Motorola E20 2/32GB all carriers - Graphite Grey

Product Information

In GPU terms, the Moto E20 scored better than both its big brother the Moto G22 and the TCL in the 3DMark Sling Shot tests. Like those other phones, the Moto E20 wouldn’t even run the more demanding Wild Life tests due to its limited hardware setup.

Things swiftly fell apart as soon as the light dropped, however. Indoor restaurant shots weren’t quite as disastrous as they could have been, but night shots were a total write-off. There’s no dedicated Night mode, and the automatic shots I took in low light conditions came out completely unusable – a noisy, poorly focused mess. I’m pleased to announce that the Moto E20 does a respectable job for the money. None of the pictures I took had me swearing off the best camera phones – you’ll still need to spend more for genuinely good results – but the results I got were far from terrible. One telltale result of this is that you get the Google Gallery app pre-installed, instead of the full-fat Google Photos that comes with most other Android phones. The onus is clearly on taking the strain off that creaky old processor and limited RAM.The Moto E20 comes with a humble camera setup that involves a 13-megapixel wide sensor and a 2-megapixel macro sensor, with a 5-megapixel selfie camera at the front. It’ll comfortably last you a full day and more on a single charge. Add in the fact that no owner of the Moto E20 is likely to be what you’d term a “power user”, and it’s safe to say that battery life is of no concern here. Nevertheless, buyers should be aware that they cannot expect razor-sharp camera pictures, a very bright screen, or fast storage for under 100 Euros. The Moto E20 does not offer all that, so it is more suitable for users who use their smartphone rather occasionally and do not need some features at all or only very rarely. That is how it is with most entry-level phones.

The Moto E20 runs on a Unisoc T606 processor, which is – you guessed it – an extremely humble piece of silicon. The company has even found a way to inject a little flair into its design in the form of a subtle hexagon pattern etched into the plastic. As well as looking a little different, it also adds a slight undulating feel to the phone, which may also make it a bit grippier. That’s true of the shots I took in good natural lighting, at least. They looked reasonably sharp and had colours that broadly resembled the scene as I saw it. Skin tones were decidedly non-ghoulish, and close-ups even yielded some convincing bokeh. Motorola's Moto E20 is a fast, light, and very affordable smartphone but with slightly shorter battery runtimes. The Moto E20 uses a 4,000mAh battery, which is pretty small by modern Android standards. Still, with that 720p display, the lower-grade CPU and lightweight Android Go OS, you’re hardly going to be drawing a lot of power.Motorola has had to trade the phone's low weight with considerably shorter runtimes compared to the competition, but the 14:27 hours in our WLAN test is still sufficient for everyday use. Sure enough, in my tests, an hour of Netflix streaming with the screen brightness set to 50% sapped just 2% off a full charge. An hour of YouTube Music streaming, meanwhile, didn’t even make the battery drop below 100%. That’s actually fractionally better than the Moto G22 with its 5,000mAh battery. The Motorola Moto E20 offers a lot of power for little money, weighs less, and features a dated but fast WLAN. If these aspects are important, then this inexpensive device could be of interest to you.

While Motorola has worked its design magic to make this cheap plastic phone feel not terrible, there’s nothing it could have done about the display. It’s perfectly serviceable for day-to-day tasks, but you wouldn’t want to indulge in any long-form media content or extensive web-browsing sessions on it. At 6.5 inches, it’s plenty large, and it gets bright enough for indoor usage, although you’ll be looking for shade when you’re outdoors on brighter days. Even the colours are reasonably vibrant, considering it’s such a low-grade LCD. But with a resolution of 720 x 1600, or 720p, the Moto E20’s display simply isn’t sharp enough to show media and web content at anything close to its best. Needless to say, the refresh rate won’t go past 60Hz either. However, given this phone’s humble performance, that’s probably a good thing.