Motorola Moto E5 Play UK SIM-Free whatsapp sim 16GB Smartphone, Black

Product Information

Sensors - Fingerprint Reader†, Proximity, Accelerometer, Ambient Light, Magnetometer (e-Compass), Sensor Hub

By comparison, the 5.7in E5 and 6in E5 Plus both have an 18:9 720p IPS display. All three phones have the same processor and have the latest iteration of Android Oreo pre-installed. Despite only having a rear 8-megapixel f/2.0 and front 5-megapixel single lens camera, the E5 Play captures plenty of light and detail. Despite its name, this phone isn’t cut out to play games. You can fire up Candy Crush or Temple Run, but don’t expect to play PUBG Mobile on it. And if you’re wondering why the E5 Play outperforms all its rivals in the onscreen tests, there’s a simple answer: its lower resolution screen is less taxing on the hardware.

The Moto E5 has a great screen, superb camera and amazing battery life — it's a whole lot of phone for not much money

The E5 Play isn’t waterproof, though Motorola claims the phone is ‘water repellent’ due to ‘advanced nano-coating technology’ – so it should survive the odd accidental splash of water. Just don’t take it in the bath. However, when I started digging into the phone’s features, I was pleasantly surprised: the fingerprint reader is fast, battery life is good, and the replaceable battery is a genuine rarity these days. What’s more, the forward-facing speaker works well for watching content on your phone, the taller 18:9 display gives you more screen to scroll on, and its front- and rear-facing cameras are impressive. It’s also not the brightest screen, which is the bigger problem. With direct sunlight reflecting off the screen, it’s hard to read. But, tilting it to a different angle mostly resolves this issue. You don’t get a dual camera on the Motorola E5 like you do with the Moto G6 phones and so there’s no portrait mode. In fact, the camera offers a pretty basic roster of facilities, with very few extra modes beyond panorama. Video looks great, too. The Moto E5 can only capture clips at 1080p and 30fps with no image stabilisation but, just like the E5’s stills, videos look crisp, with balanced exposure and loads of detail.

The UK variant of the Moto E5 Play is a 5.34in phone with a 960 x 480 FWVGA+ (18:9) TN display. It runs Android Oreo out-the-box; has a quad-core Snapdragon 425 processor with 1GB of RAM; and has 16GB of internal storage space that can be expanded with up to 128GB of additional space through a microSD card. For typical use, the screen is good enough. The lower resolution won’t be too noticeable watching shows or movies, and though the viewing angles aren’t great and lose a bit of contrast, they’re not the worst we’ve seen.This, however, is where things begin to go slightly awry and it’s performance that begins the erosion of the Moto E5’s appeal. The culprit is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 425, a chipset I haven’t come across in a smartphone before. The paltry 2GB of RAM doesn’t help either.

The E5 Play has a 5.34in 960 x 480 FWVGA+ (18:9) TN display. The phone’s resolution is rather poor for a modern-day phone, and given that the Vodafone Smart N8 has been out for over a year and sports a 720P display, it’s rather disappointing to see Motorola hasn’t upped the pixel count. The Moto E5 Play is protected from splashes and light rain by a water-repellent coating, like many of Motorola’s other phones. But don’t confuse this with waterproof. It’s not a very water-resistant phone. The entire handset measures 151 x 74 x 8.85mm and weighs a light 150 grams. Note: we popped a T-Mobile SIM card into our review unit, and it connected to the network successfully.) We did experience some sluggishness with Google Maps, but it’s still smooth enough to do the job. More demanding apps, like photo and video editing apps, can be slow on this phone, but those uses aren’t really what someone should be looking to do with the Moto E5 Play.As long as you’re not planning to read lots of full books from the Moto E5 Play, its screen is perfectly adequate. What it's like to use The Moto app that handles those features is actually the only add-on software we spotted on the phone. The Moto E5 Play is a great example of how clean Motorola keeps Android on its phones. Everything else pre-installed was the typical Google fare, like Chrome, calculator, maps, and the G Suite. (Different mobile carrier options may come pre-loaded with different apps, though.)