Moto E (2015) LTE gets updated to Android 5.1

Motorola’s 2015 model of the Moto E belongs to the wide range of budget smartphones. But even with the lower specs and matching price, Motorola is giving its device some love by updating it to Android 5.1 Lollipop. With only 1GB of RAM, a Snapdragon 410 processor, and 8GB of on-board storage, Motorola has proven that Lollipop can run on lower specs, a fresh change compared to, say, HTC’s attitude – the Taiwanese company is not going to update the better spec’ed One Mini 2 to Lollipop.

Improvements brought by this update come all across the board. Starting with the cameras, Motorola has improved low-light photos and the front-facing camera’s viewfinder. If your device is ever stolen or lost, you can now be assured that no one will be able to access your data as long as you have a screen lock. And when a heads-up notification hits the screen, you can now swipe it away for later. This way the notification leaves the screen but stores itself in the notifications panel.

There are also a number of improvements to the quick settings. Tiles now include pull-down functionality and conditional tiles can be hidden with a long-press. Also customary to other device’s rollouts of Android 5.1, the volume controls and volume settings panel have been improved dramatically. You can now change notifications volume while music is playing by tapping the bell icon.
Android 5.1 also comes with a number of other bug fixes and improvements to ART which should help performance.

Has Motorola set the bar in terms of putting brand new software on dated specs? Let us know what you think.