Will the large battery and stock Android Marshmallow interface prove beneficial for Moto?
Motorola has played a pivotal role in setting the ball rolling in India's budget smartphone industry, and with the Moto E Power, it intends to show its seriousness against similarly priced smartphones from other manufacturers. Today's launch reaffirms the importance of the most affordable price bracket of devices in India, with Moto quoting over 3 million users of Moto E.
In line with all this, Moto has presented a number of upgrades over the previous generation Moto E devices. The Moto E Power now has a 5-inch display, and the screen now has a 720×1280-pixel HD resolution, up from the 540×960-pixel qHD display on the Moto E (2nd Gen). There's nothing to fuss about the display – colours look bright, and although it isn't incredibly vibrant, it does look quite pleasant. The display looks warm, which most will find very comfortable to look at. Touch response seemed fluid, and the presence of stock Android interface helps in users getting easily adjusted to it.
Moving on to the build, the device has a metal rim around the sides, and the textured plastic back panel is removable. Moto stated that the E Power is now water repellant and smudge-resistant, which is a good thing to have on your smartphone. The Moto E Power looks almost exactly like the Moto G4 from the rear, with a flattened candybar form factor with rounded edges. It does not look bad, but there’s no particular excitement around it. I personally like the muted design statement, but for many, the Moto E Power may look a bit too plain. The overall build quality, though, is quite decent, and the device has a reassuringly durable feel to it. This will be particularly attractive for first-time smartphone buyers or basic users, for whom durability and battery life are crucial factors.
Which brings us to the massive, 3500mAh battery underneath the removable back of the Moto E Power. In comparison to the similarly-priced Xiaomi Redmi 3s which has a 4000mAh battery, the Moto E Power has the ability to offer equal or better battery life, with good optiisation of power and resources. Many would assume that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 SoC in the Redmi 3s offers better power optimisation than the MediaTek MT6735P SoC in the E Power, but that remains to be tested. Nevertheless, the Moto E Power should last for at least 18 hours or more, even with comparably intense usage. For basic users, the Moto E Power should last for more than one day, which is great.
In terms of performance, the MediaTek MT6735P SoC is paired with 2GB of RAM. Upon initial usage, the device seemed fairly fluent, although menus did seem to take a tad too long to open, and the camera app seemed quite sluggish. We could not run benchmarks on it, but the Moto E Power will possibly be best suited for basic users, whose usage mostly revolves around messaging, social media, the occasional usage of camera, and a bit of navigation and video/audio streaming. The device offers 16GB of native storage, and supports microSD cards of up to 32GB. While this would suffice most basic users, heavy users will find this limiting. The Moto E Power may not be suited for graphics-intensive gaming anyway, so 16GB of storage should be ample for storing music, photos and a movie or two.
Moving to the camera department, the 8-megapixel primary camera on the Moto E Power is now aided by a single LED flash. In terms of quality of photographs, images shot indoors under tungsten lamps looked rather grainy and soft. Colours seem reasonably true to source, although saturation levels are on the lower side. It may shoot decent photos under bright sunlight, but its low light capabilities seem doubtful. The 5-megapixel front camera, keeping up with the industry trends, now has a 'Beauty Filter' which is supposed to smoothen skin blemishes. I'm not sure if it did smoothen my skin's blemishes, but the photos it shot seemed a bit soft. The Moto E Power is possibly not the camera for shutterbugs, but we save our final verdict for the review.
To sum up, the Moto E Power is a distinct jump for Moto towards recognising market trends. The budget Moto E range has an HD display for the first time since inception, along with a large battery. In Moto's own words, the company is not playing the war of extreme value for money and specifications. Instead, it is aiming at providing a wholesome experience that gives users a good introduction to the world of Android smartphones. The Moto E Power may not have specs that wow the enthusiast, but what it does is provide reliability, the brand of Motorola, a standard display, (hopefully) decent performance, a large battery and the goodness of stock Android Marshmallow. All of this combine to make it a great prospective buy for the first-time smartphone user, or for those who are looking for a simple, no-fuss usage experience.
Simple things like the sturdy build and the simple layout of the camera app work towards impressing the basic user, and the Moto E Power delivers just that.
Buy Moto E3 Power at Rs. 7999 on Flipkart
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Souvik Das
The one that switches between BMWs and Harbour Line Second Class. View Full Profile
