Motorola Edge 60 Review

Introduction

Is a curved glass display the classy garb of a flagship or an annoying design feature that makes reflections more obvious? Your answer to that may well define your opinion of the Motorola Edge 60. 

It’s one of the most affordable phones to feature one of these curved screens. And if, like me, you remember when this style first made a splash a decade ago in phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge, it may feel like you’re getting a proper bargain with the Motorola Edge 60. 

Problems? That sense of class doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny, and the Nothing Phone 3a uses higher-end materials while costing less. 

The Motorola Edge 60 also feels a little sluggish in places, mostly the camera and fingerprint scanner. And the Nothing (3a) rival beats it for gaming too. However, a 3x zoom camera, fast charging and, to some tastes at least, a brilliant screen at this price? It’s a reasonably compelling candidate.

Design

• Curved glass
• Plastic sides and rear
• Gorilla Glass 7i screen protection

Motorola takes a quite old-school approach to making a phone feel classy, at least on the Motorola Edge 60’s front side. It has a curved glass front panel, which was once the height of high-end phone style. But is now considered a bit out of step with trends. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra has a flat screen, for example. 

If you’re not going to be turned off by the way the Motorola Edge 60’s curvy glass tends to create a line of reflections down those sides, there’s plenty to like. Curved glass helps cut down on perceived screen border, and it reduces the thickness of the shell at the point you actually hold it. It’s around 8mm thick, but it feels slimmer than a square-sided 8mm phone. 

Around the back, the Motorola Edge 60 aligns more closely with 2025 trends. It has a plastic rear, but with a texture and finish that don’t feel like cheap old plastic. My Edge 60, the blue version, has a fabric-style finish with a slightly rubber-like feel. Your other option is “Shamrock” green, which has a more leather-like texture. 

It’s pleasant, although I’ve used it with the case attached almost the entire time. The Edge 60 doesn’t come with one of Motorola’s classic, basic transparent silicone cases but a harder clip-on type. It adds little to the phone’s thickness and looks good, but it’s not a hardcore protective measure as it leaves the sides naked in an attempt to introduce as little bulk as possible. 

You may also want to consider getting a screen protector, as the Motorola Edge 60 does not come with one pre-applied. The phone features Corning Gorilla Glass 7i, which falls somewhere between the older Gorilla Glass 5 and the more premium Victus glass. Not bad. 

The Motorola Edge 60’s water and dust ratings are excellent, though. This is an IP68/69 phone, meaning it’s dustproof and can take full submersion in fresh water and being pelted by water jets. 

It features above-average ruggedisation, although the use of plastic sidewalls instead of aluminium ones is a clear indication that this is a budget phone. Such cuts are very common at the price, though. 

Screen

• 120Hz screen
• OLED panel
• Curved design pools reflections

The Motorola Edge 60 has a 6.67-inch OLED screen. And as with any phone that uses this screen tech, it’s vibrant and has impeccable contrast. 

I haven’t found that Motorola’s claims of extremely high peak brightness have panned out in the experience of using the Motorola Edge 60, though. It’s rated for up to 4500 nit brightness, but if anything, the real-world brightness when outside on a sunny day is just OK. 

It doesn’t reach anything like 4500 nits in reality, when displaying actual apps or using the browser. 

Still, it’s otherwise perfectly solid. The screen supports HDR video, and the 2712 x 1220 pixel resolution is high enough to look close to flawless in person. 

This is a 120Hz screen, although some occasional performance niggles spoil the smoothness this high refresh rate is designed to evoke. And as mentioned earlier, opinions will vary on whether the curve of the screen is a good thing or not. 

Downsides include that you can see the slight difference in brightness, due to the way the pixels on the curve aren’t actually facing you, and that reflections will often appear as a streak that runs down each side of the Motorola Edge 60. Some folks find this distracting. 

Cameras

• Generally good image quality
• Generally bad shooting experience thanks to slow performance
• Limited video modes

The Motorola Edge 60 has what I’m going to call an A.S.S. camera. It suffers from an Annoyingly Slow Shutter, which is a result of pervasive performance issues in the phone. 

Using the camera feels laggy, there’s a noticeable wait when you press the shutter button and switching between the three camera views is leaden. I loved taking pictures with the Motorola Edge 60’s more expensive sibling, the Edge 60 Pro. But this phone? I honestly have not had a great time with it.

That’s a real shame, because the actual hardware is very good for the money. There’s a large 1/1.56-inch 50MP main sensor, a 10MP 3x “zoom” camera and a 50MP ultrawide. It’s what I consider a near-ideal trio for a phone at this level. 

We get a properly useful zoom that can take genuinely good pics, and a high-quality primary camera. And while the ultra-wide is a little less strong, which becomes clearer at night, it’s still an excellent camera for a phone of the Motorola Edge 60’s cost. 

This phone can take great pictures, but the actual photographic experience is simply not that good. 

Image quality impressions are similar to those of the Edge 60 Pro, which has the same camera hardware but obviously a different image signal processor.

Photos do not generally look flawless and 100% natural down at the pixel level, and on a few occasions, HDR processing has failed to kick in when shooting multiple pictures in one go. This can lead to quite pronounced overexposure. 

However, in general, the image quality is good, the HDR processing is effective, and most of the 500-plus pictures I’ve taken with the Edge 60 look solid from a technical perspective.

The ultrawide is the weakest of the trio. It struggles most at night, and produces images with a rather different colour tone than the other lenses. Photos often look a lot cooler, bluer, and contrast can appear in lesser in scenes where there’s a stark difference in light levels.

Just like the Edge 60 Pro, the Motorola Edge 60 also has severely limited video. While the quality of the footage is good, your top modes are 4K at 30fps or 60fps at Full HD. 

There’s no 4K/60 mode, although I think it’s less of an issue here than in the significantly more expensive Edge 60 Pro. 

Around the front, we get a 50MP selfie camera, which uses its high pixel count to provide two fields of view. There’s a slightly more zoomed-in one and a wider view for group selfies. 

The detail captured and overall image quality aren’t mind-blowing, but they are solid for the Motorola Edge 60’s moderate price. 

Performance

• Weak GPU
• Limited performance
• Acceptable day-to-day responsiveness in the interface

The Motorola Edge 60’s processor is fairly weak. It’s clearly an area in which Motorola has tried to keep its hardware spend under control. 

We get a MediaTek Dimensity 7300, which is not a performance upgrade over last year’s Motorola Edge 50 and its more prestigious-sounding Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. And it’s a little lower-powered than the Nothing Phone (3a)’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 3. 

As is the norm for cheaper processor lines, while the phone’s Geekbench 6 CPU scores are solid, gaming and graphics performance is fairly weak. 

This is not the ideal phone for gaming as a result, although I think the most cloying performance issue is — as already mentioned — in the camera.

I have also experienced a few stuttery moments when navigating the interface, although for the most part, I have found the Motorola Edge 60’s general performance to be perfectly fine, if not nearly as smooth as that of the Edge 60 Pro. 

It would, after all, be a disaster if a phone that costs this much were laggy throughout. It’s a relatively affordable phone, not a cheap one, and should arguably perform better than it does.

Software & AI

• Android 15
• Some new AI features
• Classic Moto UI style

The Motorola Edge 60 runs Android 15 at the time of review and has Motorola’s classic interface pasted on top. 

It’s a fairly clean and inoffensive software layer that while not “vanilla” avoids imposing too many annoying quirks designed to make this feel like a distinctly Motorola phone. There are some neat parts too, like optional motion gestures to toggle features and a good-looking lock screen that, among Android nerds at least, has kinda become low-key iconic over the years.

This time around Motorola has, in a move that will surprise few who follow tech, added a sprinkling of AI features. When you bring up the search bar by flicking upwards on the home screen, you’ll see a little colourful icon, the shortcut to Moto AI. 

Some of this is just the familiar stuff, like image generation. But it can also act as a quick way to start transcribing a conversation. Moto AI can also provide a summary of your recent notifications. I’m not persuaded this is any more effective than looking at your notifications drop-down or using the Edge 60’s lock screen, which uses icons to visually sum them up. 

Nothing in Moto AI feels like a reason to buy the Edge 60. But none of it is too glaringly overbearing either. It’s largely tastefully done, and in the current climate, I can’t blame Motorola for jumping on the bandwagon. Everyone else has.

Battery Life

• Fairly fast charging
• Fairly long battery life
• No wireless charging

The Motorola Edge 60 has a 5200mAh battery, just a smidge higher capacity than the 5000mAh that is the norm for phones in this class. 

While stamina isn’t as good as Motorola’s step-up Edge 60 Pro, which has a 6000mAh battery despite being no larger, it’s still one of the Edge 60’s strong points. This is simply a highly reliable, long-lasting phone you don’t need to treat with caution to get it to last a full day. 

It sails past the Xiaomi 14T I used recently in real-world stamina terms. I don’t find this to be a two-day-battery phone, but almost no phones are, the way I use them. 

Charging speed is solid too, although you will have to provide your own charger as the Motorola Edge 60 does not include one. 68W is the max claimed charging pace. Using an 89W Motorola adapter I had at home, I found the phone reached 100% in exactly 45 minutes, hitting the 50% mark after just 16 minutes. 

All the other fluff has been cut out here, though. The Motorola Edge 60 does not support wireless charging or, by extension, reverse wireless charging. 

Should you buy it?

FAQs