Photo: Motorola
I've had the Samsung Galaxy S8+ for about 16 months and was getting fairly tired of not having a usable fingerprint sensor, and the infinity display was getting old. I saw the latest Motorola Z3 has the all black glass front & back so caught my eye. The super thin profile with hard edges was really attractive, and most of all the price tag less than $500 was the icing on the cake. I am really looking forward to the 2019 lineup of Samsung phones having embedded fingerprint sensors under (inside) the display, but I'm fearing they're going to charge a lot. I thought the $850 was basically too much for the S8+, and I fear Samsung will charge at least $100 more for that. So after having a Galaxy S3, Note 4, S7, and S8+, I decided to give Motorola a try.After almost a week, there are a handful of software complaints I have, but those are more with Google than Motorola, since Motorola does a good job of keeping it pretty "vanilla" Android. The all primary color blue call screen is an embarrassment to the design principles of either Google or Motorola, or both, I'm not clear. The lack of a dark theme in Android (namely for the pull-down notification pane, but also for the settings) reaks of Android v3, not v8. The fingerprint sensor on the right side is in a poor place, but functionally better than being on the rear. There's no headphone jack, but I'm fine with that as it makes for fewer openings on the device. I like the lack of the Bixby button, just power & volume. I miss the always on display that Samsung has, and since always on display is such an awesome feature, and yet after a couple years still no one else has it, it makes me wonder if Samsung was a jerk about it and patented it. Moto display is both cool and dumb at the same time. Compared to the always on display it looks childish (like the primary blue call screen). It's better than nothing, but that's about it. Could we please have a little customization (size, color, features)?
The dual camera is a gimmick, but no more so than the iPhone X. Portrait mode is a gimmick, fairly cool, but probably only truly useful once or twice a year, and even then I'll only care because I have it, not because it's needed. It does capture the photos with very low lag, and they're only just perceptibly lower color saturation than the S8+.
I do enjoy the feel of this Motorola in my hand, and knowing I paid almost half what the latest generation Samsungs cost (especially considering the Note9 is $999). This year's iPhone comes out in a week or two, and I sincerely hope they can make me envious. If they repeat last year then I'll be laughing rather than lusting, so we'll see.