Moto Z2 Play goes official: thinner and lighter, still excellent battery life

The Moto Z2 Play has just gone official and it is the successor of one of the battery champion phones: the Moto Z Play.

And the Moto Z2 Play looks a lot like its predecessor: it has a nearly identical design, (but one that is much thinner and lighter!) the square fingerprint button on the front and the large, round and protruding camera on the back. In fact, the Moto Z2 Play is the thinnest mainstream phone we can think of in recent history.

A super thin, 5.5mm body

What's changed is under the hood: the Moto Z2 Play ships with the newest Snapdragon 626 system chip, the successor to the extremely power-efficient 625 that was inside the original Z Play. This chip is a little bit faster, but remains nearly the same in terms of battery savings. So yes, expect those same solid two days of battery life out of the Moto Z2 Play as well. Keep in mind that while a mid-range chip, the Snapdragon 626 performs very smoothly, and is built on a very modern 14nm manufacturing tech, so you are not likely to run into lag in your daily grind. Of course, it's not exactly a flagship chip either.

The official battery numbers for the Moto Z2 Play stand at 30 hours, a solid figure, but also less than the 50 hour official battery life figure for the original Moto Z Play.

Here is a quick look at the most important specs for the newly announced Moto Z2 Play:

The dual-pixel auto focus is one of the most notable new additions: this means the phone will be much faster to acquire focus, so you have less blurry images in your camera roll.

The phone will be available in three color options: Lunar Gray, Nimbus Blue, or Fine Gold.

Finally, the Moto Z2 Play announcement also comes with four new Moto Mods, the magnetically snapping add-ons that Moto presented last year. We have: 

The Style Shells will retail for $40, while all others will sell for $80, which is more affordable than the sky-high prices that we saw last year.

The Moto Z2 Play will be sold on Verizon Wireless, and it will also be available unlocked, directly from Motorola. The Z2 Play will go on sale in the summer months of 2017, but we have no specific date so far.

The price, however, is clearly set in the mid range market: $500 for an unlocked phone with 64GB of storage.