Moto E3 Power first impressions: A balanced smartphone on a budget

Motorola has kept its identity even after being taken over by Lenovo. After launching three new Moto G4 versions in India this year, it finally launched its most affordable offering the Moto E3. While there are two versions of the handset, India will be getting the better equipped Moto E3 Power. Here is a quick look at the new smartphone. Design and build  The new Moto E Power has grown up and is now a 5-inch device. The looks are similar to the new Moto G4 series with a smooth plastic finish at the back, and metal finish plastic around the edges. It is a chunky smartphone to accommodate the large battery, but then the 5-inch form factor makes up for it. At the front there is the display, with the bar shaped earpiece above it and a speaker below. The right edge has volume rocker buttons and a textured power button. The top and bottom house the headphone jack and microUSB port respectively. At the back is the camera module with the LED flash. The back panel is removable and provides the slots for the SIM card and microSD memory expansion. Now Moto might not be offering a metal finish but the new Moto E3 Power is water resistant so it csn withstand a few water splashes. Display As mentioned above, the screen size has grown to 5-inches compared to the 4.5-inch on the Moto E 2nd. It retains the 720p resolution and is protected with Gorilla Glass 3 with a smudge resistant coating. Overall the viewing angles and colour reproduction looked good. Although it didn’t seem like a very competitive display panel. Hardware and software  Motorola usually sticks with Qualcomm chipsets, however this time the company went on to use a MediaTek SoC. The processor is clocked at 1GHz with four cores and a Mali T720MP2 GPU to handle the graphics. There is 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage which can be expanded further using a microSD card. The original Moto E3 comes with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage, so a good decision by the company to get the better version. On the connectivity side, you get dual SIM card slots, 4G with VoLTE support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microUSB, FM Radio and GPS. You get a large 3,500mAh battery with fast charge support which sounds like a good deal here. As usual Moto has once again used stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow to offer a vanilla Android experience. It will feature Moto’s usual features like twist to open the camera and chop to turn on the flashlight. Camera  The primary camera comes with an 8MP resolution along with an LED flash. It comes with HDR, panorama, and so on. Surprisingly you can only shoot 720p videos, which is a bummer. The front camera offers a 5MP resolution to capture selfies. Both the cameras are pretty average and we didn’t find anything exciting in the few minutes we used the device at the launch Conclusion Motorola has played safe with the latest generation of the Moto E. People looking for high end specs are probably not going to be satisfied. However the brand value might just make it a decent seller. It is also one of the only few smartphones that feature a MediaTek processor, but we can comment on how good or how bad it performs. The 3,500mAh battery sounds promising but again we can’t be sure as to how much backup will the handset provide until we thoroughly test it.

Motorola has priced it at Rs 7,999 making it a direct competitor of the Xiaomi Redmi 3S Prime which in its league is probably the best handset till date. The company is trying to lure customers with a variety of offers and benefits, but we doubt that it will affect the sales in a major way.