Inside the Moto Z Play is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625 processor. It’s not the Snapdragon 820 used in top-tier smartphones — and it benchmarks accordingly. But in day to day use, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint any performance issues. The Moto Z Play does just about everything briskly without noticeable hiccups. This is a dramatic difference from the Snapdragon 617 processor used in other midrange devices like the Moto G4 and BlackBerry’s DTEK50, where lag can become a frequent source of frustration.
For 90 percent of tasks, the Moto Z Play feels like a flagship-class device. The main exception is gaming, where the phone will struggle and stutter if you’re playing the latest titles, since the graphics horsepower just isn’t there. Stuff like Pokemon Go, The Room, Monument Valley, Two Dots, and Lara Croft Go is certainly playable, if not always perfect. The phone’s memory (3GB of RAM) means that background apps will need to reload more often when you return to them in multitasking, but it rarely stood out to me as an issue.
Compared to a speedier processor, the Snapdragon 625’s tradeoff in performance is usually imperceptible. But the gains in battery life are enormous. The endurance of this phone is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. Our Verge battery test would be rather useless in this situation since it would just spit out a marathon figure that's hard to contextualize.
So instead, I've been using the amount of time that the Z Play’s display is turned on as my measure of choice. The large majority of Android phones die somewhere between four and five hours of screen-on time for me, and many never even hit the latter mark. That's usually good for a day-ish of battery life on each charge. But the Moto Z Play hit new highs that changed my perception of how long a phone can and should last. Its display could be powered on at around 75 percent brightness for seven to eight hours between charges. That's just plain staggering. No one's going to look at their phone for eight hours per day, obviously. I'm an admitted smartphone addict and that number usually spread across two entire days for me — and sometimes into a third.
At times late in the day when I'd usually start getting anxious about my phone dying, I'd glance at the Moto Z Play and see that it still had an 80 percent charge in the tank. What? How? The Moto Z has the usual mix of battery saving modes and optimization settings, but I never turned any of that stuff on and was still left with my jaw on the floor. Nothing compares. Not a Galaxy S7 Edge. Not an iPhone 7 Plus. Those devices are far more technically advanced, but the Moto Z Play starts to make you wonder whether things like a 2K display or souped up processor are really worth it.
This kind of battery life opens up a different level of freedom in using your phone how you want on the go. Sure, stream a bunch of YouTube videos or a movie on Netflix; you’ll be fine. Don’t even worry about plugging it in if you need turn-by-turn directions in the car. The thing could probably chug through a cross-country flight without blinking. Separate from its supreme endurance, the Moto Z Play is just a pleasant phone to use thanks to Moto’s great software features on top of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. You’ve got Moto Voice and Moto Display here – just like on the other Moto Zs. Lenovo has said it will bring Android Nougat to the Z family sometime in Q4, but you really can’t count on the company for timely security patches. That’s disappointing, as is Verizon’s obnoxious level of crapware. But useless apps can be disabled; device security is a larger concern to think about.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEr5yrn5VjsLC5jmtnam5fZn1wfY5qampqYmeDcXvMqKuoqp%2Bhrm65zq2mZrJdpbmixYyrnK%2Bhlax6qLvOnWSbmaSpsrPF