Gadgetory

hey it's Ashley Carmen here with the verge and today we are checking out the Moto Z 3-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 you'll immediately notice some obvious hardware changes dual rear facing cameras the missing home button side fingerprint sensor in a taller display motorola clearly designed the device so click a higher-end phone particularly with those minimized bezels aluminum body and black back well there's no notch sorry - 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 place still supports moto mods and is backwards 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 a new 18 by 9 aspect ratio in my brief handling of the phone the 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 allow me immediately the side fingerprint 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 the rear fingerprint sensor would be covered by mods which of the company definitely wants you to buy so if it wants a fingerprint sensor it has to go with the side placement inside the phone features a Snapdragon 636 processor with four gigs of RAM and 32 gigs of expandable storage the phone charges over USB C and supports fast charging the batteries 3000 milliamp hours which is the same as last year's model but smaller than the originals II play this should still be enough to get you through the day though of course you can also always buy a battery Mon if you want more juice and if you purchase the unlocked z3 plate in the US it will be bundled with a battery mod that'll give you up to 40 hours of use the cameras underwent the biggest changes the dual cameras on the back include a 12 megapixel sensor in a 5 megapixel depth sensing lens that's mostly used for portrait mode the front-facing camera has an 8 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 lets you record a video of a scene and choose which parts of it keep moving in which stay still like these balloons or this flag it's super gimmicky but I enjoyed playing with it what I continue to use this feature after a few days probably not the phone also features google lens built right into the camera the z3 play runs Android 8.1 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 in 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 ok so the phone will be out this summer exclusively through US Cellular and Sprint in the US or you can get it unlocked through various retailers but if you do that you're going to get a bundle in the u.s. o 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 then as always stay tuned to the verge comm and the Verge's youtube channel for a full review of the z3 play and all our other tech coverage