Moto E7 Power review: clean software and big battery

Name: Moto E7 Power
Item: Moto E7 Power
Rating: 3.5
Author: Kshitij Pujari

Here is my review of the budget Moto E7 Pro with stock android which is priced at Rs 7,499.

By Kshitij Pujari

Published On: 3 March 2021 | 16:33 IST

Review Summary

Expert Rating

3.5/5

The Moto E7 Power was launched recently in the Indian market as a budget offering, adding to the hotly-contested segment. Pricing it at Rs 7,499 onwards, it is apparent that Motorola wants its phone to be ultra-competitive. While budget phones are not exactly feature-rich, it’d be fair to say that the E7 Power does offer a few things that are worth liking, but there are a few things that aren’t. In this review of the E7 Power, let’s briefly see what those things are and if it is worth buying the device.

Table of Contents

Verdict

Motorola’s stock Android-like implementation makes it easy to operate the UI and isn’t too heavy on the processor. You also get a reasonably big 5,000mAh battery that will get the job done and keep you away from the power socket for a day. However, some of the other aspects of the phone do leave one wanting for more, including sub-par performance, average cameras, and a design that doesn’t really stand out. In retrospect, the nearly six-month old POCO C3 (review) appears to be a better choice for the price.

What’s good

Solid polycarbonate construction with very little flex and a rigid design greeted me when I opened the Moto E7 Power box for the first time. The Tahiti Blue colour option and the rather polished finish in place of a textured look sit fine with me.

The phone doesn’t weigh as much as I had thought, and the edges curve ever so gently for a comfortable in-hand feel. The fingerprint sensor integrated with the Motorola logo is placed just at the right height beside the dual-camera setup. You also get an additional Google Assistant button on top of the usual volume rocker and power button.
The Moto E7 Power provides a sizeable 6.5-inch HD+ IPS LCD panel with a decent amount of brightness and slightly oversaturated tones to the colour scheme in general. You can change the profile as per your preference in the settings menu.

Optics on the device are handled by a 13MP primary shooter and a 2MP macro shooter. When presented with ample light, the E7 Power will pull off shots that look quite good. Detailing is slightly off and the dynamic range is not the best, but the focus speeds and exposure calibration work well for the most part. On the front is a 5MP selfie camera that also works well in daylight conditions and maintains skin tones accurately.

Motorola has stuck with its stock-Android skin which is clean, bloatware-free, has good integration of Google services, and is, in general, not processor-heavy. The entire UI is quite user-friendly and has options for easy one-handed usage. Plus Motorola offers you up to 2 years of software updates which should let users at least get Android 11 in the future.
The fingerprint authentication is quite snappy.

The 5,000mAh battery works quite well, with one of the reasons being that the chipset isn’t very power hungry. With moderate to light usage, the Moto E7 Power can easily last for up to two days off a single charge. It also performed well on my standard battery test of looping a video at half brightness and came up with an impressive 28 hours.

What’s not so good

While the build quality seems sturdy, the phone is not going to make any heads turn with its plain design. The Google Assistant button is placed way up top and also on the same side as the volume rocker and power button. This makes it harder to reach and sometimes I mix it up with the power button. Also, the speaker is at the back instead of the bottom, which muffles the sound when the phone is placed on its back.

The waterdrop notch houses the selfie shooter but the bezels surrounding the panel are quite thick, which increases the size of the phone.
At night the phone’s cameras fail to deliver acceptable levels of picture quality. Quite a few times, the phone just doesn’t focus even when assisted by nearby street lighting. Even when the sensor does bring the subject in focus, it does nothing to eliminate the surrounding noise. Highlights of any object are quite hard to discern and there appears to be a lot of oversharpening of details even by budget phone standards. Also, there is no dedicated Night Mode to fall back on.

I was hoping Moto would use the Helio G35 like the POCO C3, but that isn’t the case, since the E7 Power utilises the MediaTek Helio G25 chipset. The stock Android skin saves the device from being too laggy for even the most basic of tasks such as app switching. That said, the base variant only has 2GB of RAM which is simply not going to be enough to have more than a few basic apps open in the background. Thankfully tasks such as scrolling through Facebook or browsing through Chrome will generally not present any problems. However, any kind of GPU-intensive task (read gaming) is a no-no on the phone. Call of Duty Mobile crashed twice after 40 minutes of laggy gaming.

The 10W charging takes upwards of 3 hours and 30 minutes to completely charge the phone. Even for a budget device, that does seem quite slow.

Final Verdict

The Moto E7 Power is not the flashiest of devices but for its starting price, you do get solid construction and a beefy battery that lasts a while. The daylight photography and a clean software experience with the promise of future updates are also some big positives of the device. However, a weak chipset and low RAM on the starting variant is not going to be conducive for anything more than basic smartphone usage. Charging speeds are quite slow while the night photography on the device will keep you wanting more. If stock Android is something you are looking for in your budget device then the Moto E7 Power deserves a closer look, but I’d suggest you consider the 4GB RAM variant which is priced at Rs 8,299.