Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Motorola's low-end phone lineup is getting crowded, especially since last-generation models are still available for purchase months after being replaced. There's the old Moto G, the old Moto G with LTE, the old Moto E, the new Moto G, and now two different flavors of second-generation Moto E. Every single one of them is available for between $100 and $200.

No single low-end Motorola is definitively better than all the others, but the new $150 Moto E with LTE makes a strong case for itself. It's got more storage than the old one, surprisingly good specs, and a smallish 4.5-inch display that will appeal to people who think the 5-inch Moto G got too big.

Specs at a glance: 2015 Motorola Moto E LTE Screen 960×540 4.5-inch IPS (244 PPI) OS Android 5.0.2 (32-bit) CPU 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 (quad-core Cortex A53) RAM 1GB GPU Qualcomm Adreno 306 Storage 8GB NAND flash, expandable by up to 32GB via Micro SD Networking 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0. US LTE version supports GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)

UMTS/HSPA+ (850, 1700 (AWS), 1900 MHz)

4G LTE (2, 4, 5, 7, 12, 17) Ports Micro-USB, headphones, Micro SD slot Camera 5MP rear camera Size 5.11" × 2.63" × 0.20-0.48" (129.9 × 66.8 × 5.2-12.3 mm) Weight 5.11 oz. (145 g) Battery 2,390mAh Starting price $149 off-contract and unlocked

On top of all those features, the new Moto E packs in the other things that reviewers and users tend to praise about the Moto phones: a relatively clean load of a modern version of Android, a basic but attractive design, and better build quality than you'd expect. Like other Motos before it, it strives to offer the basics without frills or unnecessary embellishment. While our review of the original Moto E was lukewarm, we like this new one quite a bit better.

Look and feel

At this point, Motorola has established a basic aesthetic for the Moto phones. The Moto E has a curved back with a dimple in it for the logo, a centered camera on the rear, and a gentle curve all the way around the rim.

The major departure here is that while both Motos G and the old Moto E had rear shells that could be popped off and replaced with shells of other colors, the new Moto E uses "bands" to accomplish the same thing (the micro SD and micro SIM slots are both under the band). The back of your phone will always be either black or white, but if you buy a three-pack of bands for $20 you can replace the lining around the edges. "Grip shells" that include a rubberized rim and offer some protection for the back of the phone are available for $20 each.

The Moto E is nice to hold, and, while it's all plastic, it feels solid—there's no creaking or flexing in the body of the phone itself, though the bands are flimsy compared to the older Moto phones' complete shells. The matte finish on the back of the phone and the rough texture on the bands cut down on slipperiness, a common complaint about Samsung's plastic phones.

The 4.5-inch display is identical in size to the first-generation Moto G, and the two phones are similar in size overall. But the Moto E has a lower 960×540 resolution rather than the Moto G's 720p, and at 244 PPI its density is just low enough to make things look a little fuzzy. It's not generally a problem in most apps or on mobile sites, though you'll lose fine detail on text and images.

The quality of the display panel is still great, which lessens the blow. It's an IPS panel with good color and viewing angles, and by our colorimeter’s reckoning it’s got a fairly high max brightness of about 360 nits. There's some brightness shifting if you look at the screen from off-angles, but colors stay about the same and the display remains readable. There's no backlight bleed around the edges, which hasn't been the case on older budget Moto models. Display quality on low-end phones, laptops, and tablets is often poor, but it's not a corner that Motorola has chosen to cut here.

Call quality is fine, on par with other smartphones we've used. It sounds like a cell phone—fuzzy but workable. The phone's speaker is located under the silver bar on the front of the phone, the same place as the earpiece. It gets loud enough for YouTube videos, and it doesn't distort much, but there's no bass at all. No surprises here.

Software: 64-bit chip, 32-bit OS

The Moto E runs Android 5.0.2, which is the newest available version. Kind of, for now.

Oddly, even though the Snapdragon 410 and Lollipop both support the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set, the phone still uses a 32-bit version of Android. We asked Motorola about this, and its answer made sense:

64-bit support in Android is very new and tends to put pressure on memory, and while the Moto E hardware can technically support 64-bit, the software and applications available are still primarily running in 32-bit. To deliver the best end user performance on Moto E, we are currently running 32-bit. We’ll continually monitor the evolution of the ecosystem to 64-bit along with performance optimizations.

In other words, don’t expect widespread 64-bit support for low-end phones until 2GB of RAM becomes a low-end feature. This isn’t something users will notice, but if you’re looking for a cheap 64-bit Android device, the Moto E LTE isn’t it.

As for the software loadout itself, it’s pretty much what you'd get on a Nexus phone: the Google Now launcher is the default home screen, and most of the pre-installed apps belong to Google.

Motorola includes just a few of its own tools, all updated through the Google Play store: its standard camera app, a migration tool that helps with transfers from dumb phones, iPhones, and other Android phones, the Motorola Connect app that interfaces with the Moto 360 and a handful of other Motorola accessories, and a Moto app that controls the small handful of extra stuff Motorola usually adds to its phones.

The Moto app includes support for Moto Assist, a minor feature that will automatically mute notifications and keep the screen turned off at night. Additionally, it can mute notifications and send automatic replies to certain senders while your calendar app says you’re in a meeting.

Motorola has also included a feature called Moto Display, which has been called Active Display in past phones. It briefly flashes notifications on the screen while the phone is off, turning the screen on briefly and then turning it back off again. It’s not nearly as useful as it is on the Moto X, though. The Moto E’s simplified internals won’t detect when you move the phone or wave your hand over the screen, and the fact that the Moto E uses an IPS display rather than an AMOLED screen means that the entire screen must be powered on to show a limited amount of information. Update: Motorola tells us that the Moto Display feature will light up if you lift or nudge the phone, but in our experience it worked less consistently than it did on either Moto X. In general, larger motions are more likely to wake the screen. Motorola also says you need to wait between five and 10 seconds without moving the phone before moving it will activate the screen.

If you like this feature, we’d suggest looking at Lollipop’s native Ambient Display feature instead. It’s a version of the same idea that shows you more data. On an AMOLED screen this would use more power since it would be lighting up a higher number of pixels, but on the Moto E it doesn’t really make a difference. Update: Motorola points out that nudging or moving the phone to wake the screen and view notifications only works with Moto Display, and not Ambient Display.

Next, let's talk about typing. This is the first time I've used the Android 5.0 keyboard for an extended period of time on a screen this small, and it feels like the Google Keyboard’s Material theme was designed with larger screens in mind. I've never been a huge fan of its buttonlessness anyway, but on the Moto E I found myself making more typing mistakes than usual. Switching back to the older "holo" theme in the Google Keyboard preferences gives you your buttons back, and it improved my accuracy on this particular phone.

Finally, we come to Lollipop and Motorola’s software update policy.

Lollipop is still a young OS, and the two minor updates it has received since it was released in November haven’t fixed all of its problems. Using Lollipop still means putting up with occasional app crashes or rendering problems (that bug where the home screen has to redraw itself all the time is my least favorite, personally, but you probably have a pet glitch or two of your own) and memory leakage is apparently a problem.

Motorola has tried to make quick updates a signature feature of the Moto line. When Google does release Android 5.1 or some subsequent version to OEMs and users, Motorola will likely roll an update out relatively quickly. That said, Motorola’s press materials and reviewer’s guide make no mention of a “guaranteed” Android update the way they did when the first-generation Moto E was announced. The first-generation Moto X, G, and E are all still waiting on Lollipop updates, though given the relative bugginess of the release that’s probably not such an awful thing for users.

Point being, we’re still waiting to see how the Lenovo purchase is going to affect Motorola in the long run. Motorola has broken its own sales records based in part on the strength of the Moto lineup, so hopefully Lenovo decides not to upend the formula. If updates don’t continue to be a priority, it’s going to dampen these phones’ appeal somewhat.

Storage space

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

The 4GB of storage on the old Moto E was a major problem, because it was incredibly easy to eat up the 2GB of space that was actually usable, and offloading media to an SD card needed to be done manually. The new one comes with 8GB, which is still not a lot but it's at least workable. You'll have 4.58GB to use out of the box, which is enough for a reasonably robust selection of apps and a little bit of media.

Light users—people who use their phones primarily to do basic stuff like browsing, texting, and mapping—will probably be fine with this amount of storage. It's no longer restrictive enough to be an immediate problem. I listen to most music through Spotify and watch most things on Hulu, Netflix, or HBO Go, so the smallish amount of storage space didn't impact my media consumption habits.

Three kinds of people will want to make sure they pick up a microSD card: people who listen to music and watch movies locally, people who take lots of pictures, and people who install lots of games. Many apps won't let you move them to the SD card, but games nearly always will. And the Motorola camera app allows you to set the SD card as a storage target, giving you freedom to take as many pictures as you want.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham