Moto E4 Plus review

Battery life

• Impressive two-day battery life with average usage
• Means you won’t have to recharge your phone every night, unless intensively using it 

The battery is certainly the highlight of the Moto E4 Plus. It's a huge 5,000mAh cell, and throughout our time testing the phone we found the battery life to be nothing short of incredible. If you’re looking for a device that can last two days from a single charge, this is it.

If you’re using your phone intensively the battery life will more likely be around a day and a half, but our usage was fairly typical, and we found that it would indeed last for a whole two days.

For comparison, the standard Moto E4 only has a 2,800mAh juice pack, while even the massive Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus has just a 3,500mAh cell.

Both those phones can last a whole day, but the Moto E4 Plus’ 5,000mAh battery is only powering a low-end device with a limited processor and 720p screen, so it’s not surprising that it’s able to offer even better battery life.

There’s fast-charging tech built in here, but you’ll need to use the dedicated charger included in the box to make the most of it, so you won’t be able to fast-charge at a friend’s house or if your charger breaks.

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.

There are no bells and whistles here, such as wireless charging, you’re just getting solid battery life the old-fashioned way – and if that’s what you want from your device then you’ll have no complaints.

Camera

• 13MP sensor looks better on paper than how it actually performs
• It can take decent images, but lacks interesting camera features 

The Moto E4 Plus has a 13MP sensor on the rear, which may look great on paper, but the shooter is particularly limited.

For example, you'll be restricted to only 720p video recording, while there’s a noticeable lag between you pressing the capture button and the photo actually being taken.

We found the resolution of images to be acceptable and despite a high aperture of f/2.0 the images still seemed bright and captured with a lot of light in. Night time shooting saw the Moto E4 Plus struggle a little, but that’s expected on a phone at this price.

Images captured in good lighting looked nice and bright, and resolution was acceptable. Low light shooting saw the Moto E4 Plus struggle a little, but that’s to be expected with a phone at this price. 

There’s no real standout camera feature on the Moto E4 Plus. If you’re looking for a device that can take the odd image for uploading to Instagram or sharing with friends, you’ll likely be happy with the camera on the back here.

There's a 5MP selfie camera on the front of the phone that comes with an LED flash. Again it’s fine for the odd photo, but don't buy this phone specifically for its selfie camera, as features are limited here too. 

Camera samples

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