The Moto E5 Plus proves to be a perfectly adequate budget phone with a great battery, but the Moto G6 and limited carrier options are standing in its way.<\/b>
\nThe Moto E5 Plus draws inspiration from costlier flagship phones with a large 18:9 screen and massive battery at an affordable price, but it also draws too much influence from Motorola\u2019s other big budget challenger, the Moto G6.
It\u2019s an Android Oreo phone with a hefty 5,000mAh battery, an expansive 6-inch display, and an upgraded octa-core processor that\u2019s fast enough for most tasks. All that combined with a low price point makes it a fair option for almost anyone looking for a cheap phone.
Here\u2019s the rub: right now, the Moto E5 Plus is available in the US through Sprint and Cricket Wireless. But, things immediately get complicated, as Sprint prices the phone at $288, while Cricket prices it at $179. In the UK, the Moto E5 Plus isn\u2019t available yet, but will be coming with a chipset that\u2019s slower than the US model. Confusing? We think so, too.
So, for now, US consumers have the option of the Moto E5 Plus as a big, budget smartphone with credentials for TV and movie viewing. But, there are other more compelling Moto phones, leaving the Moto E5 Plus in an awkward place.
The Moto E5 Plus has hints of a premium, almost flagship smartphone. The display takes up a substantial portion of the phone, with thin, though still present, bezels on the sides.
At 161.9 x 75.3 x 9.35mm, it\u2019s a large phone, but not overly so. However, at 200g, it has considerable heft. But, we think that\u2019s likely because of the big battery it\u2019s packing.
The Moto E5 Plus is built to have the look of a metal frame and glass back, but it instead uses plastics and polymers that don\u2019t feel quite as premium. On the plus side, the plastic back panel is less likely to shatter than a real glass one. It also has Motorola\u2019s water-repellent coating, for protection from splashes and light rain, and Gorilla Glass 3 guarding the front against scratches and cracking.
For all the flagship look, that appearance quickly vanishes. The rear of the phone is one of the strongest smudge magnets we\u2019ve ever come across. We tried wiping it on our shirt to see if we could get it looking pretty again for a second, but that didn\u2019t work, and would have been re-smudged in a matter of moments anyway. Dust seems attracted to it as well. The rear also houses a fingerprint scanner and what at first appears to be a dual-sensor camera, but is awkwardly just one camera and a laser auto-focus sensor.
The bottom of the phone houses only a micro-USB port and a microphone, while the top has a second microphone and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Wondering where the speakers are? The main earpiece speaker also serves as the primary loudspeaker for watching or listening to media, and it does a good job putting out sound while also being hard to accidentally cover up with your palm while listening.
The display is the main selling point for the Moto E5 Plus, because it packs a big one in for a low price. It has a 6-inch IPS LCD display with an HD+ (720p) resolution. For a second, we were almost fooled into thinking it had an AMOLED display, because at low brightness settings, it manages to stay fairly black when Motorola\u2019s ambient display comes on. But, with the brightness set to a more reasonable level, it was clearly an LCD screen.
While the screen is plenty big for media viewing, it\u2019s not perfect. For an IPS display, the viewing angles aren\u2019t the best. In landscape, viewing from the sides quickly loses brightness. At HD+, it doesn\u2019t always appear the sharpest either.
The display\u2019s default color mode, \u201cneutral,\u201d also feels a bit cold and overly blue. Switching to the warm color mode felt like it dirtied the image, but eventually grew on us.
Motorola has a screen autowake function that\u2019s equal parts useful and annoying. Useful, because it doesn\u2019t take much effort to have the screen show you the time or date at a glance. Annoying, because it doesn\u2019t take much to accidentally make the screen light up. Just leaving it sitting on a small table and bumping the table will bring it up. Thankfully, you can turn this off in the Moto features menu.
With a Snapdragon 435 octa-core chipset and 3GB of RAM running Android 8.0, the Moto E5 Plus isn\u2019t challenging any high-end phones, and falls short of some mid-range phones. That said, it performs adequately enough for most people looking for a big budget phone.
From browsing to launching apps, it was quick and smooth. We didn\u2019t notice many hiccups with simple tasks. We ran Geekbench 4, and it earned a multi-core score of 2,319, which puts it on par with last year\u2019s Moto G5S, but it\u2019s still well behind the new Moto G6 and Moto G5S Plus.
One area the performance seems to really suffer those is in the speed of the storage. The model we tested came with 32GB of storage, expandable via microSD card up to 128GB. Loading up large games like PUBG Mobile or Harry Potter Hogwarts Mystery was slow. And, the screen would annoyingly timeout while loading, which in turn cancelled the loading.
Opening up a large movie file is similarly slow. Fortunately, there isn\u2019t too much else slow. Most of the gaming experience is even fairly smooth, though we have to keep PUBG on the lowest settings and aren\u2019t very satisfied with the low resolution.
One thing that helps the Moto E5 Plus run as smoothly as it does on its limited hardware is the particularly clean version of Android it\u2019s running. There\u2019s very little software bloat, and no crazy UI changes.
The only serious extras thrown into the software are Motorola\u2019s gestures, such as the chop to turn on the flashlight, or the wrist twist which activates the camera and switches between front and rear cameras. And, these fan-favorite gestures work smooth as well.
The fingerprint scanner is even snappy, though not as quick as higher-end device\u2019s scanners, and a bit too easy to only partially touch on the first try.<\/p>\n

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