Motorola Moto E4 Plus Review: Battery is Life

We all love smartphones with longer battery life. But the fact that we also want faster processors, great camera sensors, awesome selfie experience in our handsets makes it even more difficult to cherry-pick the features we need for our ideal smartphone. For a manufacturer, it's hard to cram everything in one mid-range smartphone, that's why feature-oriented handsets take spotlight every now and then. The Motorola Moto E4 Plus is not an exception.

Motorola Moto E4 Plus Review

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It is designed for those who wanted more juice in their handsets. But apart from the promise of a 48-hour battery life, can the Moto E4 Plus do other things? Will you choose it over your favorite battery-hungry phones? Let's find out in our review.

Design

The Motorola E4 Plus is designed to pack a bigger battery without compromising the design. Its metallic finish gives it a premium look unlike any other handset with bigger batteries. The back panel is also curved making it settle in the hands comfortably. 

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We have highlighted the handset's ports and buttons in our first impressions and in boxing review. The only gripe that I could think of is the fact that the Moto E4 Plus' audio jack is still located on the top which makes it more cumbersome to use. It's also chunkier with 9.6-mm depth.

Read also: Motorola Moto E4 Plus Unboxing, First Impressions

There's also no external SIM tray; in fact, you need to pull the cover up to have access to SIM slot, microSD slot and non-removable battery. But that doesn't make the handset ugly, once the back cover is snapped, you'll enjoy an almost seamless body.

One of the marquee feature of the Motorola Moto E4 Plus is the front-mounted fingerprint sensor. It's very fast in picking up biometric information. In turn, it’s very useful in unlocking the handset and provide additional layer of protection to the device at the same time.

Display

The Motorola Moto E4 Plus packs a large 5.5-inch HD display. This pairing may categorize the display to be of lower resolution which only frames 267ppi pixel density. However, in our daily use of the Moto E4 Plus as a multimedia device, we found out that it is still capable of giving great video playback experience despite the lower resolution.

When using the handset outdoors, I have struggled with the clarity of the display even when cranking the brightness to max level. However, reading text, watching movies and even playing games indoors gave me good experiences with its screen.

An HD panel in a 5.5-inch display still register to be clear and great for multimedia consumption. Plus the fact that it's only HD contributes to the longer battery life that Motorola is marketing with this device.

Battery Life

In our two weeks of using the handset, we are definitely convinced that it has more to offer in terms of delivering extra juice to your handset. With our average use, we tallied roughly 47 hours or nearly two days of battery life.

The excellent battery life of 5000 mAh is also one of the best that we have tested in a sub-Php9K price standpoint. In our moderate battery use, the 47 hours covers 30 minutes of playing Mobile Legends, 30 minutes of emails, two dozen of camera shots, 2 hours of Spotify, occasional testing, 10-minute calls and 15 minutes of video recording. All in all we had 8 hours of on-screen time.

The Motorola Moto E4 Plus also supports fast charging technology but you need to use both the wall adapter and cable included in the box. However, if the charger breaks, topping up the handset's battery will definitely be time consuming.

Camera

On paper, the 13MP f/2.0 rear sensor looks good. In actual performance, the Moto E4 Plus camera takes decent to great photos in good lighting. Images are bright and vibrant. However, the photos gets muddy in light-challenged environment. But that's expected to a smartphone in this price standpoint.

It also bothers me that it takes a few seconds from the time you click the on-screen shutter button to the actual time it takes the photo. There's no standout feature inside the camera app, everything is pretty straightforward.

In terms of video recording, you will be limited to only 720p HD. Selfie camera is rated 5MP with front-mounted LED flash. It could take decent social media selfies but if you're looking for a selfie smartphones, there are better options than this handset.

However, there’s little to complain about the camera in this price standpoint. If you just need a normal point and shoot camera that you can pull up whenever you need to capture memories with friends and family, this handset could be good companion. Check out the sample pictures below.

Performance

The Motorola Moto E4 Plus ticks with a MediaTek MT6737 processor clocked at 1.3GHz. The 3GB RAM couples the efficient processors to give you smooth experience in pulling up an app or playing non-graphic intensive games. I have tried playing graphic-demanding titles such as Lineage2 Revolution and experienced several drops in rendering and app crashing.

Popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc, run smoothly with the Moto E4 Plus. There are times that it takes a while to load these apps (one or two seconds) but it's tolerable. The 16GB version of the handset only offers 10GB of free space, the 6GB is intended for the software. Thus, if you're planning to stack multimedia files, you could go for the 32GB variant or get a microSD card.

Software

What I like about Motorola phones is their intuitive software like the Moto Actions. For one, you can do a "chop-chop" or Karate Chop action to pull up the flashlight or twist your hand to load the camera app.

It's also a great thing that the handset boots with Android 7.1.1 Nougat. And since it is a Motorola handset, there's a high possibility that it could receive an Android Oreo update in the future.

The Wrap

The Motorola Moto E4 Plus is definitely a great contender in the sub Php9K segment. Spending some time with the handset made me drool over the assurance of a long-lasting battery. The fast Android Nougat gives the phone the ability to do most of its task well.

There's also no overlooking the fact that the handset is tad thicker than most of its peers. But I find this trade-off reasonable. In an bigger scale, the handset's design is also one of its deal makers - the efficient front panel, metallic chassis, neatly curved backing. Its design is authentic; it doesn't look like any other handsets in the market.

More than anything else, if you want a phone that could stand longer hours, could accept commands and process them quickly, then the Motorola Moto E4 Plus is for you.

[2column] [content]What I Like
48-hour battery
Metallic design
Fast fingerprint scanner
Moto Actions

[/content] [content]What I Don't Like
Slow camera
Hefty chassis
Snap-on back cover[/content] [/2column]

Motorola Moto E4 Plus Specs

5.5-inch HD IPS LCD Display, 720 x 1280p, 267ppi

Gorilla Glass 3

Qualcomm Snapdragon 427

Quad-Core Cortex-A53 CPU

Adreno 308 GPU

3GB of RAM

32GB internal memory

expandable up to 128GB

13MP rear camera, f/2.0 aperture, AF, LED Flash

5MP Front camera, f/2.2, LED Flash

4G LTE,3G and 2G

Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, WiFi Direct, Hotspot

Bluetooth 4.1

GPS, AGPS

Fingerprint Sensor

Android 7.1 Nougat

5000 mAh battery

Iron Gray, Fine Gold 

Php 8,999