Title: Motorola Moto Z Play - More Than Meets The Eye
Author: NiteFenix
Recovered Author: NiteFenix
Published Date: 2017-03-29
Original URL: https://geeknode.co.za/2017/03/motorola-moto-z-play-meets-eye
Wayback URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20170712145359id_/http://www.geeknode.co.za/2017/03/motorola-moto-z-play-meets-eye/
Recovery Confidence: high
Categories: Tech Review
Tags: excellent battery, lenovo, modular support, moto z play, tech review

- Manufacturer Lenovo
- Release Date September 2016
- Where we got our copy HK Strategies

- NiteFenix

- 4 months ago

- 0 0

Welcome to this, Geek Node’s very first cell phone review.

From Lenovo comes a series of cellphones born from the ashes of a hugely popular cellphone manufacturer of the past 20 years. I can fondly remember many of my friends and family preferring the Motorola phones over the Nokia’s and Siemens that everyone else was carrying around. It was thus with trepidation that I heard that Lenovo had bought out the Motorola brand from the Motorola company and proceeded to create a new range of smartphones that could just as easily fit your budget as it could keep up with the other competitors on the market. In this review, we take a look at the Motorola Moto Z Play, the little brother of the Moto Z which hit the market a little while before the Play. But does the Play live up to the milestones set out by the Z? Let’s find out.

You might remember, a few months ago, that Geek Node was invited to an evening of hands-on time with the new range of Motorola Moto Z phones. You might also remember how Stunt was blown away by the way in which Lenovo and Motorola handled the modularity in this new range of phones. To be honest, LG has previously tried to add modularity to their phones and it did not quite take off as much as they had hoped. So what makes the Moto Z range of phones different, you ask? It’s all in the execution. But we’ll get to that. Let me tell you a bit about the base device itself before I get ahead of myself.

Features

The Moto Z Play can be summed up in just three words. Premium, durable, fun. It comes in two colours, black with a silver frame, or white with a gold frame. Pretty stock standard as far as looks go, but with that extra touch to add a bit of style. The actual layout of the phone’s design is easy on the eye and is very reminiscent of other, similar phones on the market. Not quite making the leap to the extreme. It measures in at 156.4 x 76.4 x 6.99mm and weighs 165g. For some people, this may be a bit bulky, but I prefer a phone that is a bit larger and the size and weight did not bother me in the least.

The problem comes in though when you start adding some of the modules. Lenovo South Africa included two modules for us to test with, namely the JBL Modular Speaker and the Incipio OffGrid Power Pack. The speaker increases the thickness of the phone by more than double and in turn makes it quite heavy if you’re going to be carrying it around, however – and I’m sure you’ll agree- the point is, to put the phone down (and on its stand) when listening to music. The Power Pack, on the other hand, does not make that much of a difference in terms of thickness and the sacrifice of a slightly heavier phone is a welcome one to make for that extra bit of juice.

At the back of the phone, you’ll find a flat glass panel with an aluminium frame that is 7mm thick and a modular set of pins which interfaces with any modules that you attach to the phone using its magnetic clip system. Moving down, you will find two inputs, namely a USB-C port for your charging needs as well as a 3.5mm audio jack. Yes, Lenovo has opted to include an audio jacket AND a USB-C port, so you don’t yet need to throw out those old headphones if you don’t want to.

Speaking of the USB-C port, it and the phone’s charger is probably one of the most impressive features for me personally. The battery, already boasting an incredible 3510 mAh capacity (it friggin lasts two days on standby, I kid you not), charges ULTRA FAST with the included charger. I did not initially give the phone a full charge, being quite excited to get going with my time with it. So, after receiving and charging the phone on Friday, 10 March, I used it, quite actively until the following morning and was left with about 30% battery, and amusingly about 12 hours of battery left. So I plugged in the USB-C charger, charged it for 30 minutes, and it had pushed the battery up to about 65%, and about a day and half left on standby according to the built-in battery monitoring app. When I got back from a day out, I charged it up to full and used it on and off, without charging it once until Thursday, 16 March. Let that sink in for a moment. With the Incipio OffGrid Power Pack*, (which I only started playing with from Thursday), it increased the battery life by a further day on standby. So all-in-all, I charged the battery on the Moto Z Play, a total of three times during my time with it. Extraordinary.

* The Incipio OffGrid Power Pack adds a whopping 2,200mAh of extra juice when fully charged.

When you’re not using a mod, the phone does come standard with a clip-on cover that covers the pins and gives the phone quite a nice, sleek look from the back. A welcome thing for those of you who are fans of customising your phone. There are, of course, quite a few different variants available of this cover, so if you like customising the look and feel of your smartphone, then this is most certainly something worth looking at.

Two things worth mentioning at this point are the fingerprint sensor, which some friends who played with it, said felt a bit out-of-place and in the way (I actually quite liked it where it was) and the volume up/down and power/screen on/off buttons. Let’s speak first to the fingerprint sensor. I always find fingerprint sensors to be quite handy to have, especially if you’re in a hurry and you quickly need access to the phone. The Moto Z Play’s fingerprint sensor is quite handy in the sense that it can open AND close the phone by scanning your fingerprint (it even works upside down!), thus eliminating the need to use the power/screen on/off button.

The power/screen on/off button and the volume buttons felt a bit odd in the sense that they were all the exact same size and spaced evenly apart, thus causing me to sometimes accidentally press the volume buttons instead of the power button. My Huawei Ascend G7 has its power button at the top, with the volume up and down buttons below it, so it was a slight adjustment to get used to the reverse of the Moto Z Play. I did get used to it after a while, so I can’t really say that it was necessarily a BAD thing.

What I did find annoying, though, was the sensor built into the front-facing panel. Every time my hand (or anything else for that matter) came close to the phone’s screen, the phone lit up. Now, I sleep with my phone next to me on my bed stand, and the screen lighting up got a bit annoying. This can be an annoyance in a dark space. Other instances it was also a bother, was when I was watching television with the phone next to me, and I accidentally moved my hand or leg close to the phone and the screen lit up, distracting me from what was happening on the television.

I think a lot of what makes the phone so great in terms of battery, is the fact that it doesn’t use nearly as many resources as its counterparts in the market today, in large part attributed to an appearance of being a lot leaner in terms of memory usage. The phone is incredibly quick running with a 2GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor, a lot slower than some of its counterparts (Samsung’s Galaxy S8 runs a Qualcomm MSM8998 Snapdragon 835 Octa-core (4×2.45 GHz Kryo & 4×1.9 GHz Kryo Processor) and it comes with 3GB of RAM. So it’s clear that they opted to focus more on the optimisation of speed and just how much battery they can squeeze out of the device. The phone comes with 32GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 2 TB via a microSD card. In terms of cameras, the Play has a 16-megapixel rear camera and a 5-megapixel front facing camera for those of you who like to take those selfies.

Speaking of the camera, the Moto Z Play has some interesting features out of the box for those of you who enjoys the picture side of life. Some of these include the laser autofocus and phase detection autofocus that pretty much means zero shutter lag, however, this comes at a bit of a trade off. Sadly it doesn’t have the most optimal low-light capabilities and lacks optical image stabilisation. It performs great in both day and night-time photography sessions and I managed to take a few snaps at the Pixies concert the wife and I attended at Carnival’s Rock on the Lawn Concert on Saturday, 18 March, which you can check out on my instagram account here . I am not the best photographer, so don’t blame the phone.

Getting back to the Moto Mods, I have to say I was quite impressed. I already highlighted how incredibly useful the Incipio Offgrid Power Pack was, what with adding additional battery life of up to a day (if you own a Moto Z Play, you can throw out that Power Bank), but I haven’t yet touched on the JBL SoundBoost Moto Mod. To say that this little addon is sublime is an understatement. It comes with a built-in stand, so when you clip it onto the back of your phone, it instantly initializes (and even adds an additional 10 hours battery life – there it is again!) and you can instantly start listening to music with it. We own a Bluetooth mini speaker, which already produces quite clear and good sound, but the JBL SoundBoost Moto Mod actually outperformed it by quite a bit, however, it does become a bit distorted the further away you move from it. Still, a nice addition to have if you – like me – like to have music in your life.

Other mods available are a snap on projector, and a camera mod, both of which I did not get the opportunity to play with. So I guess it’s safe to say that the Moto Z series of phones are quite an interesting and fresh new range of smart phones with the mods that are currently out. Hopefully, we see more of this type of innovation in the future.

The phone comes standard with Android 6.01 (Marshmallow) but is upgradeable to Android 7.0 (Nougat) and I must say that, despite me expecting the phone to drop in performance as smartphones are prone to do when upgrading to a later firmware, I was quite impressed by the Moto Z Play’s ability to carry on at exactly the same speed I had gotten used to in the first few days, after upgrading to Nougat. Another thing that is worth mentioning ; and that I always find annoying with smartphones, is the fact that using a phone over a few days, even weeks, tends to cause the phone to slow down. This wasn’t the case with the Moto Z Play at all. During my entire two weeks with the phone, I had only a good experience when it came to overall performance and speed.

Welcome to this, Geek Node's very first cell phone review. From Lenovo comes a series of cellphones born from the ashes of a hugely popular cellphone manufacturer of the past 20 years. I can fondly remember many of my friends and family preferring the Motorola phones over the Nokia's and Siemens that everyone else was carrying around. It was thus with trepidation that I heard that Lenovo had bought out the Motorola brand from the Motorola company and proceeded to create a new range of smartphones that could just as easily fit your budget as it could keep up with the other competitors on the market. In this review, we take a look at the Motorola Moto Z Play, the little brother of the Moto Z which hit the market a little while before the Play. But does the Play live up to the milestones set out by the Z? Let's find out. You might remember, a few months ago, that Geek Node was invited to an evening of hands-on time with the new range of Motorola Moto Z phones. You might also remember how Stunt was blown away by the way in which Lenovo and Motorola handled the modularity in this new range of phones. To be honest, LG has previously tried to add modularity to their phones and it did not quite take off as much as they had hoped. So what makes the Moto Z range of phones different, you ask? It's all in the execution. But we'll get to that. Let me tell you a bit about the base device itself before I get ahead of myself. Features The Moto Z Play can be summed up in just three words. Premium, durable, fun. It comes in two colours, black with a silver frame, or white with a gold frame. Pretty stock standard as far as looks go, but with that extra touch to add a bit of style. The actual layout of the phone's design is easy on the eye and is very reminiscent of other, similar phones on the market. Not quite making the leap to the extreme. It measures in at 156.4 x 76.4 x 6.99mm and weighs 165g. For some people, this may be a bit bulky, but I prefer a phone that is a bit larger and the size and weight did not bother me in the least. The problem comes in though when you start adding some of the modules. Lenovo South Africa included two modules for us to test with, namely the JBL Modular Speaker and the Incipio OffGrid Power Pack. The speaker increases the thickness of the phone by more than double and in turn makes it quite heavy if you're going to be carrying it around, however - and I'm sure you'll agree- the point is, to put the phone down (and on its stand) when listening to music. The Power Pack, on the other hand, does not make that much of a difference in terms of thickness and the sacrifice of…

Tech Review: Motorola Moto Z Play – More Than Meets The Eye

Tech Review: Motorola Moto Z Play – More Than Meets The Eye

2017-03-29

NiteFenix

Total - 9.8

98
9.8

The Motorola Moto Z Play is certainly one of the more interesting smartphones I have had the privilege of playing within recent memory. Even though its specs are quite low in comparison to its counterparts, that doesn't detract from the fact that it is speedy and reliable. Its battery consumption (or lack thereof) is probably one of its most standout features, boasting with up to 4 days on standby and 5 days with the Incipio Offgrid Power Pack. Modularity is where it's at in 2017 and Motorola does it right with its Moto Z lineup of phones.

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NiteFenix

Editor-In-Chief / Entertainment Editor at Geek Node

Jonathan has been a journalist for several years. Writing primarily about video games, and occasionally films and television series.

He spends most of his time talking crap on Twitter and looking for the meaning of life in all the wrong places.

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Article Tags:
excellent battery · lenovo · modular support · moto z play · tech review

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