Motorola Moto Z3 Play

WEVE ALWAYS LIKED the Moto Z Play series.

- Tom Bruce

Its attachable Moto Mods could have been a silly gimmick, but many of them are genuinely useful, and underneath this modular functionality has always been quality, reliable core hardware that would make each phone a good buy even if you couldn’t whack a magnetic power pack directly on the back.

The Moto Z3 Play is the third in this line. It looks similar to the Moto Z2 Play (Shopper 357), and can equip all the same Moto Mods, but is a touch bigger at 157x77x6.8mm, thanks to the display growing an extra half an inch. It’s also 11g heavier, weighing 156g.

SIDE PROJECT

At first glance, the Moto Z3 Play appears to be missing a fingerprint reader, but it’s just in an unusual position. Instead of sitting at the back or on the bottom bezel of the phone, it resides on the right side of the phone beneath the volume button, a place usually reserved for the power button, which has been moved to the left-hand side. It’s unusual, but it works well: when we picked up the phone, our thumb was always naturally drawn to the sensor. Left-handed users can easily use their index finger, too.

In less positive news, the Moto Z2 Play’s 3.5mm headphone jack has been culled, leaving you with just a USB Type-C port and an unwieldy Type-C-to-3.5mm adaptor. What’s worse is that this adaptor simply didn’t work for us; no matter which wired headphones we used, plugging in the adaptor did nothing to stop audio being played from the phone’s speakers instead. Bluetooth headphones worked fine, but still, this is a fairly serious technical mishap.