During the past couple of years we've seen a dramatic shift in Motorola's strategy for competing in the smartphone market. As one of the earliest producers of Android devices, the company needed to let go of ideas and strategies from years that had since past. Producing exclusive devices for carriers like Verizon was no longer going to work with the iPhone finally freed from exclusivity on AT&T, and Motorola's hardware and software design had begun to show a great deal of age.
That brings us to today, at a point where Motorola has more or less found their new approach to making smartphones. It's a very simple and understandable approach. Consistency across the design of the hardware, consistency across the design of the software, and a yearly line of phones that can easily be divided into budget, mid-range, and flagship categories based on a single letter in their name. This review takes a look at the newest version of Motorola's budget device, the 2015 Moto E. Unfortunately, this year adds a bit of complexity to the simplicity of Motorola's smartphone line. Before getting into that, I've put the general specifications of the new Moto E below, with the original 2014 model as a point of comparison.
Motorola Moto E (2015)(LTE model XT1527)
Motorola Moto E (2015)(3G models)
Motorola Moto E (2014)
SoC
Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 (MSM8916)4x Cortex A53 @ 1.2GHzAdreno 306 at 400MHz
Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 (MSM8x10)4x Cortex A7 @ 1.2GHzAdreno 302 at 400MHz
Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 (MSM8x10)2x Cortex A7 @ 1.2GHzAdreno 302 at 400MHz
RAM
1 GB LPDDR3
1GB LPDDR2
NAND
8GB NAND + microSD
4GB NAND + microSD
Display
4.5” 960x540 IPS LCD
4.3" 960x540 IPS LCD
Network
2G / 3G / 4G LTE (Qualcomm MDM9x25 UE Category 4 LTE)
2G / 3G HSPA+ (MDM8x10)
2G / 3G HSPA+ (MDM8x10)
Dimensions
129.9 x 66.8 x 12.3mm145g
124.38 x 64.8 x 12.3mm142g
Camera
5MP (2592 х 1944) Rear Facing w/Auto Focus, F/2.2 apertureVGA (640x480) Front Facing
5MP (2592 х 1944) Rear Facing w/Fixed Focus
Battery
2390 mAh (9.08Wh)
1980 mAh (7.52Wh)
OS
Android 5.0
Android 4.4.2
Connectivity
802.11 b/g/n + BT 4.0, USB2.0, GPS/GNSS, NFC
SIM Size
Micro-SIM
On the cellular side, we have two HSPA models and 1 LTE model of the Moto E. There is an LTE version with UMTS bands targeted at the US market, a 3G-only version for the US market, and a global 3G version. The difference between the US and global 3G bands is the inclusion of the 1700MHz band for T-Mobile support on the US version, and the 900/2100MHz bands on the global version.
Over the past couple of years, Motorola's hardware and software design has undergone some enormous changes. They shifted from producing heavily skinned and modified Android devices to using almost stock Google Android. Their industrial design similarly underwent significant changes, and a new style for their smartphones emerged with the original Moto X in 2013. The flat sides and edges of Motorola's old phones were replaced with continuous curves. This type of design is not only more ergonomic than Motorola's old devices, but also more unique and recognizable. It's very clear from the appearance of a Motorola phone that it is a Motorola phone, even without spotting the depressed logo on the back cover.
The Moto E is no exception to Motorola's industrial design. The back cover has a continuous curve that extends to all corners and meets with the phone's arched sides. The back of the phone has only a center-aligned 5MP camera and Motorola's standard indented logo. Unlike the original Moto E this back cover is no longer removable and customizable with different colors. Since the Moto E is a budget device, it also can't be customized with Motorola's Moto Maker. To add a level of personalization, Motorola has designed the phone so that the band around the edges is removable. Users can purchase a set of red, blue, and yellow bands for $20, and can swap them out with the default white or black bands as they please.
The band being removable creates a potential concern about the usability of the Moto E's buttons, as the part that you press down on is integrated into the bands themselves. During my time with the device I was actually surprised by how tactile the buttons felt and how little they wobbled considering that they were completely separated from the actual button mechanism. They definitely had more of a mushy feeling than the buttons on the Nexus 6, but they were still completely usable and actually better than I expected.
The removable bands also act as a great way to hide many of the ports on the device. Removing the band allows access to the Moto E's MicroSD slot and Micro-SIM port. The SIM slot is spring loaded, but it's so deep that anyone without very long nails will end up having to use a small object to press on the end of the SIM to remove it anyway.
The left side of the device has a tag which is attached internally and has FCC and regulatory information on it, as well as the device's IMEI.
I'm quite happy with the direction Motorola has gone in with regards to design. The basic design of a Motorola phone scales down to $150 devices and all the way up to $700 devices, and on all of them it's visually appealing as well as ergonomic. The material quality definitely takes a step down when you go for those budget devices, with the Moto E sporting a plastic outer band instead of the metal ones on the Moto X and Nexus 6. Despite that, the phone still feels well made and the matte plastic back actually feels just as nice as the one on the Nexus 6. If anything, Motorola might want to worry about their flagship devices not offering enough of an improvement over the very good build quality and materials of their budget offerings.
The 2015 Moto E with LTE is the first device with Snapdragon 410 that we've run through our tests. However, buyers of the 3G versions will only get a quad core Snapdragon 200 with 4 Cortex A7 cores. While this is still an improvement over the original, it's quite a disappointment when compared to the LTE edition. To be clear, the results below are from the Snapdragon 410 version, not the Snapdragon 200 version.
Qualcomm's MSM8916 is a quad core Cortex A53 part. Motorola's implementation has it running with a peak CPU core frequency of 1.2GHz, and it's paired with a 400MHz Adreno 306 GPU. Like the Cortex A7 cores used in Snapdragon 410, Cortex A53 is still a dual-issue in-order design, and pipeline depth remains the same as well. ARM has greatly improved branch prediction accuracy and expanded how instructions can be co-issued with Cortex A53, and so much of the performance increase over Cortex A7 will come from those improvements.
The Moto E shows a decent improvement over Snapdragon 400 based devices like the Moto G, and the improvement over the original Moto E would be even larger. That being said the Moto E doesn't do quite as well as one might expect in our browser tests. Browser optimizations play no small part in this, with Chrome having lagged behind the stock browser from other manufacturers for some time now. Motorola's devices use Chrome as their default browser, and I have a feeling that to an extent the Moto E is limited by software here rather than hardware.
PCMark is a benchmark that focuses more on real-world scenarios where race to sleep speed is paramount. In it we see another modest overall lead compared the Moto G. The writing test in particular shows a great deal of improvement, while the video playback test is slightly worse which I suspect is the result of the Moto E's flash storage speeds causing video seek times to be longer than the Moto G.
In BaseMark OS II we actually see the Moto E performing worse than the Snapdragon 400 powered Moto G. The Moto G's higher score in the memory subtest helps to give it an advantage overall, and I'm at a loss to explain why the Moto E scores 50 points lower than the Moto G in the Web subtest. I can only imagine that the cause is related to software tuning but I can't definitively say why the gap is as large as it is.
Overall the Moto E does perform well for a budget device, but I do wish Snapdragon 410 showed a greater performance uplift over Snapdragon 400. With only 1GB of RAM and a maximum memory bandwidth of only 5.3GB/s Snapdragon 410 is also under some heavy memory constraints that could be acting as a bottleneck to potentially greater performance improvements with Cortex A53 over Cortex A7.
The Adreno 306 GPU in Snapdragon 410 is more or less just a variant of the Adreno 305 used in the Snapdragon 400 series SoCs. Because of this, there's not likely to be much improvement in terms of overall GPU performance when comparing the Moto E to older Snapdragon 400 devices like the One Mini 2 or the Moto G.
As expected, Adreno 306 performs roughly the same as Adreno 305. In the graphics test the Moto E does slightly worse than the Moto G, while it does substantially better in the physics test. Due to the heavier weighting of the graphics test, and the harmonic mean used to calculate the overall score, the Moto E actually performs every so slightly worse than the Moto G overall. I would consider the difference in graphics scores to be within the margin of error, and in general users can expect essentially the same level of performance from Adreno 306 as that of Adreno 305.
While I would normally run BaseMark X after 3DMark, a GPU driver bug prevents the test from finishing properly and no results are reported. Because of this, our last GPU test is GFXBench 3.0. In both T-Rex HD and Manhattan, the offscreen performance of Adreno 306 is roughly comparable to that of Adreno 305 in Snapdragon 400. Onscreen performance pulls ahead of the Moto G due to the Moto E's lower display resolution.
Overall, the GPU performance of the 2015 Moto E is what you'd expect from a budget device. It would be nice if there was a larger performance improvement over Snapdragon 400, but Motorola can't be faulted for that. Buyers shouldn't expect to be able to play any intensive 3D games, but the performance is more than sufficient for simple 2D games and rendering the Android interface.
NAND performance is another important aspect of mobile devices. While in the PC world vendors will sometimes make note of their HDD/SSD speeds, in the mobile world we haven't reached a point where anything beyond the amount of flash memory is stated by manufacturers. Despite this, poor NAND can be a serious bottleneck of system performance whenever something is being loaded from the internal storage, or when a background app is doing reads and writes or downloading updates.
Random read speeds on the Moto E are fairly slow, and random writes are right in the middle of our comparison devices. While I don't think the random write will cause any issues, the slow random read speed may contribute to some slowness whenever applications are loading files.
For those who are keeping track, the Moto E does not come with Android's full device encryption (FDE) enabled by default. Google appears to have stepped back from requiring FDE, and instead just recommends that it be enabled. Despite it not being enabled on the Moto E, the sequential read performance is not quite as fast as some other budget devices like the One Mini 2, although it is in line with the 2014 Moto G. Sequential write performance is unfortunately one of the lowest results on our list, although with only 5GB of accessible storage I don't imagine users will be writing many large files where it becomes a noticeable issue.
In the past few years we've seen a tremendous improvement in the quality of smartphone displays at every single price point. The display was often the first thing to be compromised when building a smartphone to meet a low cost, and the most inexpensive phones could ship with TN panels at resolutions as low as 480x320. But today even inexpensive smartphones like the Moto E have IPS displays and high enough resolutions to render text without overwhelming aliasing.
The 2015 Moto E has a 4.5" 960x540 IPS display, which makes it slightly less sharp than the original Moto E which had the same resolution on a 4.3" panel. However, a display's pixel density is just one of many attributes. To evaluate the various other aspects of the Moto E's display quality we turn to our standard smartphone display tests. As always, measurements are performed with X-Rite's i1Pro 2 spectrophotometer and SpectraCal's CalMAN 5 software, with the exception of contrast measurements which are done with an i1Display Pro colorimeter.
At 402 nits, the Moto E's display actually has a fairly good peak brightness. Black levels are also very good, which leads to a surprisingly high contrast ratio. It should be noted that the Moto E makes use of Content Adaptive Backlight Control (CABC), and dynamic contrast. The actual contrast ratio is closer to 1050:1, which is still a very good result.
Greyscale results from the Moto E are unfortunately nothing exceptional. However, with a price point of $149 they are also not unexpected. The Moto E actually does not fare much worse than Motorola's flagship Moto X. The display's average white point tends toward the red as the blue component of luminance drops off when shades of grey approach white. The warm appearance of whites is definitely noticeable during use, but it's not highly bothersome.
With saturations the Moto E actually performs better than I had expected it to. It's certainly imperfect, especially with blue and any secondary color with blue as a component, but with a price of $149 it surpassed my expectations of how well it would perform. The gamut itself is also larger than what one might expect from a budget IPS display.
In the colorchecker test the Moto E does very well. While it isn't at the level of the most expensive flagships with calibrated displays, it beats out many devices that cost significantly more. The display is surprisingly accurate when displaying color mixtures, with much of the error coming from the issues with reproducing shades of grey.
Overall, the Moto E's display is actually much better than I had expected it to be. While I would really love if it were a 1280x720 panel, it's just not manageable with the price point that Motorola had to meet. Even so, text was still rendered fairly well, and colors were reproduced with much greater accuracy than I expected. If you have reasonable expectations of the Moto E's display when you purchase it, I think you'll find yourself pleasantly surprised.
It seems that having a camera is now a necessity on even the most inexpensive devices. But there are cases like HP's Stream 7 where the quality of the camera is so poor that you question whether it was even worth the money spent on it in the first place. However, with inexpensive smartphones the image quality is usually good enough for sharing via social media and instant messaging which makes it worth including. Whether or not this holds true for the Moto E is yet to be seen, but before discussing image quality it's important to have a good understanding of the Moto E's camera system.
Motorola Moto E (2015) Camera Specifications
Front Camera - Resolution
0.3MP (640x480)
Front Camera - Sensor
Aptina MT9V113
(2.2µm, 1/11")
Front Camera - Focal Length
1.4mm
Front Camera - Max Aperture
F/3.0
Rear Camera - Resolution
5.0MP (2560x1920)
Rear Camera - Sensor
Samsung S5K5E2 (1.12µm, 1/5")
Rear Camera - Focal Length
2.5mm (28mm eff)
Rear Camera - Max Aperture
F/2.2
The front facing camera on the Moto E is a 0.3MP sensor from Aptina. The original Moto E didn't even have a front facing camera so it's definitely an upgrade in that respect, but I do wonder if it would have been better to continue without the front facing camera and either spend the money elsewhere or further drive down the price of the phone.
The rear facing sensor is made by Samsung. It's a 1/5" 5MP sensor with 1.12 micron pixels. You may be familiar with it, as it was the sensor used for the HTC One M8's front-facing camera. It's also important to note that the 2015 Moto E supports autofocus, which is an enormous improvement over its predecessor which had a fixed focus camera. The video recording resolution of the rear camera has also been bumped from 854x480p30 to 1280x720p30.
The focus latency on the Moto E is one of the longer results on our test. For a device with only contrast detection auto focus it's not a bad result, although there are a couple devices that manage to focus a couple hundred milliseconds quicker. Shot latency is actually pretty good, and you don't ever feel like you're waiting in between taking photos.
Motorola includes their own camera application with the Moto E. By default it gives you what is essentially the most automatic camera experience possible, with zero control over focus, exposure, or any other options. In this mode, tapping anywhere on the display takes a photo, and the camera is always focused in the center. Pressing and holding on the display takes a succession of photos, which seems to work well apart from a pause after every 20 photos or so to write them to memory. Moving your finger up or down does a digital zoom up to 4.0x, although I wouldn't recommend it.
To access the controls in Motorola's camera app, you need to know to swipe in from the left side. I really don't like this hidden magic menu style of design. Motorola really should have had the menu set to be visible when the app is loaded and set it move off screen after a second or two. It is shown initially in the tutorial when you first run the app, but when you're relying on tutorials to show the user how to use the basic functions of your app your design is already a failure. Once you do find this menu, you'll be able to do various things like switch to panorama mode, change whether photos are stored on an SD card or internal memory, and most importantly, enable the control over focus and exposure that should have been enabled in the first place. You'll also be able to change the app from the default 3.7MP 16:9 cropped output to the full 2560x1920 output of the 4:3 sensor.
Unfortunately, even the focus control and exposure are implemented in a strange manner. You control the focus by moving a disk around on your screen, and when it turns green you know that you've successfully focused on that area. I understand what Motorola was trying to do here, as having the disk always on your screen lets you know where you focused. However, it's just not as intuitive as being able to tap somewhere to focus, and it just makes for a less comfortable experience than other camera applications.
I actually like some of Motorola's included applications, but the ones that try to replace the applications that already exist in AOSP or from Google tend to fall short. After playing with Motorola's camera app I just went to Google Play to download Google's Camera app which is quite frankly better than Motorola's. It's unfortunate though, because on an 8GB device the last thing you want is to have replacement apps for less than optimal default ones taking up space on your phone.
Of course, the biggest part of a smartphone's camera is not the camera app but the photos themselves. That's what I'll be looking at next.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Long ago, Motorola devices shipped with a custom Motorola UI known as Motoblur. It was one of the heavier custom Android interfaces, with many applications and widgets being included in addition to skinning the entirety of the Android interface. Naturally, it was also heavily criticized for slowing down devices and filling up storage with pre-installed applications. Over time Motorola reduced the amount of modifications they were making to stock Android, and by the time Google originally purchased Motorola Mobility before selling it again they had moved to shipping devices that were the closest to stock Google Android that you could find on a non-Nexus device. For the most part, you can find out about the Moto E software experience just by looking at our Android Lollipop review. That being said, Motorola does add a few apps and features to Android, and that's what I'll be covering here.
Motorola Alert is one of the first apps you'll see on your phone since the app drawer organizes your apps alphabetically. The app has a few different functions, and on a fundamental level it's really an app for keeping other people updated with where you are. This has fairly obvious use cases such as for elderly people and small children. When you set up the app, you'll be asked to pick some of the people from your contacts to be used as emergency contacts.
The Meet me button allows you to send a text message to some or all of your emergency contacts with a location that you are presumably travelling to and a prompt to meet you there. The Follow me feature is similar, but it instead periodically broadcasts your current location on a interval that you can specify in the settings section of the app. The Emergency button will send a special emergency message to your emergency contacts, and it will also bring up a button to either call your local emergency services number or a designated contact. You can also opt to have that number automatically dialed, and there's also an option to sound an alarm from your speakers to let anyone in the vicinity know you need help.
Motorola Migrate is another thoughtful app included by Motorola. It allows you to transfer much of your content from your older Android phone to your new Motorola device. While your Google account already allows for the transfer of things in the cloud and your applications, it doesn't move over your text messages or local photos and videos. That's where Motorola Migrate comes in. It supports transferring messages, photos, videos, music, contacts, and call logs from other Android devices, as well as contacts and calendar info from iOS devices.
When moving content from another Android device, you simply download the Migrate app on that device and scan a QR code which will be displayed on your new Motorola phone. This initiates a transfer of your files over an ad-hoc 802.11 link between the two devices, and once the transfer is complete you're ready to start using your Motorola phone. The procedure for iOS is a bit different, and it involves signing into your iCloud account which I'm just a bit weary of as you're signing into iCloud on a non-Apple device, and the migration service is actually powered by a third party company rather than Motorola. While it's most likely safe, I tend to err on the side of caution when using my Google account or Apple ID with any third party service.
Motorola has also seen fit to include their own gallery application. The reason I'm a bit confused about this is because the Moto E still ships with Google's own Photos app, and you can't remove it. Motorola's gallery isn't any worse than Google's app, but it doesn't really improve on it either. It even has the same issue of low resolution thumbnails that Google Photos does. Normally I wouldn't mind and would just hide the app, but on an 8GB device with only 5GB available to the user it's really frustrating to have a second gallery application taking up 45MB of space on the phone.
The rest of the software experience is really the same as you'll get on a Nexus device. Moto Display is a cool feature, but when your device uses an LCD instead of an AMOLED panel the power saving benefit of the dark appearance is lost. For me Moto Display isn't really a notable improvement over the standard Lollipop lock screen and how it displays notifications.
Moto Display also seems to be introducing a bug when picking up the device. The Moto Display screen will be shown briefly, and then the screen will show the launcher before suddenly drawing the standard Android lock screen. This represents a potential security flaw and I hope it will be fixed alongside a future Android 5.1 Lollipop update. I've also encountered some issues with memory usage causing the launcher to be evicted from memory. While the device is memory constrained, the memory management issues in early Lollipop releases are really Google's problem so I can't fault Motorola for it.
When building devices to meet a low price, WiFi always seems to be one of the first things on the chopping block. The assumption is most likely that the people in the market for inexpensive smartphones don't require speeds beyond what is offered by 802.11n. What disappoints me is when 5GHz support is also omitted, which leaves the device operating on the increasing crowded 2.4GHz band.
The Moto E's results are in line with other 2.4GHz 802.11n devices. With an absolute max theoretical speed of 72Mbps, 58.1Mbps over UDP is actually a pretty good result. That being said, the improved speed and reduced interference of 5GHz networks would still be appreciated. At $149 cuts have to be made somewhere though, and I would prefer that they be made to WiFi rather than the display or build quality.
Like most devices which use Qualcomm's Gobi modems, the Moto E uses Qualcomm's GNSS solution. In Airplane mode with no assistance information the Moto E was able to achieve a lock in 32 seconds, with it taking another few seconds to bring the accuracy to within 10 feet. Both these times will vary greatly depending on the surrounding environment and weather conditions. With assistance info locks take only a matter of seconds.
It wasn't that long ago that I recommended buyers looking for inexpensive smartphones avoid Android devices in favor of Windows Phone. While this may sound strange, at the time it was a reasonable way of thinking. Although Windows Phone has a limited application selection, the users who were interested in low-end devices were typically not heavy app users. Inexpensive Windows Phone devices also performed much better, with competing Android devices providing a slow and jerky interface, and ultimately a poor experience. With Android Lollipop and new budget devices like the Moto E, my opinion about the quality of low end Android devices has changed.
Although the Moto E is not a flagship smartphone, it is a very important product in Motorola's portfolio. With much of Android's growth coming from emerging markets, having a solid budget smartphone is a necessity for Android phone manufacturers. I think the Moto E represents a good value proposition for customers, and I think it provides a more than satisfactory experience. Low end Android devices are no longer painfully slow, and with Motorola providing a version of Android that is nearly the same as Google's stock Android there's no issues with bloated software bogging down the device.
When building a smartphone that targets a low price, sacrifices will inevitably be made to drive down the cost for the manufacturer and the consumer. I think Motorola has chosen the right areas to make concessions with the Moto E. The areas where the Moto E definitely stumbles are its WiFi performance and its camera. The WiFi is limited to 802.11n, and the camera takes acceptable photos only when given very generous lighting. However, by reducing costs with the camera and the WiFi, Motorola has been able to maintain quality in every other respect. The Moto E doesn't fall short of Motorola's standards for design and build quality, and it packs the fastest CPU you can get at this price point. The Snapdragon 410 model even has support for LTE which is often a feature you give up with products at this price. While the display is not as nice as the 1280x720 one on the Moto G, it's still decently sharp and has surprisingly good color reproduction.
As for the competition, I don't know of much. The Moto E is priced at $149, and in many markets I don't think the Moto E really has any competition at that price point. While there are cheaper options, the concessions to reach an even lower price point really start to damage the user experience.
Looking toward the future, there are a few things Motorola should strive for if they are possible at the Moto E's price target. I would really love to see the next version move to a 1280x720 display, although since that is a point of differentiation between it and the Moto G we may never see that happen. Continued improvements to the camera will also be appreciated, and I think faster WiFi will be a must on the next model. If not 802.11ac, then at least 5GHz 802.11n. Right now Motorola has a really solid offering, and it's a phone that pretty much anyone will be able to afford. The next billion people in the world who become connected will undoubtedly be doing it via their smartphone, and Motorola is well positioned to be a big player in that market with phones like the Moto E.