Update:Sales go live on Thursday, 4 October – pre-sale starts today.
After announcing the Moto Z3 Play back in June, the phone has now arrived in Australia where it’s available to buy for $799 from Motorola Australia.
The Moto Z3 Play is the newest in the line of Moto Z phones launched in 2016 which introduced the world to Moto Mods – the modules that can fit to the rear of the phone and expand functionality.
The Moto Z3 Play offers a refined design to the previous generations, though it retains the same form factor to allow previously launched Moto Mods to be attached to the rear. Motorola has shaved down some of the bezels on the 6.01-inch 1080P 18:9 aspect ratio Super AMOLED display which offers you 13% more screen area than the last generation.
Under the hood, the Moto Z3 Play is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 636, 4GB of RAM and comes with 64GB of onboard storage which can be increased via the microSD slot (up to 400GB) – either that or you can insert a second SIM in the dual slot. A 3000mAh battery can be combined with the Power Pack Moto Mod to get up to 35 hours of battery life, or if not you can use the Motorola Turbo Charging tech to get you back to full in no time.
The Z3 Play has a dual rear camera array with 12MP+5MP sensors allowing you to capture brilliant photos in any light. Motorola offers animated photos with Cinemagraphs which freeze a moment in a video but lets you keep part of the shot animated. There’s also camera AI that includes object, landmark and text recognition. Finally an 8MP selfie camera on the front will capture those all important selfies for you.
Motorola has announced the phone with Android 8.1 (Oreo) with Motorola’s well used enhancements including always listening voice detection and a gesture based One Button Nav Bar at the bottom which should improve the usability of that large screen. Motorola has announced that the Moto Z3 Play will be receiving the Android 9.0 (Pie) update, so that’s a bonus, with the update due to arrive starting from ‘the fall’.
The phone is only available through the Motorola Australia website – there’s no carrier or retail partners announced for the Z3 Play so far. The phone comes in only one colour: ‘Deep Indigo’, and it also includes a Hasselblad Camera Moto Mod for the first 50 orders of the Moto z3 Play. The Moto Mod is worth $349, and includes a 10x optical zoom, Xenon flash and dedicated shutter button to give the phone the look and feel of a real camera.
If you’ve been waiting for this to arrive in Australia you can head over to the Motorola Australia website and check it out.
If it came with the projector mod that’d be deal of the century.
But sheeple wouldn’t realise. I have a z1-play and the projector mod. It blows peoples mind. I’ve been in a beer garden and gotten a standing ovation for beaming a football match on a wall.
636 is fine, Motorola optimises their software, all my mid range Motorola’s have performed well. The fact that they’ve made successive battery’s smaller than the z1 and removed the headphone jack on the z3 is pretty bloody annoying though.
I was hoping this was a offer I couldn’t refuse. My original Z Play was representative of Moto value, but this Z3 isn’t. No more dual-SIM + SD. No more amazing battery life out of the box (of course, US gets a free battery mod). An oddly located fingerprint sensor. And, in keeping with the trend, an excessive price point.
This may well be the last Z series phone we see in Australia. Lenovo really stuffed Moto up.
snigger at that 636 under the hood.
636? For $799? Wake up Motorola.
$800 for a Snapdragon 636? Ahh Motorola what are you doing?