Hello, sub £-100 Moto: Lenovo punts 6.1-inch display e6S at low-cost crowd Motorola Mobility has lifted the lid on its latest budget blower – the pocket-friendly Moto e6s, which offers the most compelling, er, screen-to-price ratios on the market. Just £99 gets you a phone with a 6.1-inch HD screen. Before we delve into the gory details, it's worth mentioning that there are technically two different …
It's a MediaTek chip - so a mixed bag, it may be very easy or nigh-on impossible. And Motonovo phones are traditionally anti-modding.
There are no-root solutions that use a dummy local VPN (that routes your traffic to an app on your device) ... but that's fishy unless the one you use is open source.
If you want a really moddable phone, go for a used flagship model (or low-end if it really has to be new) that has a Qualcomm chip and a leaked/available factory programmer. Xiaomi even officially supplies them (instead of them being leaked like LG's or OnePlus's ones).
The main problem is that the rooting / modding scene is mostly made up of people who go "oooh, shiny-shiny" and buy the latest and greates (or at least not the low end models), so unless you plan to invest a ton of time (with uncertain outcome, as per Waseem's answer) go for something a little higher better. In the end price was my main motivator, the device should just work and I do not expect too much from it except to last a couple of years.
Might be worth considering a second-hand Wileyfox Swift 2 instead...they go for less than that, have all those features plus NFC and a USB-C port. And they're Dual SIM.
Actually, you can get a new one for around the same price direct from the manufacturer, though stocks are limited as they're not making any more...
I still have my Swift 2 Plus. It's a fantastic phone. I just wish they had made a follow-up...as I don't know where to go next...
It was very rare to find a metal-lined case, a fingerprint scanner, a dual-SIM capability and an NFC chip all in a phone for less than £150 at the time...
Despite what they advertise, it actually isn't that difficult to replace the battery...all you need is the right set of tiny screwdrivers which you can get off eBay for just a couple of pounds...it's not like it's glued in or anything. And you can get a battery from the same place.
> it clings stubbornly to the aged MicroUSB standard.
Good, microUSB is the one standard that has managed to persist for any period of time (short of the old barrel "nokia charger" back in the 90s early 2000's), why change it?
Pretty much every single device uses microUSB to charge now, not just phones. I got so many microUSB chargers, and so many more cables (as you know, microUSB is more than just a charging port), and it is so nice not to have to carry a charger/cable/adapter everywhere I go safe in the knowledge everyone has at least one microUSB cable kicking around. Or when going on holiday, being able to just take one or two microUSB chargers to cover all my devices. I have literally not been able to do that since the aforementioned "Nokia-everywhere" era.
Why on earth then, would I want them to move to another standard? One that is nowhere near as ubiquitous and convenient? I suspect a desire to charge us to replace all our chargers again, and for ones which have DRM to make sure you only buy the official, expensive, "branded" chargers. Yeah... no.
So, microUSB is a good point for me.
> There's a 3,000mAh battery, which charges at 5W over – as you may have guessed – MicroUSB, in addition to a 3.5mm headphone jack, Bluetooth 4.2, and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi b/g/n
Honestly, this sounds like my perfect next phone, and has a microSD slot to boot! If I find out the battery is removable, and you can put LineageOS on it, It would be perfect, and a guaranteed purchase from me. Alas the article didn't mention a removable battery, which is a shame...
Still, amazing to think that an 8 core CPU and 2GB ram is considered a "poor show" for a handheld mobile device. How times have changed... *glances at old Nokia n810, single core 400Mhz CPU with 128MB RAM*
I came here to write exactly that. Not everybody needs a crazy stupidly expensive cell phone. For some of us this is really good enough. Good price as well. My two or three year old Moto whatever is still OK, so no reason to get a new one for another two or three years. (it's also quite robust, dropped it a couple of times, nothing broke so far)
The trouble is, I still own a bunch of other devices which still use micro-USB (eBook, a torch, battery pack etc. etc.) so when I got a phone with USB-C I had to buy several new cables and chargers with multiple outputs (so I can charge other devices at the same time as my phone), and I get no advantage that I can see (the storage in my phone is not fast enough to benefit from USB3).
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"no NFC radio, making Google Pay transactions a frustrating impossibility"
For the people behind the person with the phone, this is "a glorious impossibility."
NFC phone payments are just so much slower than tapping a contactless card - which the owner of the phone will have on their person anyway.
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