Motorola Moto e7 Power Review: Big battery, but otherwise average

Where to buy

The Motorola Moto e7 Power is the lower cost sibling of the Motorola Moto e7, a phone we've already reviewed that appealed largely due to its careful balance of features within a specific budget price point.

The Motorola Moto e7 Power has a lower cost, but it's not quite as balanced a handset, preferring instead to sell primarily on the inclusion of a very large battery for its price point. If power woes are your main concern it's a good tradeoff, although this otherwise isn't a particularly nippy or exciting handset.

Design

Design

• Tahiti Blue or Coral Red finishes
• 6.5 inch 720p display
• Fingerprint sensor and headphone jack

The market position for Motorola's e-series phones are that they're low cost devices, so it's a little surprising to find that Motorola offers the Motorola Moto e7 Power in two different colour tones. You can opt for "Tahiti Blue" or "Coral Red" finishes, although either way you're ending up with a plastic body phone. That's entirely in line with its price point, but what's notable here is that you get actual choice. The slightly higher end Moto e7 only comes in one colour.

At the front, the Motorola Moto e7 Power copies the recipe of the Motorola Moto e7 with a 6.5 inch 1600x720 pixel IPS TFT LCD at 269ppi. 720 p isn't a super sharp resolution, but it's entirely in line with the Motorola Moto e7 Power's price point. There's a teardrop style notch, a slightly dated design element compared to the many holepunch style notches we see in most phones these days. As always, your taste may vary as to which you prefer.

In terms of controls, Motorola places power, volume and Google Assistant buttons running up the right hand side of the phone. It can be handy to invoke the Google Assistant without having to directly speak to it at first, but you will accidentally hit the assistant button when you want the power button more than once, or vice versa. At the top of the phone Motorola places a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and around the back there's a fingerprint sensor adorned with the classic Motorola "batwing" logo.

Camera

Camera

• Dual 13MP and Macro lenses
• Average shots under most circumstances
• 5MP selfie camera is ordinary

As the most affordable of Motorola's e series phones for 2021, it's no surprise that the Motorola Moto e7 Power gets the most ordinary camera hardware to play with. It's a big step down from the Motorola Moto e7, which featured a dual 48MP main/2MP macro lens array at the rear to a much more ordinary 13MP main/2MP macro lens. At the front, that teardrop notch houses a single 5MP selfie camera, which again is on the more ordinary side.

That's very much the price you pay for not paying all that much for the Motorola Moto e7. Megapixel counts aren't everything in mobile photography, but the reality here is that if camera quality is of prime concern to you, you'd be much better off dropping the few extra bucks for the Motorola Moto e7 over the Motorola Moto e7 Power. The camera app is quite basic, and can be quite slow to start up and focus too.

While the inclusion of the macro lens isn't unwelcome, like every other 2MP macro lens on a cheap phone, you'll struggle to get it to focus nicely on your subjects a lot of the time.
This doesn't mean you can't get some decent photos out of the Motorola Moto e7 Power. It's just that you'll really have to work at it, and in any kind of challenging scenario like fast movement or lower lighting conditions, your photos will suffer.

• Motorola Moto e7 Power Sample Photos

  

  

  

  

  

  

Performance

Performance

• MediaTek Helio G25 isn't helped by only 2GB of RAM
• Only 32GB of storage
• Clean Android UI is nice

Like the slightly more expensive Motorola Moto e7, the Motorola Moto e7 Power runs on a low-power MediaTek Helio G25 processor. Where the two phones differ is in onboard RAM, at least for the model on sale in Australia. Internationally it appears that Motorola does offer a Motorola Moto e7 Power with 4GB of RAM, but the local model as tested ships with just 2GB of RAM.

That's very low, even for a budget phone, and it's reflected in the way the Motorola Moto e7 Power performs, both in benchmarks and in real world usage.

Here's how it compares against a range of budget handsets using Geekbench 5's CPU test:

The Motorola Moto e7 Power fares slightly better in graphics terms, but only relative to the rest of the budget pack. Here's how it compares using 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme OpenGL test. The Motorola Moto e7 Power doesn't have enough RAM to run the newer Wildlife test, sadly:

All of this adds up to a phone which is noticeably laggy no matter what you're doing. If you get a lot of notifications at once, you can expect the phone to slow to a crawl. You can run very basic Android games on it, but anything that needs fast motion won't run well, if at all.

It would be foolish to expect truly high-end performance for a phone at this price point, but the reality here is that you can do better for similar money. It's quite likely that the 4GB RAM version may run better, but that's not officially landing on our shores.

You do at least get Motorola's mostly clean take on Android 10, with few other apps other than the stock Google ones taking up space or affecting performance.

That's for the best, because the Motorola Moto e7 Power also isn't blessed with a lot of storage space. There's only 32GB of onboard storage, less once you consider it's got to fit Android 10 in there too. You can at least punch that up with a microSD card in the SIM card slot if you do start to run low.

Battery life

Battery life

• 5,000mAh battery is a good performer in real world usage
• USB C charging is very welcome

The whole reason that the Motorola Moto e7 Power has that power suffix is because Motorola sacrifices the other features in the regular e7 in favour of a larger battery. The Motorola Moto e7 Power features a 5,000mAh battery, like the previous "Power" Moto phones of recent years.

The one issue here is that while at one time Motorola led the market in terms of hefty batteries in budget phones, more recently we've seen more than a few competitors drop that exact capacity in their affordable models.

With that in mind, I was curious to see how the Motorola Moto e7 Power would compare. Firstly, I ran the Motorola Moto e7 Power through our standard video streaming test, running a 720p YouTube video at maximum brightness and moderate volume for an hour over the fully charged Motorola Moto e7 Power.

What I look for here is at least 90% power remaining, because dropping below that figure shows a phone that may struggle to get through a single day.

Here's how the Motorola Moto e7 Power compared to other budget handsets:

That 93% figure isn't bad, but it also isn't blowing away the competition, and critically not even the Motorola Moto e7.

Where the Motorola Moto e7 Power did redeem itself was in day to day use, where it could comfortably last through a moderate workload for a couple of days before going flat, and longer by several hours than the comparable regular e7 model. The Motorola Moto e7 Power really does sell itself on that battery.

What's also nice here is that Motorola has jumped entirely onto USB C charging for all of its phones, including the low-cost Motorola Moto e7 Power. It does take a while to fully recharge the Motorola Moto e7 Power with support for wired charging maxing out at 10W, but at least it's easy enough to plug in.

Should you buy the Motorola Moto e7 Power?

Where the Motorola Moto e7 presented a nicely balanced set of compromises, the Motorola Moto e7 Power has a very definite bias towards battery life. That's a slightly more awkward balance to fully recommend, because while it does outpace the Moto e7 on that score, it's otherwise a slower phone with a worse camera, and it's not as though the Motorola Moto e7 has bad battery life to start with.

That means that the only real reason to buy the Motorola Moto e7 Power over the regular e7 model is if you're particularly strapped for cash, or battery life is your sole phone concern.

Pricing and availability

Price

RRP: $159.00

Where to buy

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Specifications

Images: Alex Kidman