As a Motorola phone, the Moto E5 Play does have some of the Moto actions, but not all of them. There’s no chopping gesture to turn on the flashlight, and twisting the phone twice won't activate the camera. A 3-finger tap can take a screenshot, and flipping the phone over can silence notifications. The features offered are handy, if not game-changing. If you like taking selfies, you’ll be pleased to know that the 5-megapixel front-facing camera is very impressive. The E5 Play is able to capture plenty of detail, and colours and skin tones look natural. It copes well in low light, too, as the phone has a forward-facing flash. The E5 Play supports LTE bands 1/2/3/4/5/7/8/12/13/14/17/25/26/29/30/38/41/66, allowing it to work well on several different carriers. We tested network performance primarily on Boost Mobile, which uses Sprint's network, and saw average network performance in midtown Manhattan. In low light conditions, the E5 Play holds its own, but isn’t as impressive as its Vodafone counterparts. Here, the Smart N8 and N9 perform better. In the image below, you’ll see that on the left-hand side, the Smart N8 has much less image noise, has a better colour accuracy (on the vase and pens), and has more punch to its captured images.

The Play is capable of recording 1080p video at 30fps, but footage is jittery when panning around and frames drop in darker areas. The 5MP front camera is on the soft side outdoors, but does have a front-facing LED flash for better indoor shots and video. Software The hardware you do get looks pretty good, though: a 13-megapixel camera at the rear, with an aperture of f/2 and phase-detect autofocus, capable of shooting 1080p video at up to 30fps; plus a 5.5-megapixel f/2.2 camera at the front. Unusually, there’s an LED flash at both the rear and the front. The E5 Play has a 5.34in 960 x 480 FWVGA+ (18:9) TN display. The phone’s resolution is rather poor for a modern-day phone, and given that the Vodafone Smart N8 has been out for over a year and sports a 720P display, it’s rather disappointing to see Motorola hasn’t upped the pixel count. This, however, is where things begin to go slightly awry and it’s performance that begins the erosion of the Moto E5’s appeal. The culprit is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 425, a chipset I haven’t come across in a smartphone before. The paltry 2GB of RAM doesn’t help either. The quality is good, and the sensor captures plenty of light and detail. However, with no electronic image stabilisation (EIS), videos appear a little jittery, especially if you’re walking around while filming.The E5 Play isn’t waterproof, though Motorola claims the phone is ‘water repellent’ due to ‘advanced nano-coating technology’ – so it should survive the odd accidental splash of water. Just don’t take it in the bath. On the plus side, the display’s peak brightness of 340cd/m² is bright enough to remain legible under normal ambient light. Take it out in the sunshine, however, and you’ll struggle to see the phone’s display. READ NEXT: Vodafone Smart N9 review: No better than last year’s Smart N8 Motorola Moto E5 Play review: Display Video looks great, too. The Moto E5 can only capture clips at 1080p and 30fps with no image stabilisation but, just like the E5’s stills, videos look crisp, with balanced exposure and loads of detail.

As long as you’re not planning to read lots of full books from the Moto E5 Play, its screen is perfectly adequate. What it's like to use

The UK variant of the Moto E5 Play is a 5.34in phone with a 960 x 480 FWVGA+ (18:9) TN display. It runs Android Oreo out-the-box; has a quad-core Snapdragon 425 processor with 1GB of RAM; and has 16GB of internal storage space that can be expanded with up to 128GB of additional space through a microSD card.

As you’ll see from the graph above, the phone looks on-par with other budget phones, but in practice it’s a different story. Motorola’s decision to pair the 1.4GHz quad-core processor with only 1GB of RAM is regrettable. By comparison, the regular E5 has 2GB, while the Vodafone Smart N8 has 1.5GB. That extra bit of RAM goes a long way; it allows for a more fluid experience, and especially when you’re switching between apps.

The Moto E5 has a great screen, superb camera and amazing battery life — it's a whole lot of phone for not much money

is crisp enough on some smaller screens, but for a 5.2-inch display, we could see some of the softness. App icon edges weren’t entirely smooth. Looking from a much sharper display to this one, it can seem blurry. The Moto app that handles those features is actually the only add-on software we spotted on the phone. The Moto E5 Play is a great example of how clean Motorola keeps Android on its phones. Everything else pre-installed was the typical Google fare, like Chrome, calculator, maps, and the G Suite. (Different mobile carrier options may come pre-loaded with different apps, though.) With Moto Actions, your simple gestures make everyday interactions more convenient. Whether you’re shrinking down the screen with a simple swipe or silencing the ringer just by lifting up the phone, you can do more with less effort. It’s also not the brightest screen, which is the bigger problem. With direct sunlight reflecting off the screen, it’s hard to read. But, tilting it to a different angle mostly resolves this issue.