Motorola is hoping its £90 Moto E smartphone can kill non-smartphones and disrupt the budget phone market just like its Moto G has for the past six months. Motorola claims its selling point is a handset that is cheap but built to last - so is it really a bargain at just £90?
Since Google’s purchase of the company, Motorola focused its efforts on creating phones to fill the needs of specific groups of users. Its first phone, the Moto X, was critically acclaimed – a flagship phone that wasn’t too big and was packed with innovative features like touchless control. It didn’t sell very well, however.
The Moto G was Motorola’s next phone. It was low-cost, solidly built and with a classy software experience that was great value for £135, a budget smartphone that easily competed with phones twice its price. It sold well, becoming Motorola’s best ever seller, and propelled the company from zero to 6% marketshare in the UK within six months.
The Moto E, then, is Motorola’s lowest-end and likely to be the last Google-owned phone (before the Lenovo purchase completes), something it is openly calling a “feature-phone killer”. It sits underneath the Moto G and aims to be the first smartphone for a group of consumers that have not been able to afford to buy a smartphone before.
A body that doesn’t feel cheap
The Moto E is clearly a modern Motorola smartphone. It is the spitting image of the Moto G, only slightly smaller, and is obviously related to the Moto X.
It feels robust, with very little flex in the body apart from when pressing very hard on the screen, which bends slightly. That solid build makes the phone relatively heavy at 142g, and noticeably heavier than the Nokia Lumia 520 or some other super-budget smartphones.
The Moto E is also relatively thick at 12.3mm deep, but its curved back fits nicely in the palm of the hand. The back is made of a matt black plastic, which is smooth enough to help slide the phone out of bags or pockets, yet grippy enough that it doesn’t fly out of the hand when in use.
A range of coloured backs will become available for those who want to personalise their phone.
Compared with larger smartphones, the curvaceous Moto E is easy to hold and use one-handed. Its 4.3in screen is bigger than the iPhone’s current 4in screen, but the majority of Android phones have screens in excess of 4.5in.
The screen is also very good for a budget smartphone under £90. It is relatively low resolution with a screen density of 256 pixels per inch (ppi), far below the 329ppi screen of the Moto G, but comparable or higher than most of the other phones in its class.
Despite being low resolution, the screen is very good. It is bright, with decent viewing angles and good colour saturation – a cut above most of its competition, including the Nokia Lumia 520. In general use the screen is crisp enough for viewing most text. It is only when you start to look at smaller text on desktop web pages that it becomes hard to read compared to higher resolution phones like the Moto G.
Gorilla Glass covers the Moto E’s screen, making it scratch resistant, while a P2i nano waterproof coating on both the inside and outside of the phone makes it water repellent and splash proof.
Overall, the Moto E feels more premium and expensive than it is, with build quality and features you might not expect on a £90 smartphone.
Specifications
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Screen: 4.3in 540 x 960 qHD display
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Processor: 1.2 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200
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RAM: 1GB of RAM
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Storage: 4GB
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Operating system: Android 4.4 “KitKat”
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Camera: 5-megapixel rear
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Connectivity: Wi-Fi (n), Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS
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Dimensions: 64.8 x 124.8 x 12.3mm
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Weight: 142g
Powerful enough and lasts all day
The Moto E is a low-cost phone and doesn't have as much power as more expensive smartphones. Yet it doesn't feel slow or sluggish.
A Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 1.2GHz dual-core processor makes the Moto E relatively fast and responsive, while 1GB of RAM – typically twice what is available in other smartphone costing less than £100 – allows every app to run without running into memory issues.
The latest version of Google’s Android 4.4 “KitKat” software is designed to run on smartphone with 512MB of RAM, but some apps demand more than that - and so having 1GB of RAM makes a big difference in multitasking and apps performance.
Of course it isn’t going to perform like a current flagship smartphone costing £500-plus, like the HTC One M8 or Samsung Galaxy S5, but the Moto E ticks along perfectly acceptably with minimal lag and even when browsing large websites like the desktop Guardian front page.
Apps also run well, including games, if you can get them installed in the first place, because the biggest corner that has been cut to make the Moto E cost so little is internal storage space.
The Moto E only has 4GB of built-in storage. The user only has access to just over 2GB of that, which means that storage is certainly tight. It has a microSD card slot that can accept cards up to 32GB – easily enough space for music, movies and photos – but for the most part apps need to be installed on the internal 2GB of storage.
While most applications are relatively small, and careful management of which apps need to be installed will mean that the majority of users will not have much in the way of storage issues there are some apps that need much more space than 2GB.
Some games, for instance, download a small program which then downloads a much larger file full of assets for the game. That can often be 1GB on its own, some even larger. While the games will normally run fine once installed, actually installing some games can be a real issue.
Motorola has added a utility to Android that allows apps to be moved to an SD card, but not all apps can be moved and it is a time-consuming, manual process requiring the user to move apps individually.
Motorola promises all-day battery life and in my testing the Moto E lives up to that that promise. The smartphone will last a good day’s worth of fairly heavy use with email constantly arriving via push messaging, about two hours of web browsing, one hour of listening to music via Bluetooth headphones and around 30 minutes of gaming.
The standby time was much longer, lasting a good three days while dropping only around 30% battery.
For the average first-time smartphone buyer the Moto E should easily last two days' average use, if not much more, if left on standby for large periods of the day.
Small, useful tweaks to optimised Android
One of the reasons the Moto E is relatively fast and fluid at loading apps and within the Android software is that Motorola hasn’t added much to the standard Android experience.
As with the Moto G, most of the company’s software development efforts have been spent on optimisation, speeding aspects of the phone up and reducing the Moto E’s overall power consumption, which has paid dividends in the responsive feel of the phone and extended battery life.
The Moto E has full access to the Google Play store with its 1m standard Android apps and runs the latest Android 4.4 “Kitkat” version of the Android software. Motorola will guarantee an update to the next version of Android, which is due to be announced at the Google I/O developer conference at the end of June.
Motorola has added a few bespoke apps, including Motorola Migrate, which helps you transition to the Moto E from other Android smartphones, pulling contacts, call history and text messages, photos and videos wirelessly to your new phone.
Motorola Assist is another useful app that plugs into your calendar, automatically silencing your phone when in meetings or at night, with favourites lists that allow phone calls through if the caller calls twice in quick succession.
Finally, Motorola Alert is worth mentioning as it acts as a panic button, automatically calling emergency contacts or the emergency services, as well as sounding an alarm. The app can send your location to a friend or family member, and send short bursts of pre-defined text like “I’m in danger! I need your help.”.
Poor camera
Along with low storage space, the other corner Motorola cut when getting the price of the Moto E under £90.
It’s a 5-megapixel camera, but it lacks auto-focus, which means that objects in the foreground can appear out of focus if too close. The photos it captures are weak, often lacking colour and detail – not a replacement for a point-and-shoot camera like most more expensive smartphones.
It also lacks a flash, while video capture is limited to standard definition. There is also no front-facing camera, which means selfies and video calling are out, but that is probably not a problem for the target market.
Priced to sell
The Motorola Moto E costs £90 available from 22 May in the UK, but it costs just Rs 6,999 (£70) in India exclusively from Flipkart. It is expected to cost less, in the region of £80, locked to particular mobile phone networks on pay-as-you-go plans.
Verdict: a super-budget smartphone done right
Motorola has done an very good job of balancing price and quality with the Moto E. As a first-time buyer’s smartphone or for emerging markets like India it is both affordable and a great experience, easily being the best smartphone available for less than £90 list price.
The Moto E does have some shortcomings, most notably the poor camera and shortage of internal storage, which a microSD can’t quite fully make up for. But it is solidly build, with a decent for the price screen, all-day battery life and Android that feels fast and fluid, not laggy and bogged down by bloatware.
While the Moto G is still a better phone - and one I would recommend spending the extra £20-40 on - the Moto E is leagues apart from most of its poor sub £100 competition.
For those trying to replace a feature phone with their first smartphone, or for whom most smartphones seem too expensive, the Moto E is a solid smartphone that gets the basics right. And that’s all you can really ask for £90.
Pros: Solid build, microSD card slot, good screen for the price, all-day battery life, cheap
Cons: poor quality camera with no auto-focus, very limited internal storage, 3G-only
Other reviews
• Motorola Moto G: a great budget smartphone for £135
• Google Nexus 5: a flagship Android smartphone for just £300
