding, the input itself has never really worked consistently enough for me to adopt it.

Things like personalising your home screen with custom colours, fonts, wallpapers and the like are nothing particularly original, nor are Motorola’s security and display-tweaking options. However, bringing them together in one clean app makes these functions way more intuitive and inviting than delving through a labyrinthine Settings menu, as so many other manufacturers force you to do.

It’s not all positive news for Motorola’s UI. Bloatware has started to encroach on Motorola’s phone, with non-optional pre-installations of Adobe Scan, Booking.com, an ad-filled Weather app, Opera Browser, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

At least Motorola has the decency to inform you of these at the set-up phase. By contrast there’s a handful of games, ranging from the well-known Candy Crush to the questionable Hit Master 3D, that just crop up unexpectedly in the app tray. Hit Master 3D even plonked its iffy-looking icon on the home screen shortly after set-up, making me wonder if the phone had been hit with some form of malware on a previous set-up.

Quibbles aside, though, Motorola offers one of the crispest Android UIs in the business, and it’s a joy to use on the Edge 50 Fusion.

You also get four years of guaranteed security updates with the Edge 50 Fusion, along with three major Android updates, taking it through to Android 17. That’s not as strong as the Samsung Galaxy A35 on five and four respectively, but is a match for the Nothing Phone (2a) and the Poco X6 Pro.

Battery Life

• 5000mAh battery
• All-day battery life
• 68W charger included in the box

Motorola generally knows how to extract efficient energy use from its phones, and the Edge 50 Fusion is no different. It runs on a 5000mAh cell, which is good for a full day of heavy usage.

On an average day of moderate usage, with around four hours of screen on time, I would be left with upwards of 50% juice. That’s with the screen’s refresh rate forced right up to 144Hz from the off, so bumping that back down Auto or even 120Hz would doubtless boost the figure a tad.

An hour of Netflix sapped 4% of a charge, though it’s worth remembering the lack of HDR10 support here. Half an hour of light gaming sapped 7% of a charge, which is pretty much par for the course.

Motorola packs a 68W charger in the box, which is most welcome. It’s sufficient to get the phone from completely empty to 44% in 15 minutes, in my experience, and up to 76% in 30 minutes. A full charge takes about 47 minutes.

You don’t get wireless charging here, but then only the Pixel 7a does this for less than £400.

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