Motorola has unveiled its second generation Moto E smartphone and while it's not the type of high-end device that you'll be hearing a lot about next week from Mobile World Congress, it does pack some notable features at a budget-friendly price.
The handset in question arrived on reviewers' doorsteps today in what is perhaps the most original packaging ever - a press conference in a box.
Theatrics aside, the new Moto E carries a slightly larger 4.5-inch display with a modest resolution of 960 x 540. Under the hood is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 SoC clocked at 1.2GHz alongside 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD card slot).
The new version includes the same 5-megapixel rear camera but this time around, buyers also get a front-facing VGA shooter. The original didn't come with a forward-facing camera but given its low resolution, most would probably be fine if Motorola had skipped it this time, too.
Perhaps the key selling feature here is the inclusion of a 4G LTE radio. As someone that's considered a budget phone in the past, the general lack of speedy cellular access has always kept me at bay.
The revised Moto E ships with Android 5.0 Lollipop as of writing in more than 40 markets around the globe in your choice of golden yellow, charcoal, turquoise, blue or raspberry. Seeing as the phone was just delivered to tech reviewers today, we'll have to wait at least a day or two before we get early impressions but at $149, this is certainly looking like a solid deal.