Motorola Moto Z3 Play Review: The thrill is gone

Good Stuff

• Elegant Design and Superior Building Quality
• Large Software Additions
• Works with Verizon, Sprint, AT & T, and T-Mobile [19659009] Bad
  • Slim design leaves little room for battery or headphone jack
  • Fingerprint scanner is hard to use
  • Battery life is below average . ] The Z3 Play is certainly more contemporary than its predecessor block, and the larger screen fits perfectly with the rest of the phones that are available now. The screen – an OLED panel of 6 inches and 1080 pixels wide – is rich and vibrant with saturated colors and wide viewing angles.

    But the elegant design of the device is almost at fault. Its thickness of less than 7mm makes it one of the thinnest phones you can buy, but it leaves little room for a battery and apparently no room for a headphone jack. This also makes the Z3 Play difficult to manage when there is no Mod attached. Like many phones that are available now, the front and the back of the phone are made of glbad (Gorilla Glbad 3 in this case) and are important fingerprint magnets. I like the metallic blue color of the Play, but the difficult cookies if you do not do it because it's the only color that Motorola sells the Z3 Play.

    To make room for the big screen while maintaining the same level The size and shape of the previous Z phones (which ensures compatibility with the Moto Mod platform), Motorola had to move the scanner to the next level. Fingerprints from the front of the phone on the side. It's one of the most frustrating things with the Z3 Play because the smaller side-mounted fingerprint scanner is hard to use. It is particularly difficult to use when holding the phone in your left hand (as I often do), which requires clumsy claw grasping to reach the scanner. Even more bizarre: Motorola has not integrated the power button into the scanner, so the on / off button of the Z3 Play is on the opposite side of all other phones. It's a shame that Motorola has not been able to use a sub-screen fingerprint scanner, which seems to be a perfect solution to cope with the design constraints that Motorola has. imposed with the modular platform.

    Motorola has also improved the camera system. a two-lens shooting game in mode, which is capable of false-blur portrait mode effects. The 12 megapixel camera is fine; it's fast and can take good pictures in the right light. But that will not make someone lose his quality, especially as he fights in a lower light. The same goes for the 8 megapixel front camera, which can take sharp selfies, provided you have enough lighting.

    The Z3 Play 3000 mAh battery is below average for this phone size. It can last for a day if you are a light user, but if you use your phone a lot, it will not make the note. To compensate for this, Motorola includes a Moto Power Pack Mod in the box with the phone, which adds 2.200mAh of battery capacity. But it also adds a lot of thickness and weight to the phone, making it much heavier and bigger than most phones that simply have larger batteries.

    With the Power Pack Mod, the Z3 Play can last two or sometimes even three days between charges. But I would prefer to have better battery life without having to play with a detachable accessory – even if it's included in the box.

    
    

    

    Motorola phones have long had great software experiences, and the Z3 Play continues. There are a multitude of useful features, such as gestures to quickly launch the camera or flashlight or put the phone in Do Not Disturb mode when you place it face down. None of these features feel like being bloated either; the main user interface is basically stock Android 8.1 Oreo.

    Most of the time, the Z3 Play is fast and responsive, but it has struggled with jerky scrolling and laggy performance in a number of applications, such as Twitter and YouTube. This is not something I would expect from a $ 500 phone in 2018, and this is certainly not a problem as similar price phones like the OnePlus 6.

    The Z3 Play has a feather in its cap that the OnePlus 6 and many other unlocked phones can not match: it is compatible with Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT & T's release. ;packaging. If you are a Verizon or Sprint customer and are looking for an unlocked phone for less than $ 500, the Z3 Play is one of the few choices you have.

    
    

    

    Throughout my use of the Z3 Play for this review, I did not stop to think how much the original phone was even more fascinating two years ago, the blocky design and all the rest. I even took out my Z Play from the drawer and loaded it to see if it still had any appeal. It turns out that I prefer to use this two year old phone on this new incarnation.

    The Moto Z3 Play feels like a baseball team through the last two months of play, knowing that they need to finish the season but also knowing that they will not end up with a trophy in hand. Motorola is committed to supporting the design of its 2016 Moto Mods for three generations of phones, and the Z3 Play is this third-generation phone, out of contract. But for the rest of us, it is better to drop a race.

    Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence the editorial content, although Vox Media can earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. For more information, see our Ethics Policy .