Moto Launches Moto Z2 Force With Shattershield Display

Lenovo-owned Motorola has launched its flagship for the year, the Moto Z2 Force with a shatterproof display technology. With a lot of high-end specifications, the 2nd-gen Moto Z phone will be the flag-bearer for Moto this year. It goes on sale in the USA on August 10th and is already available for pre-orders.

Moto Z2 Force has got the hardware to compete with any flagship device this year with 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset. It has Android Nougat out-of-the-box with a promised update to Android. Let’s just say, pretty standard stuff for an expensive 2017 flagship device. The USP of Moto Z2 Force is three-fold. It has a shatterproof display that won’t crumble after a few regular drops thanks to a shatter-resistant coating on the display. Next up are the Moto Mods, which is why the design and the feel of the phone have been retained, except that it’s much thinner now thanks to a 2,730 mAh battery. The previous gen Moto Z had a 3,500 mAh battery, so to ship a new phone with that big a slump in battery size, just to make it thinner seems like a tricky decision. What’s also missing is our beloved 3.5mm headphone jack, so if you’re still living in the good ol’ days of wired headphones then you need to either make a shift to the wireless universe or live the dongle life, a USB C dongle is included in the box. Another significant change is the camera setup. It now has a dual-lens camera setup with dual 12MP sensors with an f/2.0 aperture. One camera shoots in monochrome, and the other shoots in colour, similar to what we saw on Huawei devices and recent Nubia M2. The Z2 Force also has laser AF, phase detection but no mention of optical image stabilisation. Similar to Apple’s portrait mode, the dual-lends setup has allowed Moto to implement a depth-of-field effect on the Moto Z2 Force.

The Moto Z2 Force doesn’t have the edge-to-edge display from the Galaxy S8 or a huge / relatively large battery one would expect, but with a price tag of $720 (roughly INR47,000), it competes with the big boys of the current flagship market aka the Samsung Galaxy s8 and its bigger sibling the S8+, Apple’s iPhone 7 and 7 plus. The release date in India has not been specified and it is likely that the phone may not launch in India at all as the company stayed away from the Force variant last year.