Lenovo-owned Motorola has announced the successor of Moto X Pure edition with the new Z-series of lineups — Moto Z and Moto Z Force. Both these phone features modular accessories known as Moto Mods that are attached to 12 “magical-pins” located at the bottom back of the smartphone. Currently, there are four Moto mods:
- JBL SoundBoost Speaker: comes with a speaker for listening to music, offers 10 hours of music playback with an inbuilt battery inside, has a kickstand that can be kept in a table.
- Moto Insta-Share Projector: mini projector that projects the display of the Moto Z into 70-inch screen; built-in battery provides 1 hour of backup
- Power Packs: provides 22 hours of battery life; sleek looking device.
- Moto Style Shell: customizable back covers that can be attached to the back of the phone with a Magnetic snapback
Motorola claims that more Moto Mods will be available in the future. Talking about the specs, both the Moto Z and Moto Z Force sports a 5.5-inch Quad HD AMOLED display, but the Moto Z force comes with a Shatterproof display. The Moto Z is just 5.2mm thin with a 2600mAh battery and 13MP rear cameras with dual-tone LED flash, OIS, Laser Autofocus, 1.12um pixel, and f/1.8 aperture. The Moto Z force is a tad thicker at 6.99mm allowing for housing a bigger 3500mAh battery, and a high-resolution 21MP rear camera.
Both the Moto Z and Moto Z force are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC and 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, meaning you can expect excellent performance. In terms of memory, it comes in 2 variants: 32GB or 64GB with dedicated microSD card slot for memory expansion upto 2TB. The front top houses a 5MP front-facing camera with f/2.2 aperture and wide angle lens, while down below there is a fingerprint scanner just like the Moto G4 plus. There is a front-ported loudspeaker with 4 mics, as well as 2 proximity sensors for Moto display. The Moto Z and Z force runs on a stock version of Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 and has a water-repellant coating.
Gone are the 3.5mm headphone jacks, and there is only 1 USB type C port for charging, data syncing, and connecting to compatible USB type C headphones. Inside the box, Motorola has included type C to 3.5mm converter, and a turbo fast charger. Connectivity wise, both the Moto Z and Moto Z force has a single nano SIM with 4G LTE (Cat 9), 3G HSPA+, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, 2.4 GHz + 5 GHz with MIMO, NFC, Bluetooth 4.2, and GPS.
Both these phones will be available starting from the month of September. Pricing is yet to be revealed. We are expecting the Moto Z to be priced around $450, and Moto Z Force at $550.