I have had this phone functioning for a full 24 hours and have gone through one full battery cycle.Battery life is a full-on active day of full-on use, but you will still have to charge the phone once a night.
This is a carry and use all day, charge at night sort of phone.
Battery life is slightly better than the Moto G, which is understandable as the Moto E is starting up with a fresher, slightly larger more modern battery. Should have better use life as the Moto E battery is slightly bigger, but so far nothing earth shaking shows up in these early results -- just a good full day of use will run you down to about 25% left on the battery.
Moto G would have gotten lower sooner and you would have had to use the charger that you carry with you whenever you got a battery alert. The Moto E never dipped down that far.
So, you may get to stop carrying a charger with you all the time ......I had auto-installed a Flashlight app from my Google Drive Moto G backup. Before un-installing it I gave it a click "on" just to see what happened. There is no flash on the Moto E (Moto E camera can work without it, Moto E has a more modern camera sensor and better light enhancing camera software). I expected a fail to take place on this impromptu app trial. Not so, the app put the entire front face of the 4.5" display on "full strength glow light mode" and that makes the flashlight app worth keeping as that "large glow light" is perfectly OK for fumbling with keys, etc.
Kudos to the Moto E for being a 2 year more improved more modern product than the Moto G it size replaces. Triple kudos for FreedomPOP for selling this good of a phone for only $49.People who are used to and like larger phones will of course buy a similar sized product, and their math will be affected by the higher cost they pay, but anyone not on one of the low cost leaders (Republic Wireless and FreedomPOP) should consider moving at least one (1) phone over to check it out.
Be aware that you are getting a full set of basic services from Republic Wireless, but RW is all done respectably, cleanly, honestly and relatively well.
Folks generally like RW as a company. (duh, it is a Google offshoot with Google core values, what did you expect?)
In contrast FreedomPOP is much more of a raw, bare bones thing -- you have to like it for what it is cost-wise as their software and their customer service IS GOING TO IRRITATE YOU.
Most of what has been outstanding about FreedomPOP has been the Moto E phone (and face it, most phones do shine compared against their two generations back great great grandparents).
So far the worst things about FreedomPOP "free phone" are the 2G Sprint cell voice support and the
unfinished, slightly raw nature of the FreedomPOP voice over IP software and all the BS misleading FreedomPOP web pages trying to upsell you all the time.
EXAMPLE: $3 a month buys FreedomPOP Premium Voice, an item that FP owners can't agree even works at all and those that say it does work say it isn't ready for prime time yet. This supposedly plugs in normal Sprint voice calls over modern Sprint towers .... kinda, partially.
Results seem to vary strongly by phone and by local tower type.
The stock FREE voice over wifi certainly isn't the best, it always sounds rain-barrel and has scratchy static background noises. Voice calls are the worst feature of the phone right now.
Next, between spotty 2G Sprint tower placements and lack of wifi away from town, you aren't always in a place to make or take a voice call with this free phone. It greatly resembles an old Sprint 2G phone in this aspect -- so you will have to train your contact folks to text you for a call back. Or have an ongoing text to text conversation like all the modern kids do all the time.
Would I put my wife on this phone? No, not right now.She talks a lot, carries on long conversations while moving down the road in her car and does lots of other mostly verbal/email related items. She likes her Republic Wireless phone just fine ..... and face it $12.24 isn't a big monthly price to pay to keep her life smooth and her feeling happy.
...... if Momma ain't happy, ain't NOBODY happy ......I think early on Republic Wireless very wisely limited their efforts to the Motorola line of phone products intentionally just to get a consistent phone feature set to program against and to get a GOOD well accepted phone at a low price point. This was a natural to them as Google owned Motorola back then and these Republic Wireless people all started out working at Google
working full time on these very ideas before taking the low end phone ideas out into the real world as an offshoot company.
Quite differently, FreedomPOP came from the low end router ISP side of things and is a quite old company, actually. Their first product was a free dial-up ISP and that led them over the years into making a free cellular router based hot spot (and they still sell that one today as a part of their business).
Phones are a brand new thing to FreedomPOP, but it looks to be becoming quite a large thing for the folks over at FreedomPOP. Got tons of last year's phones to dump off for cheap, including a large batch of Windows phones from what I read last night.
MS needs that really big FP sell-off / dump off sales figure for their next quarter's Wall Street Required "uptick", so a very large MS "investment" came FreedomPOPs way to make sure the programming happens very very quickly, too. Sorta desperate, huh?
FreedomPOP does like to jump around all over the place all the time and it now tries to get funding directly from the big phone makers to include their "slightly out of date" dump off phones as the FreedomPOP's phone of the week. The result of this "endless fire sale" mentality is that the FP implementation of features feels like a patchwork of stuff that was written to hit different vendors at different points of time.
FreedomPOP is growing rapidly right now, outstrippping its infastructure and churning its customer base just about every year or so -- but it is making low end low cost progress much quicker than the others.
Google
wants FreedomPOP out there disrupting and moving and shaking. Google's Fi program is intended to create a whole sea of FreedomPOPs, so they can disrupt the cell phone industry and
quintuple the number of Android phones and people their ads can reach.
FreedomPOP seems to want to stay at the very bottom level of phone services and attempts seriously to be the "totally free" FreedomPOP mentality we all remember from their free router dial-up roots.
They are Google's perfect mover and shaker, to agitate the monolithic cell phone industry and get some motion up out of that settled mud down on the bottom ..... FreedomPOP on the very bottom, Republic Wireless in the layer above that and Google Fi up on top acting as a Switzerland type hands off voice over Wifi technical 'supporter'.
SO .... FreedomPOP is staying afloat while putting out a totally free service ..... so they have to make their money on the front end from Sprint and the phone makers somehow. Arranging to buy and move the builders dead phones is what they are doing right now.
How long this will last? Who knows?
At least four - five months or until the MS money runs out, I hope.
I gots me a payback period to make you know ......