Late last week, Motorola asked me for my shipping address. It wanted to send me a mystery box.

Being a reviewer means that a lot of boxes show up at your door. If you're lucky, you've actually asked for them, and you know what they all are. If you're unlucky, some unscrupulous PR firm has gotten your address and is using it to send you weird headphones and iPhone screen protectors you never wanted. Once, a company sent me a box with one of those trash can basketball hoops and a bunch of wadded up pieces of construction paper in it—they literally sent me a box full of garbage.

Sometimes, as in this case, you give them your address and hope that the package has something good in it. We weren't disappointed—Motorola's mystery box contained the latest version of the Moto E, the cheapest of its three Moto phones and the successor to the budget handset that came out last May, along with a "press conference in a box" designed to save reporters from yet another presentation at Mobile World Congress next week. We'll be giving the phone the full review treatment once we've been able to spend a little more time with it, but here are our first-blush impressions.

Outside and inside

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

The Moto phones have all stuck to the same common design language since the first Moto X came out in mid-2013—it's a basic rounded rectangle with a curved back that feels nice in your hand. The budget Moto G and Moto E phones have few embellishments—just headphone jacks at the top, micro USB ports at the bottom, and speakers on the front.

The biggest design flourish of these low-budget Moto phones has been their removable, colorful backs. The new Moto E tosses out removable shells in favor of removable borders. The border still peels off to expose the SIM and microSD card slots, but the back of the phone doesn't come off anymore.

On the outside, the new Moto E is a slightly larger version of last year's phone—the Moto G went through a similar transition last fall. Display size increases from 4.3 inches to 4.5 inches, though it retains the same 960×540 resolution. While things still look reasonably sharp, compared to a 720p or 1080p screen the loss in detail is easily noticeable. Panel quality is still pretty good, though. Colors, contrast, and viewing angles are all impressive, and we didn't notice any of the backlight bleed that older budget Moto phones have had. At this price, we'd prefer a lower-resolution, higher-quality panel to a higher-resolution screen that looks bad.

On the inside, the Moto E comes with a surprise: Qualcomm's quad-core Snapdragon 410, which is actually faster than the Snapdragon 400 in both Motos G. It's also quite a step up from the dual-core Snapdragon 200 in the last Moto E. The CPU cores step up from the Cortex A7 architecture to the 64-bit Cortex A53 architecture, and there are now four of them instead of two. The Adreno 306 GPU should be a fair step up, too. Don't expect performance that approaches a high-end phone, but for $150 you're actually getting some pretty decent performance.

The other major upgrade is LTE, which even the new Moto G doesn't have. According to Qualcomm's new LTE modem branding this is a Snapdragon X5, which means 150Mbps download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds. Everything on the new Moto E should feel quite a bit faster.

If there was one corner the old Moto E cut just a little too close, it was internal storage. The first-generation model had just 4GB of it, and only 2GB or so was actually usable for data and apps. A microSD card slot could alleviate the pressure somewhat, but Android's external media support is relatively poor. Motorola provides tools to move pictures, movies, and music en masse from your phone to an SD card, but it needs to be triggered manually—not something you want to be fiddling with if you just want to take vacation pictures.

The new Moto E ups this to a still small but more reasonable 8GB, of which about 4.58GB is usable out of the box. The microSD slot is still there, but thankfully you won't need to use it quite as much.

Other specs remain similar to the old Moto E. 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi is still as good as it gets, and the 5MP rear camera still lacks any kind of LED flash—a new front-facing camera is a welcome addition, though. The battery is a larger 2,390mAh, but we don't know how the larger screen or faster SoC will affect battery life just yet. The new Moto E also runs Android 5.0.2, which is the newest version of Android that most people can get right now. Like other Moto phones, it sticks pretty close to Google's "stock" load, with just a handful of pre-installed apps.

While Lollipop and the Snapdragon 410 are both capable of 64-bit operation, the new Moto E actually appears to be running 32-bit Android; we'll do some more digging into this for the full review.

The price

At $150 unlocked, the new Moto E is a full $20 more expensive than the old version. Carrier-locked versions will certainly be available for less, but we're still looking at a price increase.

On the one hand, the more expensive Moto E fixes some of the most pressing shortcomings of the original—there's now a workable amount of internal storage, you get two extra processor cores, and we aren't going to complain about LTE in a budget phone. But it's now just $30 less than the second-generation Moto G, and the first-generation Moto G (also a 4.5-inch phone) is easy to find at or even below $150 unlocked on Amazon and elsewhere. Despite their lack of LTE and slower SoCs, both Motos G still offer some compelling upgrades—both have sharper screens and LED camera flashes, and the newer Moto G is physically larger if bigger phones are your thing.

None of this is to say that the new Moto E looks bad. Especially if you can get it for less than the unlocked price on a carrier of your choice, it's an excellent upgrade from a dumbphone or an aging Droid-something-or-other from the turn of the decade. It's just that Motorola itself is already offering good phones for very, very close to this price.

We'll be using the Moto E for a few more days and running our standard benchmarks and battery life tests, which may give us some more nuanced thoughts on the Moto E and its place in the Android ecosystem. Look for it within the next week or so.

Update: Now that more of Motorola's product pages have gone live, it looks like there's going to be a cheaper 3G version of the Moto E for $120. That version will also come with a step down in other specs, though—you'll jump down to a quad-core version of the Snapdragon 200 rather than the faster 410. Motorola will only say that this version is "coming soon."