While Motorola has long been dominant in the budget market, these latest releases provide a solid proof of intent to its wish to stay there. This is an excellent point in the market if you’re looking for a great price/performance ratio, as while you won’t be getting the performance of a high-end of smartphone, you’ll be getting respectable power for a fraction of the cost.
Price
At £219 / $249, the Moto G6 is a little over our £200 cut-off for budget phones but it’s so close that you should definitely consider it if your budget stretches. The G6 will release go on sale on 2 May. The Moto E5 enters at £119 which is quite amazing considering that it could be confused with a phone ten times it’s price at a glance. We’ll be seeing the E5 arrive in early June. If you’re looking for solid budget smartphones this year Motorola certainly has you covered.
Design and build
While both of these phones have entered the market at a budget level, you would not guess that from the design and build quality. Both phones feature a 18:9 screen on the front with modest bezels allowing the phone to look sleek and modern. Both devices being fairly similar from the front means you could even confuse one for the other at a glance. Both phones also feature a fingerprint scanner, although the G6 retains it on the front, while the E5 has it on the back.
The E5 looks a little but more understated than its bigger brother, and the fingerprint scanner is even carefully concealed in the Motorola logo on the back, which is a nice touch. The aluminium rear cover is also a beautiful additional as it makes the device feel well made, and good to hold in the hand. The G6 has an attractive 3D curved rear cover which reflects any light in a gorgeous way making it very eye-catching, particularly in the deep blue colour that we got our hands on.
At 8.3mm thick and 167g the Moto G6 feels almost exactly as you’d expect, and it also retains the headphone jack which is a massive plus for most people. The p2i coating also helps to make the phone water repellent to boot. The E5 is the smallest bit bigger and heavier at 9mm thick and 175g, but nothing you’re going to notice in casual use. The headphone jack remains here too, although you’re not going to get the water repellent coating or USB-C here sadly (the difference in price had to kick in at some point).
Specs and features
One of the biggest pluses to the G6 range is the new 18:9 Max Vision screen which has been spreading across the phone market very swiftly and we’re extremely pleasantly surprised to find this on the E5 too, as it’s such a low cost phone. The E5 holds a 5.7in screen at the mentioned 18:9 aspect ratio, and impressively it’s also IPS LCD and has the same HD+ resolution (720×1440). The G6 also holds a 5.7in screen (seems to be the standard in 2018, even for phones at the lower end) and holds full HD+ resolution at a 18:9 ratio.
The performance is very sold on the phone and with the micro SD slot there is space for an extra 128GB of memory. The E5 holds the Qualcomm Snapdragon 425, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. That is not a lot of space at all, and just the operating system is going to take up a solid chunk of that internal storage, so some external storage in the form of a 128GB SD card is pretty much required. The performance is still more than acceptable here but the gap between the price point of these two phones is certainly starting to show. Taking a look at the cameras, the G6 is one of the cheapest phones on the market to come with a dual camera setup. The phone holds a 12Mp primary camera with a secondary 5Mp camera as well, this allows Motorola’s image processor to perform a number of tricks that a single lens just can’t achieve. The camera can take some very nice shots, particularly for a phone at this price. It can also capture video at 1080/60, and holds an 8Mp selfie camera too. The E5 holds a 13Mp rear camera which shoots at a f/2.0 aperture, and also has phase detection autofocus and HDR. For a phone of just over £100 that’s very solid. The front camera is a little more true to the price, with a 5Mp camera with an f/2.2 aperture. See below for a full specs comparison of the Moto G6 and Moto E5
