Motorola Edge 60 Neo Review: Affordable and dependable

Design

• Light and compact
• Unusually robust
• Interesting colour options

Motorola has chopped and changed the Neo line’s design over recent years, but it might just have settled on one it likes. The Motorola Edge 60 Neo is nigh-on indistinguishable from its predecessor, the Motorola Edge 50 Neo.

At 154.1 x 71.2 x 8.1mm, it sports identical dimensions, though it’s a few grams heavier at 174.5g. That’s still extremely light for a modern phone, doubtless aided by a plastic frame.

This is a very easy phone to live with. Together with Motorola’s grippy faux-leather finish on the back, one-handed usage is on the cards for those with sufficiently large and flexible hands.

Motorola’s partnership with colour grading specialist Pantone continues to bear fruit. There are only three colour options this time around (at least in the UK), rather than four like before, but they offer a nice dose of variety.

We saw my model’s Poinciana shade with the Edge 50 Neo, but it remains a distinctively bold shade of tomato-red. Grisaille (charcoal grey) and Frostbite (icy blue-green) fill out the roster nicely.

For a few years now, Motorola has made some of the most robust cheap phones on the market. The Edge 60 Neo continues this positive trend, adding IP69 certification to the already flagship-standard IP68. It means that you get protection against high-pressure water jets as well as the ability to stand up to full immersion to 1.5 metres for 30 minutes.

Military-grade MIL-STD-810H compliance returns, signifying a phone that can stand up to bumps, scrapes and changing temperatures better than most flagships.

Screen

• 6.36-inch pOLED
• 1200 x 2670 resolution
• 120Hz refresh rate

There was really no need for Motorola to change its display for the Edge 60 Neo, so it hasn’t. Some may find this 6.36-inch pOLED panel to be a little on the tiddly side, but to me it’s all part of the phone’s compact charm.

Pixel peeping is a pleasingly fruitless task at 1200 x 2670, while the colour output is punchy in the default Vivid output mode. You can rein that in to something less eye-scorching by switching to Natural in the Settings menu.

Outdoor legibility is strong for a cheaper phone, while a 3000 nits peak brightness backs up Motorola’s claims that it’s ready for HDR10+ content.

We now expect our phones to hit a nice silky 120Hz refresh rate – even Apple is onboard with this way of thinking (finally) with the iPhone 17 – and the Edge 60 Neo keeps up its part of the bargain. Any scrolling stutters you experience here are likely to be down to the phone’s modest performance, but such instances are relatively minor.

I found the in-display fingerprint sensor to be sufficiently quick and reliable, too.

Camera

• 50MP Sony LYTIA 700C main sensor
• 13MP ultra-wide
• 10MP 3x telephoto

As with the design and the display, Motorola has stuck with a familiar triple-camera set-up for the Edge 60 Neo.

Besides a decent-quality 50MP Sony LYTIA 700C main sensor and a 13MP ultra-wide, that includes a dedicated 10MP 3x telephoto. While it’s more common to see such a zoom provision on a cheaper phone these days, it’s still quite unusual to see one south of £400.

You also get the same 32MP front camera as before.

That main sensor is a reliable performer, turning out reasonably detailed, vibrant shots during the day, with only a touch of overexposure on the unseasonably sunny days I found myself shooting on.

At night, meanwhile, the main camera brightens shots up considerably – occasionally to somewhat uncanny effect – while maintaining sharpness.

The dedicated 3x camera captures decent shots, too, managing to get somewhere close to the tone of the main camera (which crops in for 2x snaps). So-called “super zoom” shots continue to be terrible, however.

Stray remotely north of that 3x optical zoom – even only as far as 6x – and there’s an enormous hit to the sharpness and exposure. All of my 6x, 10x, 20x, and 30x shots came out weirdly dark and seemingly lacking any HDR adjustment. They look so bad, in fact, that I suspect there’s a Camera app bug at play.

As we’ve come to expect from cheaper phones, the 13MP ultra-wide is the weak link here. Shots taken with this camera are softer and lower in detail than with the other sensors, with a more ‘processed’ look.

The 32MP front camera is capable of good things, turning out reasonably rich and detailed selfies – though portrait shots are a bit of a mixed bag. Occasionally, they look good, but they can also misread edge elements, while they seemingly drop the HDR implementation that you otherwise get.

Performance

• MediaTek Dimensity 7400
• 12 GB LPDDR4X
• 256GB storage

Motorola has made a nominal generational upgrade in performance terms with a switch to the MediaTek Dimensity 7400 chip.

This is similar to the chip found in the Motorola Razr 60 foldable, and is ostensibly faster than the Dimensity 7300 chip found in the Motorola Edge 60 Fusion as well as the Motorola Edge 50 Neo.

Run the phone through the usual Geekbench 6 CPU benchmark tool, however, and you’ll find more or less the same level of performance as the older chip.

I’d love to supply some similar context on the GPU front right now, but at the time of writing, our usual GFXBench test had gone the way of the dodo.

Suffice to say, you won’t want to be doing too much heavy gaming on the phone. Destiny: Rising runs, but only on fairly low graphical settings, and not without slowdown when the going gets tough.

Combined with a generous 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM, however, the Motorola Edge 60 Neo is a moderately decent operator. If you come to the phone from a flagship, you’ll notice the odd micro-pause when navigating through the UI or switching between apps, but most people won’t be doing that.

There’s a decent 256GB of storage as standard in the UK model, too, which is most welcome.

Software

• Android 15
• Up to 5 major Android upgrades

Motorola’s custom take on Android is typically lightweight, with a reasonably faithful adherence to Google’s stock OS.

The company does supply its own UI embellishments, such as its own clock widget, wallpapers, and a few of its own apps. But it’s far less obtrusive than with many rival efforts.

The preinstalled Moto app offers a very pleasant way to learn about and access the phone’s unique features, such as Motorola’s Gestures. These let you access the camera with a double twist of your wrist, or the torch with a double chop motion, to name two prominent examples.

Motorola now offers something similar for AI with the appropriately named Moto AI app, gently introducing you to the company’s artificial intelligence tools.

It’ll show you how to generate AI images, create playlists, record and transcribe audio, and more. I wish more manufacturers would adopt something similarly intuitive, especially during these early days of mobile AI assistance when it’s never entirely clear what your phone can do for you.

Elsewhere we could do without some of the bloatware on display, such as the prominently featured Opera web browser – especially when Google’s Chrome also comes pre-installed. Ditto for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Music, TikTok, and the Booking.com app. Who actually uses that last one I wonder?

Motorola’s App recommendation notifications threatened to annoy me early on, but the company does offer you the chance to opt out.

The Motorola Edge 60 Neo is running on an outdated version of Google’s OS in Android 15. However, it also comes with the promise of up to five major Android upgrades. That’s not as good as Google or Samsung, both of which offer up to seven years of updates on their mid-range offerings, but it’s not bad in the wider scheme of things.

Battery Life

• 5200mAh battery
• 68W wired charging
• 15W wireless charging

The Motorola Edge 60 Neo hardware is generally very similar to its predecessor, but there’s been one major point of advancement. You now get a much larger 5200mAh battery, up from just 4310mAh in the Edge 50 Neo.

It’s enough to propel this compact smartphone through a full day of usage without sweating over its remaining power.

An hour of Netflix streaming, with the screen at 50% brightness, sapped just 6% of a charger, which is a good result for a relatively small and lightweight phone such as this. Meanwhile, 30 minutes of light gaming on Slay the Spire ate just 2% of the phone’s charge.

This dramatic increase in battery capacity is the most meaningful improvement here.

Charging remains at 68W wired, which is fairly speedy for a cheaper phone. You don’t get a brick in the box, and you’ll need a TurboCharge-branded charger to hit full speeds, but using a Samsung charger, I was able to get from empty to 37% in 15 minutes, while a full charge took just under an hour.

Even more impressive is the provision of 15W wireless charging. That’s something you don’t see every day in this sub-£400 price category.

Should you buy it?