Motorola has revealed the successor to its hugely successful budget-friendly phone, the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion, but how does it compare to the popular Nothing Phone 3a?
While both are well-specced phones with an attractive price tag that could be among the best cheap phones around, the two differ in key areas like durability, camera performance, screen tech, processors and even battery life. This can make it difficult to choose which is best for your needs – but that’s where we at Trusted Reviews come in.
Here’s how the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion compares to the Nothing Phone 3a on paper. Our full, in-depth comparison is on the way, but we need to spend a little more time with Motorola’s new phone first.
Pricing and availability
The Motorola Edge 60 Fusion is the more affordable of the two phones, though there isn’t much in it. The Edge 60 Fusion starts at £299 with 256GB of storage, with 512GB available at additional cost.
The Nothing Phone 3a, on the other hand, retails at £329, albeit only with 128GB of storage. For the same 256GB as the Motorola alternative, you’ll need to pay an increased £379.
The Nothing Phone 3a has a more distinctive design
The Motorola Edge 60 Fusion is an exceptionally good-looking phone for the price, sporting a curved body and a matching quad-curved screen, and it’s available in both vegan leather and canvas-inspired finishes with Pantone-certified colour options to boot. Seriously, it’s a looker.
That said, it does, broadly speaking, look like pretty much every other phone on the market.
For something different, look no further than Nothing’s alternative. The Nothing Phone 3a has the same distinctive transparent design as previous entries in the Nothing family, complete with visible internals and stylised LEDs within the chassis on the rear.
These LEDs, or Glyphs, as Nothing calls them, can be programmed to flash in intricate patterns when getting calls, texts and more while also doubling up as a timer and other functions. It’s reminiscent of the semi-transparent tech fad of the early 00s, though more stylised than the sometimes-chaotic retro alternatives.
The Motorola Edge 60 Fusion is much more durable
One area where the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion apes the Nothing Phone 3a is durability. It’s arguably in this regard that the Nothing Phone shows its budget-friendly price tag, offering a rather bog-standard IP64 dust and water resistance rating.
It also doesn’t offer the best screen protection for the price, offering the lesser-known Panda Glass found on Motorola’s truly budget Moto G23, a £200 phone from 2023.
The Motorola Edge 60 Fusion is tank-like in comparison, offering flagship-level IP69 water resistance that protects the phone from high-pressure jets of hot water. It also boasts MIL-STD-810H certification used by the US military to test ruggedised products.
Better screen protection is the icing on the cake, using the more durable Gorilla Glass 7i to protect the 6.7-inch screen.
The Nothing Phone 3a has a more versatile camera offering
There are plenty of similarities between the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion and Nothing Phone 3a where the primary camera is concerned. Both offer 50MP snappers with fairly wide apertures, though the Fusion’s f/1.8 is slightly wider than Nothing’s f/1.9, and both offer OIS stabilisation to boot.
That’s pretty much where the similarities end, however. The Edge 60 Fusion comes paired with a 13MP ultrawide while the Phone 3a offers an 8MP alternative – but the Nothing phone has an ace up its sleeve in the form of a third lens.
It’s not a garbage macro lens like other budget phones either, instead packing a surprisingly high-res 50MP 2x telephoto lens. Getting any kind of telephoto in the budget is a rarity, let alone a high-res telephoto, and essentially allows for better zoom performance than Motorola’s digital-only zoom.
The Motorola Edge 60 Fusion has a bigger battery and faster charging
The Motorola Edge 60 Fusion squeaks by with a win in the battery department with a slightly larger 5200mAh cell than the Nothing Phone 3a’s 5000mAh cell – though neither should struggle to last all day on a charge.
Instead, the bigger difference comes in the charging department, with the Edge 60 Fusion offering faster 68W TurboCharge support in place of the 50W charging on offer from Nothing’s alternative.
That should translate to a notable difference in overall charge speeds, though you will need a TurboCharge-supported charger to hit those speeds with the Edge 60 Fusion – and a charger doesn’t always come in the box. It will at some retailers, it just depends on where you buy the phone.
The Nothing Phone 3a has a slightly more capable chipset
The MediaTek Dimensity 7300 found in the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion is a notable upgrade over the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 found in its predecessor, but it falls short of the upgraded Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 found in the Nothing Phone 3a.
It offers a slight advantage in both CPU and GPU performance that should mean the Nothing Phone 3a should benchmark slightly better than Motorola’s alternative in tests – something we’ll be confirming in the coming weeks.
The Motorola Edge 60 Fusion comes paired with 8GB and either 256- or 512GB of storage, a healthy boost over the 128- or 256GB you’ll get from Nothing’s budget phone.
Early thoughts
Both the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion and Nothing Phone 3a are capable budget-focused smartphones, though each has a different focus.
While Motorola offers a more durable design, Nothing offers something more eye-catching. But while the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion has a better screen, the Nothing Phone 3a has more capable camera hardware. It largely depends on what you want from your phone.
That said, we’ll reserve our final verdict for our full, in-depth comparison in the coming weeks.
