The Motorola Edge 60 is a new mid-range phone that comes with a curved screen and a 3x zoom camera. It's part of Motorola's Edge series, known for their curved designs and Pantone colors. This year, they've added Moto AI features. The Edge 60 is a middle-of-the-road option, offering a telephoto zoom camera unlike the Fusion model, but with a less powerful chipset than the Pro models. It also has upgrades like better ingress protection, a larger battery, expandable storage, and a new ultrawide camera.
Design And Build Quality
Motorola's Edge series phones are pretty easy to spot with their curved designs. This year, they also bring a bunch of Moto AI-based features. The Edge 60 is a middle-of-the-road option in the series. It has a telephoto zoom camera, unlike the Fusion, but its chipset isn't as powerful as the Pro models. The phone has some upgrades over last year, like better ingress protection, a bigger battery, expandable storage, and a new ultrawide camera.
Our model has a back covered with vegan leather, but there's also a textile-like option and a sandpaper-ish one. The Edge 60 has those signature curves, with both the back and front meeting a thin plastic frame. The phone feels light and comfortable to hold. This phone is generally pretty tough. It even meets a military standard for use in extreme conditions. Like last year, there's IP68-rated protection against dust and water, but now the phone is also IP69-rated against heated water jets.
Display And Audio
- The Edge 60's display is a curved 6.67-inch OLED with a 1220p resolution, a 120 Hz refresh rate, and Gorilla Glass 7i protection. The display looks good, with plenty of sharpness and support for 10-bit color depth. You also get HDR10+ video playback.
- The screen's brightness is great. We measured up to around 500 nits with the manual slider, and this can boost to 1400 nits in auto mode when needed.
- The refresh rate is 120 Hz when you're interacting with the screen to smooth out your swiping and scrolling, and this can go down to 60 Hz when the phone is idle to save energy. However, there's no support for an always-on display.
- For audio, there's a pair of stereo speakers, and they're loud, scoring an excellent mark. The audio quality is just average, though. Highs are well presented, but vocals and bass could be better.
Storage And Biometrics
An interesting change this year is the addition of expandable storage through micro SD. That's on top of the 256 or 512 gigs of UFS 4.0 storage built in. For biometric input, the Edge 60 has an optical under-display fingerprint sensor. It's fast and reliable.
Software And Performance
The Edge 60 series runs on Android 15 with Moto's own Hello UI interface. This year, Hello UI comes with Moto AI, an extensive suite of AI-based features that even integrates features from other AI platforms. Motorola promises three major OS upgrades and four years of security patches for the Edge 60 series.
Under the hood of the Motorola Edge 60 is the same chipset as the Edge 60 Fusion, a Dimensity 7300. In benchmarks, it's not a chart-topper. It's worth noting that it's not exactly an upgrade over the chipset in the previous model, a Snapdragon 7 Gen1 AE. The scores are roughly the same and even lower in some tests. Still, the performance is good enough for its class, and the phone feels responsive in daily tasks. As expected for a modest chipset, the sustained performance is quite stable without thermal throttling.
Battery Life And Charging
The Moto Edge 60 is powered by a 5,200 mAh battery, a small increase over the 5,000 mAh one in the Edge 50. Moto has done a lot better with the battery life this time around. The Edge 60 earned a solid active use score of 13 hours and 32 minutes in our tests. That's a big improvement compared to last year's sub-10-hour score.
The charging hasn't changed. It's still 68 watts, and there's no charger included in the box. Using Moto's adapter, we charged the phone from 0 to 81% in half an hour, and a full charge took 45 minutes, which is pretty fast. However, while the Edge 50 had wireless charging support, that's not the case with the Edge 60.
Camera System
Let's talk about the Edge 60's triple camera setup. There's a main camera, a 3x telephoto, and a new 50-megapixel ultrawide, which replaces last year's 13-megapixel one.
Main Camera
- Daylight photos: The main camera produces nice photos with plenty of color, good sharpness, and relatively wide dynamic range despite the contrasty look. The detail isn't perfect; we noticed soft patches on foliage, especially grass. A bigger issue is consistency. Almost half of the photos we took came out blurry, soft, noisy, or without HDR applied.
- Portrait photos: Subjects come out a little rough around the edges.
- 2x zoom: Usable, but there's visible softness and noise, as well as upscaling artifacts.
- Low light: The main camera does a decent job. When the photos come out right, they have plenty of detail and wide dynamic range. Colors are conservative, and there's plenty of sharpening added. Unfortunately, we noticed the same inconsistency when shooting at night as we did during the day. Many of the photos we took were unusable, coming out foggy, fuzzy, and noisy.
Telephoto Camera
- Daylight photos: The 3x telephoto zoom does a solid job. Its colors are more conservative, and dynamic range is more limited than the main camera's, but you get a good level of sharpness and detail.
- Night photos: The zoom camera's photos are pretty good with enough detail, nice colors, wide dynamic range, and low noise.
Ultrawide Camera
- Daylight photos: The new ultrawide camera's daylight photos look really good for this type of camera, better than last year. They're generally sharp and have plenty of detail, and the colors are spot-on.
- Macro close-ups: Since the camera has autofocus, it can also take macro close-ups. We weren't really impressed with the results, though.
- Night photos: We expected more from this camera. The photos come out very soft, yet with a lot of added sharpness. Detail is lacking, and dynamic range is limited with dark shadows and some clipped highlights.
Selfie Camera
Moto has swapped the selfie camera for a 50-megapixel one this year, and it does a great job. The subject is always well exposed. The colors are nice and natural, the sharpness is good, and the level of detail is impressive. Dynamic range is wide, and noise is low.
Video Quality
The Edge 60 can record videos in 4K at 30 fps with all of the cameras, including the selfie camera.
- Main camera: 4K videos come out sharp and detailed with wide dynamic range and accurate colors.
- Telephoto camera: Zoomed videos are a bit soft for 4K resolution, but they're generally decent.
- Ultrawide camera: Does a good job when recording videos. They're sharp and detailed, and the clips have livelier colors than the other cameras. The electronic video stabilization smooths things out nicely.
- Low light: The main camera's 4K videos come out very soft and noisy with clipped highlights.
Conclusion
So, there you have it, the Moto Edge 60. It packs a lot of nice features, plus there are plenty of upgrades over last year. There's better ingress protection, longer battery life, expandable storage, and Moto AI features. The new ultrawide and selfie cameras do a great job, too. Our main complaints are that Motorola has gotten rid of wireless charging, and the main camera's performance is inconsistent. You can also get a better chipset at this price. We also have to mention the cheaper Edge 60 Fusion. It lacks the telephoto camera, but otherwise has the same features, plus a more consistent main camera and better battery life. So, while the Edge 60 is a decent mid-ranger, if you're not set on having this telephoto camera, then the Fusion model might give you more for your money.
