The Motorola Edge 50 Fusion is the best sub-£400 phone I’ve tested this year

The Motorola Edge 50 Fusion was something of a surprise to me. While the Lenovo-owned brand has always been a firm favourite in our best budget phone rankings, anything priced over £300 has been a little hit-and-miss for the past few years. For every Motorola Edge 30 Ultra – another surprise that offered flagship-level quality for a very keen price – we’ve had an Edge 50 Pro, which is decent but I felt couldn’t live up to its price.

So when I ran the Edge 50 Fusion through testing, I was expecting something serviceable, at best. As it turns out, everything that I found wrong with the Pro model is essentially inverted here, offering a level of quality and breadth of features that far exceeds what I’d expect for the money. There are a few wobbles along the way but they are nowhere near enough to keep the Edge 50 Fusion from being one of the best mid-range phones around.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review: What you need to know

With both Pro and Ultra variants in play this year, the Edge 50 Fusion is no longer the middle-ground entry. That makes its Fusion name slightly less apt but I think that this phone works better as a lower mid-range option.

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset is a solid pick for this price range and it’s paired with a decent 12GB of RAM and 256GB of non-expandable storage. The battery is a 5,000mAh unit that can be charged up via the speedy 68W charger bundled in the box.

The display is a 6.7in AMOLED panel, with a 2,400 x,1,080 resolution and a slick 144Hz refresh rate. Beneath the screen is the 32MP (f/2.5) selfie camera, while the rear array comprises a 50MP (f/1.9) main lens and a 13MP (f/2.2) ultrawide shooter.

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Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review: Price and competition

The Motorola Edge 50 Fusion is retailing for £350, which is a fair drop from the last Fusion model – 2022’s Edge 30 Fusion cost £500 at launch. That puts it in line with the likes of the Nothing Phone (2a), which is currently £349 for the 256GB model. Nothing’s mid-range handset has terrific battery life and a uniquely stylish design but middling performance and colour accuracy.

Samsung has the Galaxy A35 5G around this price (£389 for the 256GB version) and once again performance isn’t amazing, but the main camera is decent and battery life isn’t bad, either. Finally, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro originally retailed for £339 but can currently be had for just £253. Its strengths include a terrific display and solid speed but battery life doesn’t impress and the software is fairly cluttered.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review: Design and key features

Despite the dramatically lower price, the Edge 50 Fusion still looks the part. The curved display, slim edges and unibody rear with its subtle camera bump are all very similar to the much pricier Edge 50 Pro – though the rear panel lips out ever so slightly on the sides, meaning you can feel small ridges when holding the phone. It’s relatively minor as design flaws go, and I quickly got used to it, but some may find it less comfortable than smoothly rounded edges.

There are three colour options available and interestingly, each has its own rear material. The Forest Blue model I was sent has a frosted plastic rear matched with a glossy camera bump, the Hot Pink style is covered in vegan suede and the Marshmallow Blue is coated in vegan leather. The difference is purely aesthetic, however, as all three get the same IP68 dust and water-resistance rating and a layer of Gorilla Glass 5 over the display – both notably robust for such a cheap phone, I might add.

We don’t get a 3.5mm headphone jack or microSD card slot, but there are the Edge series’ side-mounted LED notification strips to help you see different types of alerts when the phone is face down. Biometrics are also present and correct, with an optical fingerprint sensor underneath the display and facial recognition courtesy of the selfie camera.

The Edge 50 Fusion launches with Android 14 and Motorola’s Hello UI pasted on top. This is one of the cleaner Android variants you can get outside of Google’s stock version and usually goes easy on the bloatware – though, Motorola is pushing its luck here, with no fewer than ten pre-installed mobile games. The manufacturer has pledged three years of OS updates and four years of security patches, which is fine for this price. If you want better you’ll need to fork out a further £150 to get the Google Pixel 8a and its seven years of software support.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review: Display

The 144Hz refresh rate is arguably overkill, but it lends credence to my theory that Motorola has simply poached this AMOLED display from a more expensive phone. The 2,400 x 1,080 resolution is the only part that feels like it’s from a £350 phone, everything else dramatically overperforms for the price. Brightness reached an impressive peak of 491cd/m2 and went even higher on the adaptive setting, hitting 1,204cd/m2 with a torch on the light sensor.

Colour accuracy is terrific, as well. The Edge 50 Fusion supports Motorola’s latest trio of colour profiles: Vivid and Radiant both dial up the saturation to make streaming and gaming punchier, while Natural hits sRGB coverage of 98.7%, with a total volume of 103.3%. With the average Delta E colour variance score, the target is 1 or under, so the Natural profile’s result of 1.01 is bang on the money.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review: Performance and battery life

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset is solid enough and it sees the Edge 50 Fusion performing competently alongside the competition – not storming ahead but not lagging behind either. Only the Nothing Phone (2a) struggles to keep up, with the Edge 50 Fusion outpacing it by around 14% in the multi-core test.

Interestingly, the Nothing Phone (2a) makes up for its lacklustre CPU performance by hitting the best frame rates of the selection in both the on-screen and off-screen portions of the GFXBench tests. The Edge 50 Fusion is level with the rest of the competition in the off-screen component and a handful of frames better than the Xiaomi in the on-screen component.

In use, the Fusion doesn’t deliver seamless performance with demanding 3D games but is more than sufficient for more casual content like Candy Crush and Solitaire. I even got Asphalt 9: Legends running fairly smoothly, albeit on the lowest graphical settings.

I was extremely suspicious of the Edge 50 Fusion’s battery life result, not least because the Redmi Note 13 Pro uses the same processor and underperformed here, but after running it again I achieved the same fantastic result of just over 27 hours. That has it joining the Nothing Phone (2a) on our best phone battery life list. 

Things continue to look good after the battery dies, because 68W is some of the fastest charging you can get for this price. Using the provided plug, I juiced the battery up to 50% in around 15 minutes and on to full in less than 40.

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Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review: Cameras

The 50MP (f/1.9) main camera is another of the Edge 50 Fusion’s strengths. It doesn’t quite match the level of quality that we saw with the Google Pixel 8a, but for a sub-£400 phone, this is a cut above.

In good lighting conditions, the main camera produces wonderfully vibrant images packed with detail – the red building especially has some terrific definition in its brickwork, despite the sun being behind it.

I was also quite impressed with the main camera’s performance in low light. There’s a loss of detail further in the background but things generally look crisp, especially in the reflections and buildings on the right side, and the sky is relatively free of visual noise.

I’m pleased to see that Motorola hasn’t wasted real estate on a superfluous third lens, keeping the 13MP (f/2.2) ultrawide shooter as the only secondary lens. However, even as the only backup camera, this lens performs okay at best. Colours are maintained fairly well but the detail level isn’t great, particularly towards the edges.

Video is fairly standard, shooting in 1080p up to 60fps or 4K at 30fps, with solid quality and decent handling of exposure transitions. The electronic stabilisation naturally isn’t as bulletproof as Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS) but for this price, it’s more than acceptable.

Motorola Edge 50 Fusion review: Verdict

The fact that a lot of my criticisms here are that certain elements are merely okay, rather than outstanding, says a lot about the Edge 50 Fusion. The general build, display and battery life all speak to a much more premium phone, while the performance and camera quality may not be as impressive but are still very respectable.

The argument could be made that anyone with a more flexible spending limit should consider pushing a little higher and picking up our favourite mid-range phone, the Google Pixel 8a. The cameras are better, you get access to Gemini AI and software support is more extensive. If, however, you’ve got a strict budget of £400, I’m struggling to find any alternatives that will serve you better than the Motorola Edge 50 Fusion: it’s a whole lot of phone for a very tempting price.