Design
- Compact, easy to handle, good hand feel
- Looks fairly boring, and plain
Display
- Good, modern 18:9 screen - brightness is high enough for use outdoors, contrast is perfectly solid, and viewing angles are decent too
Software
- Motorola continues it's winning approach with software here, essentially shipping a stock Android UI with a few useful additions in the form of Motorola Actions (simple gestures that, for example, let you silence notifications by laying the Moto E5 down on its screen), and Motorola Display (a display that pops up when the E5 is in standby, and you pick it up or move it - it shows the time, and icons representing any recent notifications)
Performance
- Sluggish day-to-day performance, due to a budget Snapdragon 425 with 2GB of RAM - the combination means that web pages and apps take a tad long to load, and there are lags and stutters here and there
Camera
- Pretty decent 13 megapixel rear camera - matches up to the level of other good budget camera phones - in daylight you can take reasonably sharp and detailed images
- Pretty decent selfie camera too
- The camera has a little shutter lag when shooting normal photos, and even more of a delay with HDR images - also the camera app is prone to the same load lag as other apps too - you often have to wait around 2-3 seconds for the camera to initialise
Battery
- Excellent battery life - you will comfortably get all-day use, and with lighter use you can expect even 2 days of use
More
- Limited 16GB of internal storage means you might quickly hit storage limits if you use a few heavy apps, and then have to shift to using a memory card, which will downgrade the performance further
- On the whole, while the E5 is a pretty solid budget phone in most areas (and excels in the battery department), given its performance limitations, it might make more sense for a lot of users to invest a little bit more and get more reliable performance with the Moto G6 Play