Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
No matter how comfortable it is to hold, every smartphone lives and dies by the prowess of its screen. This is a basic camera array that can take some nice-looking photos during the day, thanks to Auto HDR, dynamic range enhancement. The Motorola Moto E6 Plus is no master of colour, or at avoiding blown highlights regardless of the light contrast in a scene. However, on a bright day it can take some pleasant shots. However, elsewhere it doesn’t look old-school at all; it’s absolutely a handset that belongs in 2019/2020. It has a tall aspect screen, a neat little display notch and a shiny finish. The rear of the phone is plastic, but it has some of the visual impact of treated glass or buffed metal. The Motorola Moto E6 Plus runs Android 9.0, and doesn’t have quite the same approach as the previous Moto E5 range or the Moto G7 family.
Interestingly, as well as the rear plate of the handset being swappable, it also hides the battery, which is removable. As well as being a blast from the past, this makes ‘hot-swapping’ of charged spare batteries possible, a real boon for frequent travelers. Asphalt 9 runs but its frame rate is slow enough to seem slightly juddery. PUBG is pretty smooth but will only run at the lower graphics settings, missing out on anti-aliasing and some higher-end textures.
That’s a departure from the previous generation which used Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, but if your heart sunk when you saw the word “MediaTek” then you’re in for a pleasant surprise. As well as feeling smooth enough in day-to-day use, it actually outperformed most of its Qualcomm-toting rivals in our benchmarks.
In multi-core tests, in particular, it’s a massive improvement on last year’s Moto E5 family, and it’s almost in reach of the Moto G7 Power, which is impressive. It comfortably beats the Xiaomi Redmi 7A and is essentially a rounding error away from tying with the Vodafone Smart X9. Impressive stuff. On the design front, Motorola goes to great pains to emphasize the ‘ultra-wide’ display on the front of the Moto E6 Plus. It has a small notch hiding the selfie camera, but despite this the panel is certainly expansive, reaching 6.1 inches on the diagonal. Also, in daylight the noise reduction algorithms tend to turn some natural textures such as grass into mush. There’s often too much purple hue in the browns of nature scenes, highlighted by the Motorola Moto E6 Plus’s tendency to slightly overexpose images when there’s no sky in the shot to act as an exposure guide.
Of course, the real challenge comes from indoors when light is at a premium, and you often get lots of nasty visual noise when phones try to compensate for camera deficiencies with heavy-handed processing. Again, it’s not too bad here, even if post-processing aggressively softens the edges of objects – it’s especially prominent around the teddy bear’s ears, for instance. Like most Motos, it’s fine. Moderate use might see it hold onto around 20-30% by bed, but I’ve drained it further most days. This is because use has included a lot of streamed audio, a fair amount of YouTube and some public transport navigation by CityMapper. One real positive however is the itty-bitty notch at the top, which is so small that it is really quite difficult to become annoyed about. In person it is even smaller than in photos, so only the most committed of notch-phobes need worry. Brightness too is okay at best, with the panel not getting so bright that it can compete with the sun, nor so dim that it can be comfortably used in bed at night. You’ll see these loading pauses more regularly than in other phones, too, because the Motorola Moto E6 Plus has only 2GB of RAM (4GB version available in some countries). Phones use this kind of memory to “park” apps when not in use, to avoid closing them down completely in case you return after a few minutes.
But for the basics – and more besides – the Motorola Moto E6 Plus is a charmer, and one of the better Moto E series phones to date.In terms of what this camera doesn’t handle so well, low-light performance is poor. Images become super-soft and colour takes on the usual crude look you’ll see from other low-end cameras.
Great Deal 
New Comment