The Moto E (2015) Review
by Brandon Chester on April 21, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Motorola
- Mobile
- Moto E (2015)
Camera Performance
Examining a phone's camera on paper can only tell part of the story about its image quality. The camera's system of lenses and processing after the sensor captures an image have major impacts on the quality of photos. While I do wish we had a more consistent and objective test for comparing camera quality, there's still a great deal of information that can be found by comparing how different smartphone cameras resolve detail and handle noise reduction and sharpening.
Left: iPhone 6. Right: Moto E (2015)
While I normally begin with a test that has several objects in a white box with extremely generous lighting to get an idea of how the camera performs in the most optimal conditions, the Moto E presents an issue with that test. For whatever reason, Motorola's white balance algorithm goes berserk in the presence of the 3000K LED bulbs that I use for lighting. Users can rest assured that I never encountered this issue in any other situation, but it's still somewhat concerning. If nothing else, the Moto E's image quality in the photo above is very good apart from it being yellow.
The Moto E's camera performance in adequate lighting is actually better than I had expected. The tree in the upper right is well captured, and brick walls of the building on the left have a good level of detail. The low resolution limits the amount of detail in the bricks of the orange brick building, and the shrubs on the right side also end up becoming a bit of a mess. The colors of the photo also seem to be shifted slightly toward orange compared to what they actually looked like to me in real life. Overall though, the output is certainly acceptable for posting on Twitter or Facebook, or for sending to someone via MMS/IM. It's not the world's best camera, but it's good enough that I'm sure people will be glad Motorola included it.
Unfortunately the Moto E's sensor size ends up hurting it when it comes to low light situations. The photo has much more noise than any of the other smartphones compared, including the iPad Air 2 which has the same pixel size but on a larger 8MP sensor. It's impossible to see the brick texture on either building due to the noise, and the bricks on the ground that are more than a couple of feet away just end up blending together.
The Moto E is capable of 1280x720p30 video recording. Unfortunately the quality of those videos is nothing exceptional. There's just a general lack of detail to everything, even objects that are very close. Video is encoded with an average bitrate of 10Mbps and uses the H.264 High profile.
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RealTheXev - Wednesday, April 29, 2015 - link
I picked one up for my mother, only $69 at Walmart (Verizon LTE prepay). The only REAL downside is you cannot unlock the bootloader using Moto's official tool (and that's why my mother got the phone lol).BMNify - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
Xiaomi Redmi 2, Lenovo A6000 Plus and Micromax Canvas Spark are three better options than Moto E, Lenovo is already widespread in many countries and Xiaomi already caters to the largest smartphones markets that is China, India, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. In 2015, Xiaomi will enter Russia and Brazil which is Hugo Barra's home market.BMNify - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
I have considered the pricing from Flipkart for the above phones but the pricing is nearly the same for these in all the countries in which they are sold officially by the manufacturers.hans_ober - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
Yeah, but how's the software support? Heard that Xiaomi/Lenovo have almost non-existent service centers in India.BMNify - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Software updates: Xiaomi has excellent software support, they provide software updates and even small bug fixes in between for all their phones, even the low end $100 phones. Infact their Developer ROM is updated every week. Apart from that Xiaomi is the only company who listens and replies to complaints via facebook, twitter, G+ etc. Xiaomi Devs and even the head Hugo Barra listen and reply to comments, no company is such consumer focused and that is the reason why they have millions of fans with Zero Dollar marketing budget.Service centres: Xiaomi has more service centres than Motorola in India, Xiaomi has exclusive service centres too along with tie-up with 3rd parties/outsourced whereas Motorola relies only on outsourced service centres. Lenovo and Motorola are neck and neck with both sharing the same service centres in most places.
Microsoft/nokia Lumia, Samsung and LG have better service than the above brands but that is expected.
loimlo - Tuesday, April 28, 2015 - link
That said, Redmi and Xiaomi series are different with regard to SW update mechanisms. Redmi doesn't get update on a weekly basis. It's not that I need weekly update for my Redmi, but I'd like to clarify the things.Btw, I've been using Redmi for past 15 months. It's a solid phone given its pricing of USD 130.
Tyron - Saturday, March 12, 2016 - link
Lol redmi 2 or the Lenovo A6000 never got even Android 5.1 !!While Moto E2, 5.0-5.1-5.1.1-6.0
Motorola rocks (and lenovo sucks)
Thermogenic - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
The Microsoft Lumia 640(XL) looks to be a very solid competitor to the Moto E.der - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
50th comment woooStanand - Tuesday, April 21, 2015 - link
Also, the Verizon-locked Moto E seems to be only usable with Verizon's monthly prepaid smartphone plans that start at $45 per month. That's not a horrible deal for those that want unlimited talk/text and a little data, but many budget buyers (like me) want pay-as-you-go and the option to use an MVNO (like Page Plus).