The Moto E (2015) Review
by Brandon Chester on April 21, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola
- Mobile
- Moto E (2015)
Battery Life
The original Moto E shipped with a 7.52Wh battery. While we don't have data for battery life on the original, it's safe to say that the new Moto E with its 9.08Wh battery and more efficient SoC should have no trouble surpassing the battery life of the original. I've highlighted the 2014 Moto G in the graphs below just to provide an interesting point of comparison.
The combination of a fairly large battery with a power efficient SoC allows the Moto E to take one of the highest spots in our WiFi web browsing test with a runtime of 11.65 hours.
In the BaseMark OS II battery test we see the Moto E pull off a very respectable battery life of 4.35hrs. The score in the battery test is also fairly high, indicating that Snapdradon 410 was able to sustain a high load throughout the test.
The Moto E does very well in GFXBench's battery test, with a score that sits well above most other smartphones. While the performance for the final run is not as fast as flagship smartphones, it actually doesn't really drop at all from the performance of the very first run.
Overall I think the battery life on the Moto E is stellar, and I don't think buyers will have any complaints about it. The Moto E includes a larger battery than the Moto G, and with a smaller display and more efficient components this gives it a significant lead in every test. There's not much more that you can ask for.
Charge Time
The other side of battery life is the time it takes to charge the battery. If a device has a battery life that falls short of the competition, it can be somewhat excused if the time to charge it is very short which minimizes the amount of time the device is dead for. The opposite can also be true, where a device with a long battery life can end up having longer periods of downtime due to a long charge time.
At 4.23 hours, the Moto E has the longest charge time of the devices we've tested to date. While it's not a big issue if you end up charging it overnight, it feels like an eternity when you end up charging it during the day. The problem is that Motorola packages the Moto E with a 5V 550mA charger, which makes it the slowest USB charger I have in my possession. This is definitely another concession for budget reasons, and my recommendation for any buyers is to use the charging block from another device.
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Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
Buying goods internationally is always more hassle. First off, there's customs fees that may increase the total cost quite significantly. On top of that there's always a concern regarding warranty because if the OEM has no presence in your country, you may have to ship it to another country that increases waiting time and may even cost you.erikiksaz - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
I was under the impression that xiaomi phones don't have all the proper bands for T-mobile. Is this not true?hans_ober - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
Any front camera samples?Did you try charging it using a Quick-Charge 2 charger; or even another normal charger with a high amp rating?
How good (or bad) is multitasking on the phone due to only 1GB RAM?
Brandon Chester - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
The original release of Lollipop has some memory issues of its own, but I never felt like there were problems with multitasking due to the limited amount of memory. There's definitely more app reloading than on the Nexus 6 but it's not a big deal.hans_ober - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
Thanks, aren't you guys gonna share front camera sample pics?It might not be great, but I was curious to see how good/bad it is.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
It's funny that we're talking about a PHONE having "ONLY" 1GiB RAM, when I vividly remember that being a shit-hot amount of RAM for your desktop PC.That aside, I don't see Moto E as a hardcore multitasking phone anyway, it's just a decent phone with a reasonable set of specs for someone who isn't that hardcore of a smartphone user.
hans_ober - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
Times change :) When it comes to PC's I think 4GB RAM is the minimum that should come with a new PC, anyone planning on multitasking needs more. When it comes to laptops like the Surface and MBP, they should be including 8GB atleast: the iGPU uses a portion and that reduces things even further.mkozakewich - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
No, times have changed yet again. A PC should have 1 GB at the very least, with 4 GB being a good amount. Most of these kinds of computers have SSDs, which are a lot faster with their page files. You can swap without too much delay, so you don't actually need much RAM. I've been surprised at how well the 1GB Stream 7 performs, despite Windows 8 taking up about a gigabyte on boot.(If you use Chrome heavily, tack on an extra 2 GB. All those tabs really add up.)
hans_ober - Friday, April 24, 2015 - link
Don't page file read/writes have a negative impact on the life of SSD's?blzd - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
My desktop PC has never gone above 6 GB of RAM usage, that's while playing a Shadows of Mordor while streaming twitch and Spotify in the background.