14 DAY TRIAL // Motorola, the troubled mobile phone maker that became part of Google in early 2012 and which will soon join Lenovo, is finally getting on the right track with the release of dirt-cheap smartphones capable of proving highly appealing among end users, such as the Moto E.
The handset, made official on May 13, has been released on only a few markets out there but is already proving capable of attracting a great deal of users to its side and should continue to do so for the next several months as well.
Put up for sale in India a couple of weeks back, the mobile phone has already ran out of stock twice in the country and might see similar issues for a while longer, especially since Motorola is just getting ready to expand its availability.
Priced at only Rs. 6999 ($120/€88), Moto E is clearly capable of easily proving a great option for a lot of users in India, where budget-friendly handsets are most sought for.
Overall, Motorola might have sold only around 120,000 Moto E devices in the country, but the number is nevertheless impressive, especially when taking into consideration the hardware specifications that this device arrives on shelves with.
For those out of the loop, we should note that the Moto E was announced with a 4.3-inch touchscreen display, as well as with a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, which is complemented by 1GB of RAM.
Moreover, the mobile phone lands on shelves with a 5-megapixel camera on the back and runs under the Android 4.4 KitKat operating system right from the start. It sports a few software customizations coming from Motorola as well.
Although these specs might not seem to be much, they are not something to be neglected, that's for sure. After all, high-end smartphones launched about two years ago came to the market with about the same camera, processor and RAM.
At the moment, Moto E might be just what the doctor ordered for Motorola, as the handset vendor is struggling to grab more market share, so as to become once again the powerful brand it used to be several years ago.
This is not the first appealing, affordable handset that Motorola has brought to the market over the past 12 months or so, but it is certainly capable of proving the most popular of them.
The first such device was the Moto X, which arrived in summer last year with a near-stock Android experience and with specs customization options that turned it into one of the most appealing mid-range smartphones out there.
Next, Motorola launched the Moto G, a cheaper version of the Moto X, which has already attracted a great deal of users to its side and which should be able to continue doing so following the unveiling of a 4G LTE variant the same day that Moto E was announced.
Moto E is by no means a powerful device, as it comes with even lower specs than the Moto G, but it can easily prove a great option for those users who have never had a smartphone before, but which are finally ready to grab one.
The fact that it has already registered great success in India is proof of that, especially since Motorola was not present on the market in this country for the past few years.
Most users in emerging markets still own feature phones, especially due to their lower price tag, but handsets such as Moto E, which are as affordable as basic phones are, should be able to determine a lot of people to switch to smartphones.
Even so, the device can deliver a nice experience to those buying it and will easily rise well above other handsets launched in the same market segment, that's for sure.
Motorola might not be making much money from the sale of Moto E, but the idea behind releasing such a low-cost device is not to make it profitable on the short term, but to help the brand grow, and this is exactly what this smartphone was launched for.
In fact, chances are that Motorola is actually selling the handset at loss and that Google is behind all this. Moto E might also be the handset designed to help the company win the battle at the entry level of the market.
Despite the fact that there are a great deal of Android smartphones available on the market at very cheap price tags, few have actually managed to make a name for themselves, something that Moto E might change.
Furthermore, various devices running under other mobile operating systems are crowding the entry-level segment, including those powered by Firefox OS and Windows Phone, with the latest being highly successful on emerging markets as of lately.
With Moto E, Google and Motorola can shift users' interest to Android on emerging markets and successfully counter Windows Phone in the low-end segment.
Moto E's roll-out on the market will be in full swing soon, and I believe that it will become successful in more countries out there, the same as it has done in India over the past several days.
However, once Motorola becomes part of Lenovo, there's little chance that the company will manage to continue to release smartphones as cheap as Moto E, even if the phone sells very well, as the Chinese vendor too will be focused on profitability.
Even so, Moto E will certainly be remembered as one of the most popular cheap Android smartphones out there, at least when 2014 is concerned, and Motorola's name will have a lot to gain from that.