Motorola Edge 30 Fusion: A solid budget phone (review)

The Motorola Edge 30 Fusion is in a weird middle ground where it’s too expensive to be budget, and not fancy enough to be actually fancy. At $899 it’s in a difficult no-man’s land where you can get a Google Pixel 6A for $150 less, a Google Pixel 7 for $100 more and a Samsung Galaxy A72 for $100 less. You could even get an iPhone SE for $180 less, or an iPhone 12/iPhone 13 Mini for $150 more if you wanted to go the iOS route.

At $899 it’s well-priced, and has a couple of stand-out features. But at that price is it still worth moving away from the current big names in phones, which promise more OS updates for fewer dollars?

Details: Motorola Edge 30 Fusion

Australian website	Motorola
Price (RRP)	$899
Warranty	1 year
Other	Read more mobile reviews on GadgetGuy

First Impressions: Motorola Edge 30 Fusion

At first look, taking the price out of the equation, I quite like the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion. It’s thin, attractive enough, and does everything you need a phone to do. It is neither thrilling nor lacklustre, it’s just exactly what you would expect a mid-level Android phone to be in 2022.

Specs

Operating System	Android 12
Internal storage	128GB built-in
Processor	Snapdragon 888 + 5G
Memory (RAM)	8GB LPDDR5
Sensors	Proximity, Ambient light, Gyroscope, Accelerometer, SAR sensor, Magnetometer (Compass)
Battery size	4400mAh
Resolution	FHD+ (2400 x 1080) 402ppi
Camera	50MP

Design

The Motorola Edge 30 Fusion has a really nice design. The width of this thing is made to be held comfortably. While the wider screens of larger iPhones and the Samsung S22 Ultra make for more impressive landscape viewing and photography, the narrowness of the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion makes it super comfortable. Yet it’s still wide enough for a mostly-enjoyable typing experience using the on-screen keyboard.

The edge-to-edge screen looks sleek and more expensive than the $899 price tag, and the silky matte finish on the back provides a little grip without adding stickiness, while still feeling premium.

You can also get a variant with a faux leather back. Though, having seen how faux leather phone cases get sticky and gross after six months of heavy use, I would be hesitant to get that built onto the actual phone itself.

The lock/power and volume buttons on the right-hand side are easy to access, though they feel flimsy to press, are too thin, and appear to have been placed at random. But they’re fine enough.

The only thing I don’t like is the appearance of the camera bump. The two large cameras look nice, but the thickness of the bump just looks a bit tacky. I would’ve preferred the whole phone to be a bit thicker, which would have made it more comfortable to hold horizontally. But, that’s just a personal preference thing rather than an objective flaw.

Packaging

The design of the packaging is nice. Motorola is really trying to seem as eco-friendly as possible with the recycled packaging and big “eco-friendly packaging” branding everywhere. Having eco-friendly packaging is really great, but it’s difficult to not side eye it as greenwashing, as the phone itself doesn’t appear to be particularly eco-friendly, and the mined materials within it are going to be a far more serious ecological problem long term than the packaging was going to be. Something is better than nothing for sure, but this gesture feels closer to the “nothing” end of the scale.

In the box, you get a charger and a wired pair of USB-C in-ear headphones, which is really nice to see in this time of $2,000 phones not coming with chargers. You also get a pre-applied screen protector, which is a great bonus since these less popular phones tend not to get the range of accessories made for them that iPhones and Samsung Galaxies do. Plus, applying screen protectors yourself is horrible. I’m not sure how protective it’s actually going to be, because it’s very thin. It also doesn’t cover the whole screen, and mine was slightly misaligned on the selfie camera, but it’s still better than nothing, and a better application job than I would have done.

Cameras

I’m really, really impressed with the night mode photography on this phone. I took pictures of some flowers in a dark bathroom, and I almost prefer the brightness and colours of the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion compared to the iPhone 14 Pro Max, which is shocking, given the price differences.

However, with regular photography, it often looks overly processed and the colour saturation was off. But what’s weird, though, is that the results were very hit-and-miss. Every now and then I would take a great photo, but just as much I’d get one where some colours were too aggressive with the others too muted, or it would be randomly blurry, or it just wouldn’t save.

I never got a photo that looked like the scene I was looking at with the naked eye. Sometimes it would look better, sometimes it looked worse, and sometimes it didn’t look like anything at all. I could almost forgive that in a budget phone, but once you start playing near $1,000, I expect to be able to rely on an excellent camera, and this wasn’t that.

Battery life

At best I would describe it as “fine”. Most of the time I got a full day’s use, but there were several times I had to charge it by dinner time. On heavy days I felt like I had to carry a battery pack around with me. It’s also weird that an $899 phone doesn’t have wireless charging in 2022.

Is it a good phone for games?

Yes and no. The Snapdragon 888+ chip has more than enough power to run plenty of games, but I found the phone unpleasant to hold and play by itself. The Motorola Edge 30 Fusion is too thin and the screen is a touch narrow to be comfortable to play for a long time, and I couldn’t get as much of a field of view of the game as I’d like.

But, when docked in a BackBone or Razer Kishi mobile gaming controller attachment, that solved most of my problems, and playing Xbox Cloud Gaming titles was really fun. That’s impressive for a phone this well-priced.

Screen

On paper, I’m really impressed by this screen. Sure, it’s plastic substrate instead of glass, but having HDR10+, 144Hz and an OLED display at this price is pretty good.

Looking at it directly, though, it’s not my favourite phone screen by any means. I just don’t like the colour balance and contrast. But for this price point, it’s got some of the best tech available before you start getting into the premium stuff, and the rest comes down to personal preferences and settings.

The screen is nice and responsive from a touch perspective, which made typing and gaming comfortable. One problem is that because the phone is so thin, and the curved edges are so, well, curved, I found that sometimes my hands would press stuff on the sides while I was just trying to hold it, which was frustrating. This could be alleviated with a Pop Socket or similar.

Would I buy the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion?

Maybe, but probably not. It’s not that the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion isn’t a good phone, but because the Google Pixel 6a is arguably an equally good phone that retails for $150 less, and is frequently available at much lower prices than that, under $600. I’ve even seen the Google Pixel 7 for $749.

The Pixel 6a has an IP67 rating as opposed to the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion which is only IP52, so the Pixel is more durable as well as having a better battery life and access to Android 13 (instead of just 12). However, the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion has a slightly faster chip, more RAM, a slightly brighter screen, and a higher megapixel camera. It really depends on what your priority is. Most people aren’t really going to notice the difference much between the two in practice, and in the budget flagship space, a $150 saving is a lot.