Moto E Review - Dirt Cheap Smartphone

The new Moto E is the most basic, but upto date, branded smartphone till now. The company has trimmed down the specifications very cleverly for making the Moto E among the most economical KitKat phone. Motorola's target is a very specific audience who want neat and clean android phone with the most updated software without burning their pocket.Now it'll be hard to come by a better choice than the Moto E in the budget of 7000 bucks. Whats missing in Moto E then? It misses front-facing camera and camera flash.

The Moto E is Motorola's entry-level smartphone in the company's line of Moro-branded handsets. The big sell is that Moto E @ 7000 bucks is dirt cheap.

As you'd expect from a phone of its price, the hardware elements are scaled down to fit its class. The Moto E comes with a 4.3-inch display, which is a bit larger than the iPhone but smaller than the 5-inch screens.

The resolution is just 540 x 960, but the color accuracy is superb. Most importantly, the Moto E iscapable of connecting to 3G networks. It runs on an old Snapdragon 200 processor and comes with 4GB of onboard storage.But you can add up to 32GB of extra storage space in form of SD card.

There's no front facing camera and flash on the Moto E. There is just 5-megapixel main camera that sits on the back above the Motorola logo.

In terms of design, the Moto E looks like a chunkier version of the Moto G and Moto X phones. There's a smooth hard matte back panel that feels like polycarbonate paired with a slick glossy front.The phone feels sturdy enough to endure a few drops.

 Moto E's shell gets dirty very easily if you're not careful. But the good news is the back panel is replaceable.
Company offers a variety of colored shells for the Moto E.

Then why Moto E ?!!!!!

The Moto E's  benefits are in its software, not its hardware. For example, since Motorola didn't modify Android very much, it'll get software updates a lot faster than most Android phones.This means that it will be among the first to get all of the new features that will be coming to Android, even before widely popular handsets. It comes with the latest version of Android out of the box, and it's guaranteed to get updates in the future. For a smartphone as cheap as the Moto E, that's a great perk that will save hardcore Android fans a lot of frustration.

Motorola offers some useful apps of its own as well. For example Motorola Alert, a system that's designed to function as a sort of virtual body guard. The new feature allows you to put your phone in an alert mode that will send notifications to your most trustworthy contacts periodically. These alerts also tell those contacts where you are in case of an emergency.

The apps Motorola introduced with its previous handsets are also preloaded with the Moto E, such as Motorola Assist, which uses your calendar to automatically mute your phone whenever an event or meeting is scheduled. You can also set quiet hours through Motorola Assist to prevent midnight phone calls and notifications from disrupting your sleep. By most accounts, the Moto E will fulfill most of your needs, but there are some areas where it falls noticeable short. Moto E's camera is a significant weak point.The image quality is about what you'd expect from a 5-megapixel camera-satisfactory for taking casual photos but not that great. Concern here is that the camera is evidently slow. After tapping the screen, there was an significant delay before capturing an image.

The Moto E is using the dual core MSM8610 qualcomm snapdragon 200 chipset clocked at 1.2GHz with Adreno 305 GPU. The performance is good and lag free.

Benchmark scores
Quadrant 5383
Antutu 12605
Vellamo HTML5 (1193) Metal (452)
Nenamark2 49.2 fps
Multi touch 5 point


PROS
Gorilla glass protection
Latest OS KitKat
Future updates without any worries
1GB RAM

CONS
Fixed Focus camera
OTG not supported
Inability to install heavy games on external storage.

Nutshell
Moto E @ 7000 bucks, build quality and the brand it is worth the price.