Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Moto Z3 Play: A mid-range phone with flagship flair”.
Hey it’s Ashley Carman, here with The Verge, and today we are checking out the Moto Z3 Play Motorola’s newest phone in their Z, lineup.. You can immediately tell they’ve made some obvious hardware changes to make the phone look a little more expensive, even though it’s still keeping that mid-range cost. And so far, I’m having a lot of fun playing with it. ( upbeat, music, ) You’ll, immediately notice, some obvious hardware. Changes.: Dual rear-facing cameras, the missing home button, a side fingerprint sensor and a taller display. Motorola, clearly designed the device to look like a higher end phone, particularly with those minimized, bezels, aluminum body and glass back.. But there’s no notch.. Sorry to all you notch lovers out. There.
The new phone looks nice. Although the glass back gathers lots of fingerprints and doesn’t serve a real purpose like allowing for wireless charging., You’ll need a Moto mod. If you want to do that., Speaking of which Z3 Play still supports, Moto mods and is back where it’s compatible with any, you might have purchased for prior models.. As for these hardware updates, the display is a six inch, full HD plus super amoled with the 18 by nine aspect.
Ratio. In my brief handling of the phone display, quality wasn’t great.. It wasn’t very bright when I took it outside and I didn’t feel it could accurately represent colors, especially skin tones..
It also wasn’t extremely clear and didn’t wow me immediately.. The side finger print sensor seems to work well enough. Although Sony was really the only other company using side, sensors and even they recently gave up on it.
But Motorola didn’t really have a choice here, because a rear fingerprint sensor would be covered by mods, which the company definitely wants you to buy.. So if it wants a finger print sensor, it has to go with the side placement. Inside the phone features, a snap dragon 636 processor, with four gigs of ram and 32 gigs of expandable storage. The phone chargers over USB-C and supports fast charging.. The battery is 3,000 milliamperes, which is the same as last year’s model, but smaller than the original Z Play.. This should still be enough to get you through the day though..
Of course, you can also always buy a battery mod if you want more juice. And if you purchase the unlocked Z3 Play in the US, it will be bundled with a battery mod that’ll, give you up to 40 hours of use. ( gentle techno, music ), The Camera’S underwent the biggest changes.. The dual cameras on the back include a 12 megapixel sensor and a five megapixel depth.
Sensing lens, that’s mostly used for portrait mode. The front facing camera has an eight megapixel sensor.. There are a couple new software features like portrait mode for the front facing camera., But my favorite is the cinemagraph mode. It.
Let’S, you record a video of a scene and choose which parts of it keep moving and which stay still. Like these balloons or this flag.. It’S super gimmicky, but I enjoyed playing with it.. Would I continued to use this feature after a few days? Eh, probably not..
The phone also features Google lens built right into the camera.. The Z3 play runs android 8.1 and mostly sticks with Google stock android. But because there’s no home button, you can gesture on the screen through Motorola’s one button navigation.. It allows you to swipe left to go back right for recent apps or tap to go back home..
If you press and hold Google assistant will launch., The phone will be shipped with this feature: turned off and the standard navigation buttons on.. Honestly, this didn’t free up much screen space and I kept getting confused about which gestures did what.. It’S personal preference though, and some people will probably like this feature, while others won’t. Okay, so the phone will be out this summer exclusively through US, Cellular and Sprint in the US, or you can get it on lack through various retailers. But if you do that, you’re going to get a bundle. In the US it’ll come bundled with a battery mod and abroad. You can either get a battery mod with the phone or a speaker mod.. Those bundles will cost $ 499..
We don’t have pricing yet just on the phone by itself through the carriers, but hopefully we’ll have that information. Soon. Thanks for watching and as always stay tuned to TheVerge.com and The Verge’s YouTube channel for a full review of the Z3 Play and all our other tech coverage. .