Most budget phones - and, annoyingly, quite a few more expensive phones - tend to come with older versions of Android, with only a vague promise of an upgrade at some point. Although the frame rate noticeably dropped on occasion, it was at the very least playable - in fact, I managed to complete the final race in 1st place while waiting for a train to London - something I didn't expect would be possible on such a cheap phone. I was surprised to see that Riptide GP 2 played adequately well too. More demanding tasks such as photo editing with Snapseed was also possible, as was streaming the first series of Pokemon on Netflix. That's thankfully not the case with the Moto E.
That might not seem like a big deal, but underpowered cheap phones can often make even moving around Android clunky, slow and frustrating. Swiping between home screens was lag-free, the camera and messaging apps opened without delay, the keyboard was responsive and kept up with my typing, and pulling down the notifications panel didn't result in any juddering. On the Geekbench test, the E racked up a score of 817 (the Moto G achieved 1,315).īenchmarks aren't everything of course, and I'm happy to report that navigating around the Moto E is swift and enjoyable. Unsurprisingly, benchmark performance by the E was a little below that of the G. It does, however, come with the same 1GB of RAM. It's a 1.2GHz dual-core rather than quad-core chip - a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200, to be specific. The processor has also taken a cut from the Moto G in order to keep costs down. The display generally isn't as good as the Moto G's, which is the best screen you get for the price, but it's still better than the vast majority of displays I've seen for around £80. I did notice that the Moto E's viewing angle wasn't great - tilting the phone away from my line of sight resulted in a little colour distortion.
If you're expecting to play the latest 3D games in glorious high-definition with eye-searingly bright colours, an ultra-budget phone really shouldn't be on your wish list. It's fairly bright too and I've definitely seen worse colour handling on other budget mobiles. Side-by-side with higher resolution phones, you can see a noticeable difference in clarity, but the Moto E's display is at least adequate for the everyday tasks it's designed for.