Motorola Edge 60 Pro Review: It excels where it matters… and stumbles where it shouldn’t

Motorola Edge 60 Pro Intro

So, with such a price, what does the new Edge 60 Pro have to offer?

Our review score places the Edge 60 Pro right at the average rating for its price class. It is above that average when it comes to battery life, with some small setbacks like the wireless charging, software support, and performance.

Table of Contents:

Motorola Edge 60 Pro Specs

Upgrades on multiple fronts

Let’s start with an overview of the Motorola Edge 60 Pro specs:

Motorola Edge 60 Pro Design and Display

Familiar design and experience, albeit with a new button

A classic Motorola design. | Image by PhoneArena

The Edge 60 Pro continues its predecessor’s slim form factor, with a vegan leather back panel for extra grip and no fingerprints. It is also very light, at just 186 g, and measures 160.7 x 73.1 x 8.2 mm.

Nice and thin. | Image by PhoneArena

The Motorola Edge 60 Pro in its three color variants. | Image credits — Motorola

The Edge 60 Pro comes in Pantone Shadow, Dazzling Blue, Sparkling Grape. We have the Pantone Sparkling Grape, which is very vibrant and rich, and has a more leathery feel to it.

Some goodies in the box. | Image by PhoneArena

While there’s no charger in the box, it’s nice to see a color-matching case to help you protect the phone the moment you unbox it. Other than that, you get the usual USB-C cable and SIM tool.

Brightness levels are high enough for most scenarios. | Image by PhoneArena

The curved edge display of the Edge 60 Pro has stellar image quality, although I still prefer a flat one to avoid those pesky reflections. Still, I watching content on this phone. The colors looked vibrant and, since it is an OLED panel, the contrast was great too.

As for biometrics, the fingerprint reader that’s embedded in the display feels plenty quick and worked well.

Motorola Edge 60 Pro Camera

New ultra-wide camera

A good camera system for the price. | Image by PhoneArena

If we are talking about photography, the camera system on the Edge 60 Pro is a solid performer, with good scores in all of our camera tests. Things start to go a little downhill when we take a look at the phones video recording, though, especially when using the secondary cameras.

As for camera hardware, we have a brand new 50 MP ultra-wide snapper (upgraded from 13 MP) that is also capable of Macro Mode and has auto focus. The main 50 MP image sensor has not changed, but its aperture is now f/1.8 vs f/1.4 on the predecessor. The 10 MP 3x telephoto camera can now also digitally zoom up to 50x.

The selfie camera remains at 50 MP.

The ultra-wide camera is still a little soft, despite its higher resolution, but I like how the phone handles HDR situations — there is plenty of detail both in the highlights and the shadows without the image looking weird.

The 3x telephoto camera is sharp enough to be perfectly usable, and it preserves the color accuracy better than the ultra-wide camera.

The selfie camera does a stellar job, capturing pretty accurate skin tones and pleasantly sharp images (without oversharpening).

Video Quality

As long as you stay still, video quality with the main and telephoto cameras is pretty good. The moment you start moving, though, you notice just how poor the video stabilization is on this phone.

The video quality from the ultra-wide camera, on the other hand, is poor no matter how you are using it, so I wouldn’t recommend it for video.

Motorola Edge 60 Pro Performance & Benchmarks

A truly powerful chipset

Motorola has also upgraded the memory and storage. | Image by PhoneArena

Motorola decided to go with Mediatek for the new Edge 60 Pro, upgrading to the Dimensity 8350 Extreme from the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 that powered the previous generation.

The phone feels snappy during regular use, and it felt capable for mobile gaming, although it did get a bit hot after prolonged use.

The single core CPU performance has increased by about 21% while the multi-core performance has jumped by a more significant 34% compared to last generation.

GPU Performance

In terms of raw graphical performance, the Dimensity 8350 Extreme reached twice as better results in the 3DMark Extreme benchmark. That said, the Edge 60 Pro overheated very easily, which dropped its performance lower than its predecessor due to throttling.

As for memory, you get 12 GB of LPDDR5X RAM (really fast memory) and 512 GB UFS 4.0 of storage, both of which are upgrades over the predecessor, which had LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 2.2 storage.

Motorola Edge 60 Pro Software

Moto AI introduces several tools, all of which we have seen before from other phone manufacturers. You have “Catch Me Up,” which summarizes missed notifications, and “Pay Attention” that can transcribe and summarize conversations in real time. “Next Move” provides contextual suggestions based on your habits, and “Remember This” lets you tag important information for future recall using voice prompts.

The Edge 60 Pro also supports Google’s “Circle to Search”, letting you find information instantly by circling text or images on your screen — a useful addition powered by Google’s visual search capabilities.

As for the software support window, it is still 3 years of Android upgrades and 4 years of security patches.

I didn’t even have to charge the Edge 60 Pro at the end of the day, as it still had about 60% of its battery left before I went to bed, even on weekends when I tend to spend a little more time on things like YouTube videos or gaming.

It seems that the sacrifice Motorola decided to make to achieve this great battery life on the Edge 60 Pro was the charging speeds. Last generation had 125W wired and 50W wireless charging, and this year’s Edge Pro comes with 90W of wired and 15W of wireless.

In our tests, the difference was twice the time when charging the phone via a cable. Frankly, while this is undoubtedly a downgrade, I think it is well-calculated one — 50 minutes to charge to 100% and 30 minutes to get 75% is more than quick enough, especially with such great battery life.

Some downgrades are okay when you compensate with an appropriate improvement. | Image by PhoneArena

Lastly, the reverse-wireless charging has also dropped down from 10W to 5W, but at least it is still there to help you juice up your other gadgets like a pair of earbuds or a smartwatch.

The dual speakers sound pretty good — there’s some depth to the audio and speech is clear. This changes once you go above 70% of the max volume, though, which is when you start to hear distortion.

If you don’t mind the somewhat small distortion, the phone can get very loud, so it’s perfect if you are cooking and want to listen to a podcast or a YouTube video, for example.

The speakers are also good enough to enjoy some music on the go, as long as you don’t max out the volume.

As for haptics, they feel tight on the Edge 60 Pro, although typing can sound rather annoying while the phone vibrates for each tap, which is why I turned haptic feedback for the keyboard off — something I don’t usually do.

Should you buy it?

Make sure you take a look at the competition first. | Image by PhoneArena