While the design is familiar, Motorola has brought one new thing to the table with a removable band around the edge. This plastic band — which looks a little like a frame for the phone — covers the slots and provides the buttons, and it can be removed rather simply.
In fact, Motorola even made the bands one of those things you could customise, with different colours possible.
Or there would be customisation of the bands, anyway, if Motorola had supported it locally, which it doesn’t appear to be doing. If you want to replace these, you’re going to want to order them from that internet thing people are always talking about (us included).
Under this band, you’ll find a few useful slots, too, with a microSD slot to expand that 8GB storage — yay! — and two microSIM slots.
Two SIM card slots mean this phone supports two networks or two accounts at the same time, which could prove useful if heading overseas or using different accounts for different services, such as one for voice and text and another for data.
And data speeds will be quite nice, with 4G offered in the Moto E 2015 edition handset.
We saw speeds ranging from 13 to 50Mbps on the Telstra 4GX network, and that’s a pretty clear indication that this device will offer at least Category 3 speeds of 100Mbps, though that will be something dependent on your network provider, of course, as well as your location.
That’s a huge improvement over last year’s 3G-only Motorola E, and that’s not the only area the handset maker has improved on, either, with the specs getting a once over, too.
Unfortunately, while Motorola might have taken the time to update the specs, the system performance of the 2015 E isn’t far off the mark from last year’s E, resulting in a phone that has the potential to operate efficiently, but most of the time doesn’t.
As such, you may find quite a few slow downs when getting to use the new E, which should be faster, and sometimes even feels faster, but often generally comes crashing to a halt and making you wait for the processor and operating system to catch up to you.
Take opening Chrome, which is the default web browser on many an Android phone. We have a shortcut at the bottom of the screen in the dock, and yet we’d press on it with the E, watch the icon light up momentarily, and then nothing would happen. Nothing would continue to happen for a second or two later, so we’d press it again, and eventually — three or four seconds in, Chrome would open.
That similar experience was found with Google’s Play Music app, which often did the same, and even went further by crashing out on us while we were listening to music, usually mid-song. We’re not sure why, and after testing quite literally hundreds of phones, we’ve yet to see this pop up on other devices, making us wonder just what in the blazes is going on with this phone.
Is it the processor, the memory, or just a phone that hasn’t been optimised properly?
Honestly, we’re not sure, but the new Moto E reminds us of last year’s Moto E, despite there being a different processor with two extra cores, and an updated Android that now runs version 5.0, also known as “Lollipop”.
Whatever is wrong, it is certainly doing the 2015 edition of the Moto E no favours, because while the phone can work efficiently, it just generally doesn’t feel like it is, and there were times where we wanted to throw this phone out the window (that’s the not so fun part of this job where you review something that gets you frustrated).
Battery life is also a bit of a downer, with our regular phone test of using the phone with wired headphones and listening to music, doing some social networking, web surfing, making phone calls, reading and writing emails, taking pictures, and generally using that phone over the course of a day revealing not much more than 24 hours of battery life.
We’re going to assume that because not much has changed in this model outside of the 4G modem and the faster and more capable processor that these two aspects are the reasons we’re seeing a battery drop, but it could also be the screen which is now a little larger, too.
Either way, a little over a full 24 hours isn’t super impressive performance, especially when the previous Moto E netted two days of life, even though it was only 3G.
You’ll get a little less if you decide to switch Bluetooth on, or use your phone more aggressively, so think of this as another day-long phone, only, at least from our tests.
So performance is certainly an area Motorola could have managed a little better on, and we’re in much the same frame of mind with the camera, which hasn’t received much of a bump if any at all.
Here you’ll find another 5 megapixel camera with no flash, a hint of autofocus (though it’s usually happening without you touching the screen, and there is no touch to autofocus control), and pretty hum-drum performance whether the sun is out or sleeping.
The daylight shots are definitely more preferable, because low-light imagery from this camera just isn’t the best, with focus not always on target and sharpness hard to find, especially since there’s no flash to stabilise the image if need be.
Essentially, you’ll need to hold very, very still, and with this 5 megapixel camera, it’s just not work it.
There’s a little more video control here if you fancy some 720p HD action, and Motorola has been kind enough to upgrade the front-facing camera by the simple act of including one this time around, but we’re not talking high quality innards here, so don’t expect this to replace your dedicated camera anytime. Hell, we’d carry one around just because this isn’t a good camera.
At least it’s a comfortable phone to hold, and at least there’s a great incarnation of Android running here, with one pretty much bereft of any of the extra overlays manufacturers generally put on, making it the way Google develops Android to be.
But with performance issues all over shop and more of a ho-hum experience, it’s hard to see the new Moto E being an improvement over the original, though we hope Motorola addresses these concerns with future firmware updates that could end up addressing these.
Conclusion
While the specs read like Motorola may have made the best budget phone ever, the result is further from the truth than the dream, and unfortunately, the 4G Motorola E just doesn’t hold up as strongly as a Moto model barely $50 more, the G with 4G.
In fact while the original E was an acceptable entry-level phone for a bit under $200, the now $70 more costly E is harder to justify, especially since it faces some pretty steep competition from other entry level phones out there.
Not helping the new E is a performance which just feels slow, a battery life that doesn’t make the two days of battery life we had hoped for, and the general feeling that you’re being overcharged for something so close to where Motorola plants the mid-range option.
If none of that bothers you, Motorola’s new E is an acceptable device, but we’d wait for the price to drop on this one before it’s worth considering, as there’s just so much else out there that performs better in this price bracket, and Motorola even makes one of those options.
