Lenovo acquired Motorola Mobility from Google back in 2014 and decided to kill the iconic brand name in favor of Lenovo. Industry experts called it an unwise decision, as Motorola enjoys much better recognition as compared to Lenovo.

The company learned the lesson soon enough and decided to kill Lenovo smartphone range instead. Now the Chinese electronics giant is actively pushing Motorola smartphones, not only in established markets but emerging markets like Pakistan are also included in the list.

Motorola Moto Z and later Moto M were launched in Pakistan but, due to their high prices and low brand visibility, these phones didn’t do good in the market.

However, now Lenovo has made an aggressive comeback in the market with its battery focused mid-range smartphones, the Moto E4 and E4 Plus.

Battery life is a big concern for almost all Android phones these days. So, it is fitted with a battery that will last you days and can handle any scenario to a certain extent.

On paper, the specs seem to be okay-ish but there isn’t anything extra-ordinary, it’s just a regular phone that performs good for the offered price, i.e. Rs. 20,000/-

E4 Plus Unboxing Video:

Looks and Build Quality:

The Moto E4 Plus looks bulky and it feels heavy, like so much heavy for a 2017 smartphone featuring a 5.5-inch display. That’s probably due to the massive battery inside. It weighs about 198 grams and it’s also quite thick at 9.6mm.

It doesn’t mean that the phone has an ugly design and as compared to other mid-range phones it actually gives a more premium feel. With its curved back and metal encasing the phone sits perfect in your hands.

The 5.5-inch screen on the front offers only a 720p resolution, which looks good but the colors aren’t quite vivid and reading text could be bothersome.

Along with Moto branding, the border above screen features a flash light, ear-speaker, front facing camera and proximity / light sensors.

Things get more interesting below the screen with a presence of a fingerprint scanner, not to be found in other smartphone in this range. The sensor works fine, though it isn’t the fastest or the most accurate.

On the bottom of the phone there’s a speaker and a micro USB port and on top, a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is quite a luxury these days considering high-end phones don’t have them anymore.

The phone is designed in a way that it looks like a uni-body layout, however the back-metal case can be removed, which is quite a difficult task.

Once you’ve taken care of that, 2 SIM cards and a microSD card can be inserted inside the phone. Here you also get to see the massive 5000mAh battery, but you can take it out.

Performance and User Experience:

The variant of E4 Plus launched in Pakistan is equipped with a rather outdated MediaTek MT6735 SoC, featuring a quad-core ARM Cortex A-53 Architecture with a clock speed of 1.25GHz. It is complemented by 3GB of RAM and 16GB on-board storage.

Although, these specs don’t look good on paper the phone works just fine and runs most of the common apps without breaking any sweat. Things get a little bit lag-ish, when you try to open multiple apps, browse some super-heavy web pages or launch a resource hungry app – especially the 3D games.

By default, the phone comes with a “close to stock” version of Android Nougat 7.1.1, which does look promising as there are very minimal changes in the system and we do know that such phones may get Android version upgrades.

But considering Lenovo’s previous strategy, the phone might not get a taste of Oreo (the latest version of Android) anytime soon. Moreover, the MediaTek chipset is also a big hurdle in the way of timely updates as the Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company is infamous for not releasing updated drivers.

Cameras & Video:

The E4 Plus packs a 13-Megapixel rear camera and a 5-Megapixel shooter on the front, both of these are couple with dedicated flash lights. However, camera performance is a real lackluster.

The focusing is quite slow and the color reproduction isn’t quite accurate. You have to be extra careful while taking the shots, otherwise the photos will come blurry and out of focus.

If there isn’t enough light, you won’t be able to get perfect shots and the details are missing in many of the night shots.

The front camera does manage to take some decent selfies in the day light or when you have adequate light on the subject, but it doesn’t produce a detailed image and most of the images come out very soft.

Videos aren’t fun either and there is limit of 720p resolution only. The camera app itself is quite confusing and totally different from stock Android and other Android smartphones.

You can take some panoramic photos and it does support beauty mode for both cameras. But there’s no real standout camera feature on the Moto E4 Plus.

A Massive Battery that runs for days:

Moto E4 Plus comes with a 5000mAh battery that will not die on you quite easily. After a single charge, you can easily get two days of normal usage out of this thing without recharging. It supports some kind of fast charging as well, however the supplied charger operates at the regular 5V – 2A and its unclear how it charges fast without more watts.

When charging normally, the E4 Plus takes a particularly long time to top up on account of that 5,000mAh cell, so you’ll want to try and keep your fast charger on you if you’re out and about.

After using (abusing) the battery during our tests, it’s clear that E4 Plus has the best optimization of battery and with its bigger capacity, it runs for days if you don’t use your phone much.

We do wish that more and more phones get bigger batteries and such level of optimization so you might stop thinking about the charger, and forget about plugging it in at night.

Is it the best Choice under Rs. 20,000?

The Moto E4 Plus is a solid phone which does last you days on a single charge. The performance is also satisfactory as it can run all of the crucial apps with no issues, and the price tag is hard to beat, considering it has fingerprint scanner and premium build quality.

Although, the phone does have some drawbacks, especially the low-resolution screen and mediocre camera experience – But we do recommend you to get Moto E4 Plus if you’re either looking for an affordable phone, or a device that will last you a couple of days on a single charge.

The Moto E4 Plus has all the qualities that a phone in this price range should have and you’ll always have to make some compromises while buying a budget device.

You can also find other devices with slightly better camera capabilities, like the OPPO A71 or the Vivo Y55s in the same price, but the battery capacity won’t be the same as E4 Plus.

Share your opinion about the Moto E4 Plus in the comments section below and do let us know if you know about any other smartphones in this price range, that can compete against the Moto E4 Plus.