The first thing that struck me when opening the box holding the Edge 60 is how remarkably similar it is to the Edge 60 Fusion. On checking the specifications for the two models, the similarities are clearly not just physical. Furthermore, third-party case-makers are actually listing their cases as suitable for both phones. So I guess it's clear! I was thinking that this would be a comparison with last year's Edge 50, but maybe not!
The second thing that struck me was the quite significant perfumy smell (present even actually before opening the box), which I think has been made stronger than it used to be! I guess people must like this as they've been doing it for some years now. Can't say I'm a fan, but perhaps as a chap in his 60's I'm not the appreciative target demographic!
The third thing to strike me was the quad-curved screen. We've seen left/right curves of course over the years - some waterfall outrageous curves - but more recently subtle, lending a classy and premium feel. I was expecting the top/bottom curves to be the same as left/right but they're not - they're more subtle and I, for one, find them very attractive and lovely to use as the finger slides over them with various swipes. But we'll come to the screen in due course.
MotorolaUK PR have sent this over for to us at Phones Show Chat to review, incidentally, but I've not been dictated to in any way regarding my opinion of what I find and will say here exactly that - as I'm sure that they, and more importantly, you, would have me do. But anyway, the box is first as always and it's a white one! Inside is a USB-C to USB-C cable, a hard semi-cut-out case for protection (which is very nice, colour-matched with the phone, but very slippery - much more so than the back of the phone), pokey SIM Card tool, papers, Energy Rating sticker and that's about it. No charger.
I used my Motorola Razr 50 as the source for setup/restore, which it did wirelessly over my home network, no offer of a cable option this time. Coming from another Moto, as one might expect, home screen layouts are all in place, as many apps as Google's system allows signed in (excluding financials of course, understandably for security), settings preferences all the same, toggles thrown as they were on the Razr - it really is very impressive these days (especially when doing this from two devices from the same firm).
The dimensions of the phone are 161.2 x 73.1 x 7.9mm and weighing 179g it's stealth-like! It's beautifully slim around the plastic frame as the glass edges come round to meet it with a nicely razor-thin volume rocker and power button on the right and USB-C port, one of the stereo pair of speakers and SIM Card Tray on the bottom edge. And Edge is the word. Without a case on, it's all edge. I know there's divided opinion about the pragmatics around curved screens and flat these days, but I fail to see how anyone can not be impressed by the look, feel and finish of the Edge 60's styling here. By the way, there's no dedicated left-side Moto AI key on this phone (like these is on some other 2025 models) but I'll come to the whole AI thing later! This Pantone Gibraltar Sea colour they describe as a canvas-inspired silicone finish or nylon-like texture. To me it feels like some sort of cloth, but it would seem not! It's very nice to the touch though and does afford (certainly more) grip (than the supplied case). There's also a kind of bright green - Shamrock (which has a leather-like silicone back) and a purple-like Plum Perfect (with sandpaper-like texture).
We have got used to Moto knocking it out of the park with their P-OLED screens and this is no exception. Once again a gorgeously bright, colourful and vibrant screen which is capable of reaching 4,500nits in auto mode out in the sun. It has a refresh rate of 120Hz, ratio of 20:9 and pixel count of 1220 x 2712 - which makes for 446ppi. It's a 6.67" panel but the phone feels smaller than that because of the quad-curving. To me, it feels more like a 6.5" screened device. It's protected by Gorilla Glass 7i from Corning, which seems to be a poor man's Victus but certainly a mid-tier leg-up from Gorilla Glass 3 and 5. Improved drop performance, enhanced scratch resistance - on top of any benefits brought to the phone by IP-ratings and more which I'll come to in a minute.
The phone arrived with Android 15 in charge with a Moto promise of 3 OS updates, so up to and including Android 18. Google Security patches swiftly updated to March 2025 and Moto promises 4 years of those, taking users to April 2029. Sadly, this is one of the devices where you can expect Motorola to auto-install various applications from their partners when the phone gets any kind of update. Bloat, we call it. Presumably keeping the price of the hardware down. On this occasion it was Ball Sort Puzzle, Amazon Music, Temu Shopping, Happy Color, Solitaire and Monopoly Go! Fortunately, these were all uninstallable, but you have to keep an eye open for more. Pre-installed on the phone (with no choice during setup) were Opera, Booking (dot) com, LinkedIn, Perplexity and Adobe Scan AI PDF. These are also uninstallable, but in actual fact, the last two might be useful to leave as they are to some degree baked into some of the other Moto apps. Depending on whether or not you have any interest in or intention to use AI!
Whipping out the SIM Card Tray using the provided tool, it was clear that there was some resistance, reassuringly 'sealed' around the edges to meet with the ingress protection which feels like is becoming standard for Moto candybar phones these days, budget, mid-tier or flagship. Yes, we have IP6/8 rating, IP6/9 and to top it all off, the phone is also MIL-STD-810H compliant. So pretty much whatever you're likely to throw at it - or indeed it, at! Surprisingly, inside the back of the SIM Card Tray is a space for a second nanoSIM Card or microSD Card so users can mix and match as they like, especially given that the phone can also be used with an eSIM. The world is your oyster!
The Edge 60 can be bought in various storage/RAM configurations - this one supplied has 512GB storage and 12GB RAM, which is the top one. There's also 256GB/8GB and 256GB/12GB depending on market and/or operator (if buying on contract). 256GB being the baseline storage is just great and 512GB, at least for me, is oodles more than enough! Added to which, this phone has a microSD Card slot, as I said earlier, meaning that you can expand the storage yet again - I'm sitting here on 1.5TB all-in! Data transfer speeds to/from the internal storage utilise UFS 4 and in my tests here it flies - even compared to my (much more expensive) champ - Sony Xperia 1 Mk VI.
There's also a RAM Boost function which uses some of your storage as RAM if you want it to. Here, it arrived with 12GB+4GB turned on and something I'd not seen before - AI Auto (using AI learning, optimise RAM use by up to 12GB) which I guess means that it works out for itself, depending on what demands you put on the system, how much it switches. Not quite sure how this works, however, as this system has never been on-the-fly, rather having to reboot the phone after any changes made. Anyway, with 12GB here I contend that nobody needs to be engaging this function as the system keeps many more tasks open than the vast majority of people are going to readily use or notice if it didn't!
Driving the operation is a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 (4nm) which was the same as last year's Edge 50 Neo. It feels snappy enough in operation and those who seem to know, compare it with a SnapDragon 7-series, maybe the Gen 3. I don't see any slowdown here and unless a person is pushing gaming to the limits, it will be just fine for 95% of uses for 95% of people. For those demanding that extra 5% performance, they certainly would be looking somewhere other than mid-tier devices in this price range anyway. I've been testing car racing games here and pressing the AI functions (which I'll come to) and it doesn't appear to flinch.
The speakers seem decent enough for the majority of users. They are not the loudest, but unlike other phones which push volume so as to make music sound distorted and tinny, these don't. They cap the volume to keep the quality good. Playing around with Dolby Atmos I have found that the best sound for most of the music I like to listen to is with Spatial Audio selected - but others make prefer to use Smart Audio, Music, Film, Game or Podcast settings instead, or the Custom option, within which there are frequency sliders to manually adjust/tweak. I think the bottom line here is that the volume won't blow out the quality, as I say - and the phone has found a good balance in that approach.
There's no 3.5mm audio-jack so head/earphones by wire are out of the USB-C port or via Bluetooth. Tested with Google's own USB-C wired earphones here and it sounds excellent. Bluetooth v5.4 is here and as you'd expect, it sounds great, particularly when paired up with Moto's own Buds+ which I reviewed along with the Edge 50 Pro last year or better still, as you might expect, Sony's WH-1000XM4 headphones! No complaints with audio via cans either with wire or BT.
As for HelloUI, Moto's software layer over Android, it remains as attractive in so many ways. The ways in which most other OEMs just seem to get it wrong but Moto retains enough of a flavour of AOSP from back in the AndroidOne days, whilst adding genuinely useful functions and gestures that don't bog the system down or get in the way. Kudos to them. Stuff like 3-finger screenshot, chop-chop to turn on the torch, swivel-swivel to turn on the camera, attentive display that stays on when you're looking at it, edge-lighting for notifications, control panel in gaming, themes, fonts, personalisation of elements - there are loads of them to play around with in the Moto-dedicated app and settings. Some of which have been borrowed from others, some of which others have borrowed - between them all I think Moto gets the balance right. Adding enough but not confusing the user.
I'm going to throw in one gripe, one complaint, into that mix, however - and that's the Always on Display - or lack of here. It's a deal-breaker for me, personally and sends me off to the Play Store to find a 3rd party one - but I guess most won't really care. I thought that with the arrival of a 'proper' AoD with the Razr phones, and even on last year's much cheaper Edge 50 Neo, we'd turned a corner and away from Moto's Peek Display. Super as it was - I want an AoD now. And a good bright one like with the two aforementioned devices - not a wishy-washy one (as per Pixel phones and many others) - which similarly sips at the battery, doesn't gulp. I wrote about Peek Display time and time again in amongst my loads of Motorola reviews over the years - search my blog and you'll find them (short summary below). It was great in its day - but please Moto - let's move on. You have proved you can do AoD brilliantly well now.
So anyway, gripe over, Motorola's 'Peek' arrangement really is decent-enough (for most). It wakes up with movement of any kind and shows the incoming notifications as a badge. If you touch/hold each of them you get a deep-dive summary of what the notification is about. Let go and it goes away. Drag your finger to the fingerprint scanner area and the phone opens up the notification source and takes you directly to the app/service to read it. I loved this system for years and was surprised that nobody emulated it. And if Moto hadn't teased us by showing that there's a better way, I'd have been OK with it. But they have. And there is. And it should be here!
The lock screen arrangements are present and as last reported - with the user able to adjust content, clock size and style, shortcuts to various widgets, style of notifications, shuffle it around, resize, add elements and so on. It's a system that works well and following a double-tap on the sleeping screen, you can get straight to the lock screen with all this stuff. There's also lift to wake and coupled with the very good face recognition the phone has, you can be straight in. The face recognition, incidentally, is quick and easy to set up, unlike the old days! So yes, there's lift to wake, nudge to wake, tap to wake - no doubt all influencing elements that made Moto exclude a proper Always on Display! (I won't start on that again!)
Smart Connect (formerly Ready For) works as perfectly as it does with any modern Moto phone, by cable or wirelessly here. Use a cable method to keep the battery topped up too. You get all the usual activities and services - App Streaming, Mobile Desktop, Phone on PC, Webcam, Files (manager), Hotspot, Smart Clipboard, Cross Control with unified mouse, keyboard, tablet or any other connected device and their own Share Hub. I've written about Smart Connect on my blog for a deeper dive and yes, it all works beautifully (particularly for the hot-desking multi/Windows PC user). Nobody else is doing this like Moto is. Not even Samsung's DeX now (though it will be interesting to see what Samsung and Google do with Android 16's Desktop mode as they collaborate).
I was mentioning earlier that there's no Moto AI Key on the left of the phone. Some of the 2025 devices do have this and it seems to be a hardware feature that the firm is adding to their more premium handsets. Razr 60 Ultra, Edge 60 Pro. The AI functionality seems to be similar, however, on most of these 2025 unit, but it's just a case of how you get into it. Those without a button need to access it by an on-screen optional button, an optional double-press of the power key, double-tap on the back of the phone or by voice. Those with a button can use it much like Nothing's Essential Key button with press and long-press. So that brings us nicely into Moto AI then! I think most of the tools are present on the phone as are on my Razr 50 and which I summarised in a blog post a while ago, so no need to repeat it all here - feel free to click through. There's loads to unpack!
Since that summary, Moto have added extra functionality to Moto AI however and changed a thing or two. In the App Tray, up the top, there are some tabs. One is the standard Apps listing, the second is Newsfeed, again, summarised in my post, above, but the Journal which was present then has disappeared - I think in lieu of the new Moto Notes app. So now, when you take a screenshot, make a recording, photo, text or whatever via the Moto AI UI, it gets saved into Memories. Finding Memories (because the Journal is now gone) is then tricky - by voice, search or eventually I found a section in the Moto AI app's Settings under Responses>Memory. That Memory area needs a shortcut (or app of its own). I get the feeling that Moto AI is certainly a work in progress and they're sorting out what should go where and how it all interacts. But most of it really is as I described via that link above, so do please click through and digest all the goodness. Inside the Moto Notes app, there's also an Auto-sync with Google Drive option and it then seems to upload to a newly-made folder called Moto Notes. Seems to do what it is supposed to though - of course one has to give Moto permissions to write to one's Google Drive account etc. which might not suit some. As I say, I think it's a learning time for Moto and I am certainly feeding back to them on my findings, frustrations and fumblings!
Everyone's favourite topic it seems with phones these days is cameras - and my least favourite! Which is why I usually hand this one off to GSMArena. They deep dive the whole camera thing in every review they write, littered with helpful examples, samples and insights. I openly admit that I don't really understand digital photography, being much more of a film user back in the day, and count myself now among the many, many phone users out there who reckon that (pretty much) any modern phone's camera will do pretty much everything that is needed - and that results, at best, are going to be posted to social media - not blown up to A3 poster and put on a wall. However, I do like to run through what I find in the camera UI when I review, so here we go.
First things first and that excellent Macro functionality via the autofocus in the wide-angle lens. I do enjoy using this and taking photos of close-up objects (which I enjoyed with film back in the day with 1:1 rendering lenses on full-frame 35mm). I digress again! The three lenses/cameras in the phone are a 50MP f/1.8 main unit with OIS, a supporting 10MP f2 telephoto with 3x optical zoom and OIS and that 50MP f/2 wide-angle with the AF/Macro. The main camera can shoot video at 4K@30fps or 1080p@240fps (with gyro-EIS) and round the front there's a 50MP f/2 Selfie which can do the same video at 4K@30fps with a slightly reduced frame rate at 1080p@120fps.
So yes, in the main Photo UI you get buttons for quick-selecting 3x zoom, 2x zoom, 1x normal, o.5x wide-angle and a dedicated Macro button. The Macro can also work automatically if you let it via settings and will switch over when it thinks it is close enough to the subject. There's a whole bunch of filters which can be added pre-shooting. Then there's Portrait mode which in my tests here are very pleasing with various depth of field effects which can be set at 24mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm for angle of view, Pro Mode gives the user fine control if they want to go manual for focus, white balance, shutter speed, ISO and EV and under the More button we have Scan for documents, Night vision (which in my tests seems to pull light from nowhere!), Panorama, Ultra Res (using the full 50MP with big file sizes resulting), Photo Booth (which is like a passport photo booth giving a user 4 shots, 3 seconds apart (on the right is my mad attempt!), Timelapse and some other stuff for playing about with. Digging deeper into settings we have all sorts of other stuff as you'd expect including AI Audio for video (Audio Zoom), smile/gesture capture, grids, levellers etc. I think that the Moto Camera app's UI is a nice one and, as I say, for the vast majority of people who are not going to pixel-peep (or even know what that means!) it's an enjoyable experience.
I was talking earlier about the very efficient face unlock and this is supported by an under-display, optical fingerprint scanner to get in. Registration is similarly quick and painless and in my experience since testing the phone, even though it's said to be second best to ultrasonic (and certainly capacitive) it works just fine. Never failed for me and quick. In terms of connectivity we have 5G of course, which I've tested for data and voice and works well in my test areas/subjects, WiFi 6 which, although not the latest version works perfectly well for me here in my test with good connectivity for data/streaming, NFC support here for paying with the likes of Google Pay and GPS which seems to lock on to location quickly and holds on well. I covered Bluetooth earlier and yes, excellent range (depending on other gear used of course) and clarity. Anything I've plugged into the USB-C (2.0) seems to work well with OTG functionality - not only the PC mentioned earlier but also SSD storage, headphones (with or without dongle/adapters) and chargers of course.
Speaking of which, the phone has a 5,200mAh battery (for this market) and 68W wired charging capability. Sadly there's no Qi wireless charging which would have been, along with an Always on Display (did I mention that?!), the icing on the cake. I have a 100W GaN charger here and using that I get decent-enough charging speeds - a full charge from flat in well under an hour can't be bad. I do, once again, however, question how much it would have cost to add a Qi coil - especially given that last year's model (Edge 50) had it. Still, I guess Moto have done their research and conclude that not enough people are interested. The battery performs sparklingly well incidentally, as usual with Moto phones, heading for two and a half hours on my standard 10% Reading Test and if pushed without a charge, well into, if not to the end of, day 2.
It's a super little phone, very dinky in the hand, particularly for those brave enough to use without a case, the 512GB/12GB version is £379 in the UK direct from Moto (not made it yet to Amazon at time of writing) and represents super value for money. The screen is gorgeous in every way, the Smart Connect works beautifully, loads of storage and microSD, chipset is perfect good for all-but the most demanding, decent enough promise of support going forward, the speakers sound great on balance, it's got a super camera setup, IP ratings galore - even Military compliance - and the makings of some great AI features which evolve as we go along - which I'm sure will feature in every update. Yes I can whine about lack of Qi Charging and Always on Display but Moto, no doubt, given their research, most likely think I'm in the minority - and these are my only two quibbles. Otherwise, thoroughly recommended at this price. (This final photo is one of mine demonstrating how the phone looks after a 3rd Party Always on Display has been added - in this case, Peek AOD - Always On Display by Dubiaz, available in the Play Store.)
