Which of these smartphones is the better buy? We compare the Nokia Lumia 520 and the Motorola Moto E to see which one is worth the purchase.

In terms of design and display, the Nokia Lumia 520 is a solid smartphone with a curved back and almost sharp corners. It measures 119.9x64x9.9 mm, and weighs only 124 grams. The Lumia 520 comes in bright colors, being available in 5 variants. It has 3.5mm audio jack on top, on the right side were placed the volume rocker, power switch and the dedicated camera button and the Micro-USB found its place at the bottom.

The Motorola Moto E is also made of plastic, but it has a matte effect and comes only in black and white colors. Its body is thicker at 12.3 mm, but it’s also taller at 128.8 mm and has a width of 64.8m m. It weighs 142 grams and features Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on its screen. Its back is curvier with more rounded corners and a dip at the top and the front panel has two horizontal bars above and below the screen.

The Moto E has a 4.3 inches display with a higher resolution of 540×960 pixels and supports 256ppi pixel density. The Lumia 520 features a 4 inches IPS LCD screen that renders 480×800 pixels and 233ppi.

For the hardware and OS, the Motorola Moto E has a slightly faster processor because it has a higher clock speed of 1.2GH and the CPU is Cortex-A7 with two cores, supported by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 chipset along with an Adreno 302 400MHz GPU and 1GB of RAM. The Nokia Lumia 520 has a Qualcomm MSM8227 dual core 1GHz processor paired with 512MB of RAM, but it has bigger storage capacity of 8GB, expandable up to 64GB, compared to 4GB and increases up to 32GB.

The Nokia handset runs on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 OS, but users can install the new 8.1 update, while the Motorola handset came with an Android v4.4.2 (KitKat), then the 4.4.4 update, and soon it will run on the latest v5.0 (Lollipop).

For battery and camera specs, the Nokia Lumia 520 has a removable battery of 1430 mAh, which should last over 9 hours and a half when talking on 3G. The Motorola Moto E features a much bigger battery of 1980 mAh, but it’s non-removable.

Both smartphones have only one camera on their backs, with the same resolution of 5MP and which lack LED flash. However, the Lumia 520 provides autofocus, a 1/4” sensor size and video recording capabilities at 720p@30fps, while the Moto E records at 480p@30fps.

The Nokia Lumia 520 cost $82, while the Motorola Moto E costs $120.

Which smartphone is the better buy? Sound off in the comments section below.