Motorola’s commitment to choice goes much further than letting you color your own Moto X. The way the company sees it, owning a smartphone at all should be a choice—and the Moto E was built explicitly to make that choice easier. It’s made to be one thing, and one thing only: cheap as hell.
Today, just ahead of Mobile World Congress, Motorola slyly announced a new version of the Moto E by messengering a mysterious box to a few members of the press. It came in this adorable box made to look like a diorama of a product announcement—but Motorola wanted to keep this a little more personal, and just let us use the phone.
I’ve been using it all morning, and the craziest thing about it isn’t that it’s only $149, or that it has LTE and a newer version of Android than even most flagship smartphones. No, the craziest thing about the Moto E is that it seems like a pretty great phone.
The biggest downside is the screen. In almost every case, the first way manufacturers save money on a smartphone is to downsize and down-res the screen. The new Moto E has a 4.5-inch, 960 x 540 display that looks blurry and dim next to almost any recent model, and its desaturated color profile that has me wiping off the screen every ten seconds trying to make it clearer. I mean, come on, though: it’s $149. Unlocked. Off contract. The screen’s fine.
Like last year’s model, most of the rest of the Moto E is good, and not just for a super-cheap smartphone. The 5-megapixel camera takes decent pictures, though none of Motorola’s devices are exactly at the vanguard of smartphone photography. There’s a front-facing camera now, too, for all your selfie-taking. (One thing I keep hearing over and over from phone makers: everyone, especially in developing markets, is obsessed with selfies. Everyone.) The Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor is probably noticeably slower than the chip inside your phone, but it does a decent job. The plastic body is a little thick, but its trademark curved back is sturdy and comfortable.
There are also these really clever interchangeable bumpers: you’re not changing the whole color of the phone, just the accents around the side. My white E shipped with black, white, yellow, and blue bumpers, and there are a few other options as well; I’m using the blue. This would have been a flagship phone a couple of years ago. It’s a reminder of how quickly technology improves, and of the fact that smartphones have been pretty good for a while now.
Motorola
This year, the E got more access to some of Motorola’s clever software enhancements. It uses Moto Display to show notifications and the time without turning the screen on, and has the nifty wrist-flicking camera motion. Best of all, it runs Android 5.0 Lollipop, which very few phones at any price can claim.
In 2014, the average selling price of a smartphone was estimated to be $297. Motorola undercut that once, with the Moto G, which quickly became the company’s best-selling phone of all time. The Moto E went even further down the pricing pyramid, and the new model makes that phone a much more powerful option. LTE is turning on in markets around the world, and at $149 the price is hard to beat. (There’s a $129 version, too, which is the same minus LTE capability.)
Are you going to ditch your iPhone for the Moto E? Nah. But for the billions of people who have never been able to afford a smartphone, the options are simultaneously becoming more affordable and more impressive. That’s a remarkable combination.
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