Motorola One Fusion+ review

Design, build, handling

The Motorola One Fusion+ is a well-built phone with eye-catchy paint and notch-free screen. Since it's a budget device a few cuts had to be made on the way, but everything has come together nicely in the end.

The front is all Gorilla Glass, while the back is one giant plastic piece. Indeed, there is no standalone frame, the rear panel covers both the sides of the phone and its back. We have the Twilight Blue version that it has two different shades of dark blue mixing, with some very discreet S-shaped texture underneath.

Unfortunately, while all these layers of paint and plastic look great, the back is a massive fingerprint magnet, and everything gets ruined quite fast. The bundled case helps, though it takes away from the cool looks. It's a tough decision, we know.

So, the star of the show is surely the 6.5" screen, which Motorola's dubbed Total Vision. It is the second Moto so far with a notch-free design and the name surely suits it. The selfie camera is placed on a motorized pop-up module on top of the Fusion+ and so there was no need for a bunch of pixels to die.

The good news is that indeed this is probably the best way to get a complete immersive viewing experience. But if you have expected a bezel-less screen, you might be disappointed - the One Fusion+ has a noticeably large chin below the display.

Such thick bottom bezels are common in the midrange, especially when the panel is LCD one as it is not as thin as OLED and requires more space for, while its driver is usually hidden below the said chin.

Anyway, for a €299 phone, this is probably the most premium screen you can get with high-resolution, HDR10 support, and cutout-free at that, so we embrace that bezel. In fact, we think it may be better to have it when using the phone single-handedly.

The pop-up module is like the rest of such appendixes we've met - motorized and you can hear the mechanics beneath the thing working when it goes up or down. It contains the 16MP Quad-Bayer selfie camera and nothing else. The module pops only when needed and it is equipped with fall detection and automatically retracts if it detects the One Fusion+ is in free fall.

There is one very tiny earpiece above the screen, almost unnoticeable. Unfortunately, Motorola chose not to put a notification LED light on the Fusion+.

As we mentioned above, the phone has a nearly 1cm thick sides, but the outside frame is part of the rear panel - something we used to call unibody in the past. It is a nice touch, even if it were made as part of cost cutting. Around the sides of the panel you'll find all the keys, the 3.5mm jack and the USB-C port, there is also the hybrid-SIM tray at the top, and the speaker at the bottom.

The Fusion+ features a hardware Google Assistant key above its volume rocker and it does just that - invokes the Assistant. We weren't able to reassign its functionality.

The plastic rear of the Motorola One Fusion+ is beautiful, no two ways about it. The two blue hues transition gracefully, and the subtle S-shaped texture looks really good up closely. If you want to preserve this beaty, regular cleaning is a must as fingerprints love stick and overstay.

The quad-camera is protruding just a little bit and it's done in a 3+1 fashion. The 8MP ultrawide camera is separated above the triple arrangement with the main, macro, and depth snappers. A single-LED flash is around, too.

The One Fusion+ has its fingerprint scanner placed on the back and the Moto logo painted all over it. It's of the always-on kind and works flawlessly.

The Motorola One Fusion+ measures 162.9 x 76.4 x 9.6 mm and weighs about 210g. That's neither the thinners, nor the lighter 6.5-incher, but about what we'd expect for a phone with a large 5,000mAh battery. And while using it we felt it solid, but not hefty or thicker than expected.

The Motorola One Fusion+ feels good in hand, with the case or not, safe and solid, and we liked the time we spent with the Moto. It is a phone with a great build and its water-repellent coating adds even more value to its design. It is a large phone, and if you are fine with that, then you will like it just as easy as we did.