Motorola Edge 20 Fusion Review - Great in nearly every aspect

Over two months after its launch in India, Motorola Edge 20 Fusion has finally landed in the Philippines. 

Meet the Motorola Edge 20 Fusion

To recap, it features the premium-look, 5G-ready MediaTek 800U processor, 108MP main camera, and 90Hz refresh rate screen. For cameras, it has a triple camera setup with Ultra Pixel technology featuring 108MP f/1.9 main sensor + 8MP f/2.2 118-degree ultra-wide-angle sensor + 2MP f/2.4 depth sensor with LED flash. For selfies, it has a 32MP f/2.3 camera.

It runs Android 11 out of the box. It also has a 3.5mm headphone jack, dual-band WiFi, 5G, 4G LTE, GPS, A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, NFC, and FM Radio.

But, why do we say it's only near perfect at this price point? Let's find out.

Unboxing/Accessories

The accessories

The Motorola Edge 20 Fusion arrives in a navy blue box with silver-colored branding on different sides. Inside, you'll get the following: handset, TurboPower 30W charger, USB Type-A to Type-C cable, protective case, SIM card tool, and paper manual. 

Classy, minimalist box

What's missing is a pre-installed screen protector. But, we are not complaining. This is a near-complete package.

Build Quality/Design

Moto Edge 20 Fusion in Electric Graphite

Right out of the box, the Moto Edge 20 Fusion greets us with a premium design and bulky build. Upon closer inspection, we see that it's made up of plastic and glass. It has a noticeable subtle glitter design on its sides.

The camera hump has a plastic frame and a glass-like cover as well.

There's no mention of protection on the screen. But, the Edge 20 Fusion is IP52 rated for dust and water resistance.  

Blue-ish effect pops up when light falls on the back

The Moto Edge 20 Fusion is available in Cyber Teal and Electric Graphite color options at the back with a curved design and frosted glossy matte-like finish (to lessen fingerprint smudges). We are using the latter one in our review. However, only the Electric Graphite colorway will be available in the local market (for now).

Modern design, just choose the right color for you!

The Electric Graphite looks gray most of the time but a hint of blue pops up as soon as the light falls on its back. Personally, this paint finish looks a bit full for me and I might like the flashier Cyber Teal variant better if it. But, for those who wanted a simpler look, go for Electric Graphite.

As mentioned, it has a square camera hump housing the three sensors and LED flash. It also has a minimal Motorola logo at the back as well.

The device spans a 6.7-inch 10-bit OLED screen with a 2400 x 1080 FHD+ resolution, 90Hz refresh rate, HDR10+ support, and 393 ppi pixel density. It also has a center punch-hole and right above it is the earpiece. It also features a fairly large bezel on the bottom and thin bezels on the rest of the sides.

Hybrid SIM tray

In case you're wondering, the handset has a hybrid SIM + SD card slot. This means that users can use either two SIMs or one SIM + one microSD card expandable up to 512GB.

Top and bottom

Left and right

On top is the primary microphone while the 3.5mm headphone jack slot, USB-C charging slot, secondary microphone, and grille speaker are on the bottom. 

The power button/side-mounted fingerprint scanner and volume buttons sit on the right side while the dedicated Google Assistant button and hybrid slot tray are on the left.

The device measures 166 x 76 x 8.3 mm making it quite handy to hold with one hand for swiping and viewing. For typing, a two-handed operation is likely required if you won't switch to the one-handed mode feature. At 8.3 mm, this is fairly thin for a device with a 108MP camera and 5,000mAh juice.

It doesn't feel too heavy even if held on one hand at 185 grams.

Multimedia Experience

The 6.7-inch 10-bit OLED display looks stunning on Edge 20 Fusion!

The 6.7-inch 10-bit OLED display and a 90Hz screen refresh rate is probably the best screen we've tested at this price point. It is a feast in the eyes whether for binge-watching or playing games. The display is packed with punchy colors, the right amount of contrast, and sharpness.

In the display settings, there's an option to lower the refresh rate to 60Hz (for better battery life), turn on Dark Theme, Night Light, Adaptive Brightness, Peek Display, color profile (saturated vs natural), and temperature, among others. 

One of the better displays we tested so far for the mid-range segment!

The screen can get extremely bright and is easily readable under direct sunlight. As expected, it supports 10 points of multitouch and we didn't notice a delay, misread taps, or gestures.

Bulky design but easy on the hands

The single bottom-firing speakers produce a fairly loud sound. It can fill up to a medium-sized room and doesn't suffer from noticeable distortion at the loudest volume. However, the speakers could've been better if they were stereo. On the other hand, the microphone is clear with decent noise cancellation.

The speakers are not stereo unlike some similarly priced phones though.

Cameras

Triple rear camera setup

The Moto Edge 20 Fusion sports a triple camera system of 108MP main camera, 8MP ultra-wide + macro vision lens, and a 2MP depth sensor plus an LED flash. 

The stock camera app has the following features: video, photo, portrait, cutout, spot color, night vision, cinemagraph, panorama, group selfie, live filter, pro, dual capture, slow motion, and timelapse. 

The spot color and dual capture features are available for both photo and video modes.

Rear Camera Samples

Gloomy outdoor

Gloomy outdoor wide

Daylight 2

Daylight wide 2

Daylight 3

Gloomy outdoor portrait

Macro

Indoor

Indoor 2

Low light with LED flash

Night vision

The 108MP primary snapper is a stunner on paper, however, in real-world results, the results are okay. In daylight, the Moto Edge 20 Fusion shoots natural-looking and sharp images with a decent dynamic range. Even so, we're expecting a better output.  

For indoors, it produces slightly saturated photos. This comes in handy for photos taken against the light. Maybe the Edge 20 Fusion is making the photos look brighter in indoor settings by default but we're expecting different results.

Good camera hardware, inconsistent results

With a human subject, the portrait mode shoots saturated photos as well with decent edge detection. 

In low light, the night mode comes in handy. It aids in exposure and the details are more evident. Although the LED flash might also be an extra hand for some.

Overall, the Moto Edge 20 Fusion rear cameras are not the best but not bad either. The inconsistency in the images is very much noticeable and we're hoping that Moto can fix this through future updates.

32MP front shooter

In front, the center punch-hole houses the 32MP selfie camera. It carries all the modes similar to the main camera's.

Selfie Camera Samples

Daylight selfie

Daylight portrait selfie

Indoor selfie

Indoor selfie beautified

Indoor selfie portrait

Indoor selfie with screen flash

Indoor portrait with artificial light

Gloomy outdoor selfie

Gloomy outdoor portrait selfie

Gloomy outdoor selfie with screen flash

Low light selfie with night vision and screen flash

The selfie shooter produces detailed images with decent sharpness and vibrancy under the daylight setting. The Portrait mode has a nice separation. Users have the option to toggle the level of the blur. 

As for the indoor selfies, the images are nice as well. The lack of colors is a little noticeable but not to the point that it's bothering. The portrait mode works well on indoor selfies, too. The beautification feature is a little overdone as seen in the selfie sample above. 

There's no way you can use auto shoot in taking selfies in low light mode. Good thing the night vision and screen flash works well together. 

Notably, when we took a point and shoot selfie indoors, the Moto Edge 20 Fusion automatically produced a beautified copy of the image, hence the beautified selfie camera sample above.

Overall, the Moto Edge 20 Fusion's selfie camera produced nice images although some inconsistencies are still noticeable. One example is the oversaturated gloomy outdoor selfie that I took with the aid of the screen flash.

For videos, the main camera can shoot up to 4K 30fps and 1080P 30fps in front. Users can also shoot slow-mo with a 240fps frame rate. There is no OIS in recording on either end. But, it has EIS to provide software-based stabilization.

Note: Video samples will be added to this article soon.

Performance

Sustained performance!

As mentioned, the Motorola Edge 20 Fusion is powered by MediaTek Dimensity 800U 5G SoC. It is a 7nm chip comprising two Arm Cortex-A76 processors clocked at 2.4GHz and six Arm Cortex-A55 processors with a clock speed of 2GHz. It is paired with Arm Mali-G57 GPU with an independent AI processing unit (APU).

It also has 6GB/8GB LPDDR4x RAM, 128GB of UFS 2.2 storage expandable up to 512GB.

The following are the benchmark scores we got: AnTuTu - 369,785 and GeekBench - 576 Single-Core & 1744 Multi-Core. In the 3DMark Wild Life benchmark, the phone managed an impressive 1611 overall score and an average frame rate of 9.60. 

The benchmark scores

The scores are at par with expectations and these translated into sustained performance in real-life usage.

Smooth and sustained performance!

It may not be equipped with the speedier MTK Dimensity 1100 or the SD870 SoC, but Motorola Edge 20 Fusion gave us a smooth performance for the most part. We didn't experience hiccups throughout our test in the last two weeks.

Besides, Dimensity 800U is faster and way better than the SD720G of Galaxy A52 4G from Samsung. It is also better than the usual Dimensity 700 or 720G from other affordable 5G mid-range phones.

So, games like Call of Duty and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang loads quickly with no speed issues. Below are the default settings we got upon opening these mobile games:

Call of Duty settings on Moto Edge 20 Fusion

The face unlock and a side-mounted fingerprint scanner is present. Both are responsive and we appreciate the fingerprint scanner since it's more usable these days because face masks are required. 

Of course, we can't forget about its battery. The Motorola Edge 20 Fusion packs a 5,000mAh battery paired with 30W charging via USB-C port. There is no wireless charging support. 

PCMark Battery Test score

In our PCMark battery test, it clocked a total of 18 hours and 27 minutes. Meanwhile, in real-life usage, the Edge 20 Fusion was able to last more than a day under moderate usage comprised of casual texts and calls, social media and web browsing, a little gaming, and music playback.

Long battery life!

Charging using the 30W in-box charger takes almost an hour from flat to full. 

Battery settings

In terms of connectivity, the Moto Edge 20 Fusion has support for multiple 5G bands. It also has dual-band WiFi, NFC, Bluetooth 5.0, and a 3.5mm headphone jack一all of which worked well. We were able to test its 5G capacity using a Smart Postpaid SIM, and the result is as follows:

5G speed test!

Notably, it has a built-in FM Radio which comes in handy during brownouts and other instances. It works using 3.5mm headphones, wireless Bluetooth, or even via loudspeaker! Moto Edge 20 Fusion has no antenna but the headphones, when plugged in, act as an antenna for the radio.

FM Radio is present!

In our experience, the signal is good with headphones plugged in and it even has a record button in case you need it. Using the FM Radio via loudspeaker gives us low audio and signal quality. 

As mentioned above, the Edge 20 Fusion runs on Android 11 out of the box and offers a clean experience with a stock-ish look. It comes with only 35 pre-installed apps of which 25 apps are from Google's suite, some of which are uninstallable. The software experience is overall smooth and fast.

Moto Edge 20 Fusion runs on Android 11

For our nitpicks, we wish this smartphone has wireless charging support. We also hope that the camera inconsistency is improved through future updates. It could've also been better if it has an in-display fingerprint scanner unlike most phones with OLED screens.

Pros - 10-bit 90Hz FHD+ OLED panel, 5G support, great battery life with fast charging, clean stock-ish Android 11, capable performance, IP52 rating

Cons - Inconsistent cameras, no stereo speakers, no In-Display fingerprint scanner

Motorola Edge 20 Fusion Specs

Display: 6.7-inch 2.5D curved 10-bit OLED screen w/ 90Hz refresh rate FHD+ 2400 x 1080 resolution at 393 ppi

CPU: 2.4GHz 7nm MediaTek Dimensity 800U 5G octa-core processor

GPU: Mali-G57 MC3

RAM: 8GB LPDDR4X

ROM: 128GB UFS 2.2

Back Camera: 108MP f/1.9 w/ PDAF, EIS + 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide angle + 2MP f/2.4 depth sensor + LED flash 

Selfie Camera: 32MP f/2.3

Battery: 5,000mAh w/ 30W fast charging

OS: Android 11

Connectivity: WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4GHz/5GHz), 5G, 4G LTE, Bluetooth 5.0 A2DP LE, A-GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, dual SIM

Sensors: Accelerometer, light, orientation, proximity, gyroscope, sound, magnetic

Others: Side-mounted fingerprint scanner, face unlock, IP52 water and dust resistance, USB-C, Colors: Electric Graphite, Cyber Teal

Dimensions: 166 x 76 x 8.3 mm

Weight: 185 g

Price: PHP 16,995

Verdict

Near-perfect mid-ranger

The Motorola Edge 20 Fusion is nearly great in every aspect for the price. 

This handset can easily be recommended to anyone looking for a good mid-range device at this price point. 

It packs a smooth and crisp display, sustained performance, great battery life, clean software, and of course 5G connectivity. However, it could've been superb only if the cameras were consistent. Bu,t we're really looking forward that it can be addressed through future updates.

Do you agree with us?

In case you're eyeing to get this, Motorola is having a week-long bundle promo! From October 15 to 21, the Moto Edge 20 Fusion gets PHP 1,000 off which means you can score it for only PHP 15,995.

During this week, every purchase of this handset also comes with the following freebies: Lenovo S2 Smartwatch (worth PHP 2,995) and Lenovo HT28 Headset (worth PHP 1,995).

Follow Motorola Philippines on Facebook for more details. To purchase official products, shop from authorized mobile resellers nationwide and Motorola flagship stores on Lazada and Shopee.

Build/Design - 4

Multimedia Experience - 4.25

Cameras - 4

Performance - 4.25

Average - 4.19/5