Motorola Edge 50 Fusion Review: This might be one of the best-value phones for 2024

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion Intro

Table of Contents:

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion Specs

Gorgeous, curvy, with reflections

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion Design and Display

Cheap materials but beautiful and durable design

 

The Edge 50 Fusion looks good, despite being made of non-premium materials. It comes either in vegan leather (silicone polymer) or plastic with a matte finish. The frame is also plastic, and it is very thin on the sides where the curved glass of the display and the curved back panel meet.

Despite the plasticky build, Motorola has managed to get an IP68 water and dust certification for the Edge 50 Fusion, which is something you typically see only on flagship devices.

Its thin formfactor, as well as the fact that it is lightweight, made the Edge 50 Fusion much more comfortable to hold for me compared to other phones. We have the matte finish version here at the office, but I image that it is even more comfortable to hold with the vegan leather back that is less prone to slip.

The phone has a long and narrow body, measuring at 6.37 x 2.88 x 0.31 inches (161.9 x 73.1 x 7.9 mm).

As for the Edge 50 fusion colors, here’s what you have to choose from:

The one you see in this review is the Forest Blue option.

As usual, Motorola is quite generous with its Edge series and gives buyers a charger in the box with the Edge 50 Fusion. You also get a pretty nice coloured case that fits the color option you went for and, of course, a USB-C cable.

The display is one of the strongest characteristics with Motorola’s Edge phones, and that’s true for the Edge 50 Fusion as well. The lengthy 1080 x 2400 pixels OLED screen is a joy to feast your eyes upon, with great contrast levels and vivid colours. Games look eye watering, with punchy visuals and a smooth 144Hz frame rate (if supported by the game).

Something that might annoy some users is the curved nature of the display, which can create reflections that sometimes become distracting, somewhat taking away from everything else that makes the image quality of this screen good.

The good news is that the brightness levels were high enough for me to use the phone under direct sunlight, which is not something you see in all phones from this price range. Additionally, protecting the display is Gorilla Glass Victus 5, which is strong but we would still slap on a screen protector as curved glass tends to be more prone to breaking.

Our display lab tests showed us that the cheaper Edge 50 Fusion has as nice of a display as its more premium Edge 50 Pro variant, and a better one than the predecessor. It even beats the Galaxy A35 5G by a landslide.

Embedded in the display you have an accurate fingerprint reader that was quick enough to unlock the phone from its sleep state. It usually took less than a second to go to my home screen after placing my finger.  

There’s also face unlock, but I wouldn’t recommend using that safety biometric as it doesn’t offer any meaningful benefits in this case.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion Camera

Very impressive, especially for taking photos

The Edge 50 Fusion scored high on our comprehensive PhoneArena Camera Score, the Edge 50 Ultra scored well for photo quality, and not so well in our video tests. But let’s first take a quick look at the full Edge 50 Fusion camera specs:

• Main (wide): 50MP, f/1.9 aperture, Optical Image Stabilization (OIS)
• Ultra-wide: 13MP, f/2.2, Autofocus
• Front: 32MP, f/2.5

Frankly, for a phone that goes for €399/£349, the Edge 50 Fusion shoots photos that look amazing! Especially impressive is the HDR performance, which is so good that even in the most difficult conditions the camera manages to capture more detail in the very dark and bright areas without making the image dull-looking.

A lot of this is probably thanks to the new AI camera algorithms Motorola introduced with its Edge 50 series, which the even the lower tier Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 supports.

What’s more, the main 50MP camera produces sharp and clear photos without excessive post processing, which is also true for the 32MP front-facing camera. Things start to fall off (rather obviously), whenever you want to digitally zoom in, but that’s to be expected given the lack of a dedicated telephoto camera.

The macro mode is also pretty good, although images will mostly look good only on smaller phone screens as there is not a lot of resolution in them.

Video Quality

The Edge 50 Fusion can take video at a maximum of 4K 30fps and 1080p at 120fps with the main camera. The selfie camera can shoot at 4K 30fps and 1080p at 30fps.

The audio recording is not the best out there, but what’s even worse is the lag we experienced when switching to the ultra-wide camera. Hopefully Motorola fixes that as it makes recording with the secondary camera absolutely abysmal.

Stabilization is alright if you are stationary, but not good enough to fix more shaky footage if you move around a lot.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion Performance & Benchmarks

Sufficiently powerful

The Edge 50 Fusion comes with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7s Gen 2—a mid-range chipset that packs a punch despite its status. The phone was capable enough to handle League of Legends Wild Rift at high settings and 60FPS, so you shouldn’t have any trouble playing most other games with it.

Using other applications such as Lightroom Mobile and CapCut also proved to fit inside the phone’s capabilities without any significant hiccups. The camera app is a bit slow to operate, but we attribute that to the slow internal storage than the Snapdragon chipset.

Performance Benchmarks:

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 inside the Edge 50 Fusion offers a decent performance upgrade over last year’s Edge 40 Neo. That is most true when we look at the multi-core benchmark results and a little less so when it comes to the graphical performance.

You can get the Edge 50 Fusion in two RAM/storage combos, either 12/256GB or 12/512GB. The RAM is LPDDR5, which is not the best out there but it is pretty close and plenty fast. The storage is UFS 2.2, though, which is a bit on the cheaper side and is pretty bad at power-efficiency and read/write speeds compared to the UFS 3.1 storage on the Galaxy A35 5G. Still, the older storage type is far from a deal breaker.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion Software

Regarding the UI and Motorola’s custom Android skin, it is mostly the same experience you would get from a Google Pixel phone. That said, you still get some extra features such as Motorola’s gestures to quickly turn on the camera or the flashlight.

Our battery tests showed us that the Edge 50 Fusion has somewhat better battery life compared to its predecessor, the Edge 40 Neo, lasting longer especially during our gaming battery test. That said, the Galaxy A35 5G beat it by about 2 hours for the web browsing and 3D gaming battery tests.

Charging-wise, the Edge 50 Fusion comes with 68W fast wired charging, which makes it one of the quickest to charge phones in its price range.

Sadly, you don’t get wireless charging with the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion, but at least you can top up super quickly. 

Should you buy it?

There aren’t a lot of bad things we would say about the Edge 50 Fusion from Motorola. It will leave most users happy with its impressive camera system, flagship-level display and powerful chipset. It even comes with outstanding water and dust resistance.

Even some of its strongest competition, like the Galaxy A35 5G, cannot hold a candle to it, with only one year more of software support and a glass back panel as the two main benefits. Well, there’s also the somewhat better battery life.

But even if we have to address the worst part about the Edge 50 Fusion, which is its disappointing battery life, the fact that it comes with 68W of fast charging elevates that issue for the most part.

If I was looking for a phone in this price range I would have no issue with picking the Edge 50 Fusion as my daily driver and hold onto it for at least a couple of years or for the full three-year software support period. Motorola really hit the mark with this affordable mid-ranger.