No one has ever accused the Moto Z lineup of being too bulky; in fact, Motorola’s first generation of modular phones are some of the slimmest handsets available. But that isn’t stopping the Lenovo subsidiary from shaving precious thickness off of the Android 7.1.1 Nougat-powered Moto Z2 Play.
That reduction in depth, however, will come at a somewhat steep price, according to marketing material reviewed by VentureBeat: a model whose predecessor is renowned for its capacious 3510mAh battery is going to offer a much more conservative 3000mAh pack. That has the effect of reducing maximum listed usage time from 50 hours down to 30 hours.
At just a hair under 7 millimeters thick and 165 grams, the original Z Play — the most affordable of the three first-gen Moto Z models — was nonetheless the least slim of the series. With a full millimeter and 20-gram reductions in depth and weight, respectively, the Z2 Play comes closer to — but still doesn’t match — the original Moto Z’s impressive 5.19-millimeter thinness.
Almost all of the Z2 Play’s internals are set to see upgrades, albeit somewhat modest ones. For instance, in place of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 system-on-chip running eight cores at 2.0GHz, Z2 Play utilizes a Snapdragon 626 with the same number of cores but a slightly higher, 2.2GHz clock speed. Both SoCs are paired with the same Adreno 506 graphical processing unit.
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Perhaps the biggest boost will come in the memory and storage departments, where the original Z Play’s 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage capacity will increase to 4GB and 64GB, respectively, in its successor.
One component that won’t see much of a change, unsurprisingly, is the Super AMOLED display. Its 5.5-inch diagonal and 1080 x 1920 resolution remain static from year-to-year, most likely because Motorola needed to ensure that all of the MotoMods maintain compatibility with the newer Z-series devices.
Finally, while the front-facing 5-megapixel selfie cam on the Z2 Play is largely the same as on the original, Motorola is opting to reduce the resolution of the main camera but increasing its imaging quality. To that end, gone is the 16-megapixel, f/2.0 module, replaced by a 12-megapixel, f/1.7 component featuring dual autofocus pixels.
Set to ship in Lunar Gray and Fine Gold (pictured up top), the Moto Z2 Play is one of three handsets in the refreshed Moto Z2 lineup, and among the first in a series of Motorola phones set to be released throughout the rest of the year. Those include the new entry-level Moto C and C Plus, the Moto E4 and E4 Plus, and the aforementioned Moto Z2 and Moto Z2 Force.
