Like i said, don’t expect too much. Moto E is one of those phones in which you get what you pay for. Nothing more, nothing less. Although Moto E does gives you something more in terms of build quality, it has a Corning Gorilla Glass
protection over its LCD. A feature you won’t find in many smartphones under this price range. It also has qHD display, something you don’t get under 7,000 Rupees. Most of the phones have WVGA display in that price range.
Build & Design Quality
In my unboxing video, i called Moto E, “Fat E” because it’s 12.3 mm thick. The thickest phone that i have used in a while. But Motorola has done a clever job in designing the back of this phone. The front is completely flat, but the it has rounded edges around the back. It gives an illusion of the phone being slimmer than it actually is. You will never notice that it’s 12 mm thick. Clever. It does have a notification LED.
Display
Screen is of qHD resolution. Best you could get around this price, i would say. The viewing angles are good too. But after an angle of tilt the screen starts to lose its colors. For example, If you turn the screen towards left it would start to look a little more yellowish. The Gorilla Glass actually helps in increasing the contrast of this phone. Since the glass is naturally black in colour and the thickness of it is more than ordinary plastic film shields that come on top of most of the phones under this price. It makes the screen somewhat better.
But there’s also a downside of this, even after increasing the brightness to the fullest. The screen won’t look that bright and its hardly visible in sunlight.
Camera
Camera of this phone is downright horrible. It only has fixed focus. The photos taken with this phone are most of the time out of focus. It doesn’t have flash. It doesn’t have secondary camera. It doesn’t even have setting, only a scroll of pre-sets. You can only shoot videos up-to 480p. But it has a option of pausing the video recording instead of stopping it, so that’s a plus point.
Image quality is not that great. It’s full of noise and graininess. Almost all the time the photo is out of focus, so there’s no point in talking about clarity here. I would say the camera is there at the back for the name’s sake. Even for that price, you don’t expect picture quality this bad from a company like Motorola. Below are some still shots and a small video sample in between the review video.
Music & Video
Music quality of this phone is pretty good. The loudspeaker is loud and clear. And in ears, if you use proper quality earphones/headphones. You will be able to hear the deatils, the mids, the lows. And the sound does not distort or tear even at high volume, that’s another good thing about it. The music player has lot of settings from which you choose whatever you like. i will suggest you to turn the ‘audio settings’ off if you want your music to sound natural.
It can play full hd video without any problems and on its qHD screen the videos look very good. It doesn’t slow down while playing a full hd video. The front loudspeaker is very good for watching videos without earphones.
OS & Storage
It runs on Android 4.4.2 KitKat. And because of that the phone doesn’t lag despite of being not that powerful. Kitkat is designed to work great on phones with mild specifications. The OS is stock android no customization by Motorola on top of it. That’s a good thing. But software optimizations is one thing and raw hardware power is other.
Storage wise it has 1GB of RAM out of which 400MB is always available for the user. And out of 4GB total internal memory, 2.2GB is available for the user. It supports Move to SD feature so you won’t have much problem in terms of storage with this phone. It is guaranteed a future update by Motorola/Google.
Connectivity
Connectivity wise, it has 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 Also you can connect your smart TV with it easily with its ‘Cast’ feature under display options in settings. WiFi connectivity is quick and it does not lose signal that easily. It also has dual sim. Call quality is pretty good thanks to its big earpiece and loudspeaker in the front.
Performance & Battery life
Performance is one thing of this phone about which i am a little skeptical. Since this phone doesn’t have any raw processing all its relying on to run smooth is the software optimizations. In the long run when the apps will get more demanding it will fall short. Even right now, only those games that are optimized for this chipset or GPU runs great on this phone. They occasionally lag though. It only has a dual core Cortex A7 processor and Adreno 302. You will have an excuse of price though.
Battery life of this phone depends on you, just like any other phone’s. It depends on how you use it. You can empty the battery in just 5 hours by playing games on it constantly or you could get a full day out of it by using it wisely. The average time, i can give you is around 7-8 hours. The battery is 1980mAh by the way.
Choice
If you only have 7,000 rupees in spare to spend on a smartphone. What choices do you have? Very few. This Moto E is good phone especially at the price it is available at. For its positive it has great build and music quality. But camera quality is very bad. Then again, you have to compromise on to something. You can not have everything, you know. Especially under that price. The other choices you have are Karbonn Titanium S1 Plus and Lava Iris 406q. My pick would be Moto E over those phones though solely because of its build quality.