Moto Z _ Z Force Review - 2 Months with Modular Phones
**The Z vs The Z Force: A Comparative Analysis**
When it comes to smartphones, modularity is often a sought-after feature that sets these devices apart from their non-modular counterparts. In this review, we'll be comparing two modular phones, the Z and the Z Force, to see which one comes out on top.
**Performance**
One of the key aspects we wanted to test was performance. We started by taking some photos with both devices to see how quickly they focus and render colors. Unfortunately, I found that the Z takes a bit longer to focus than the Z Force, but it's not drastically slower. The shutter lag is still relatively quick, and once in focus, the image looks decently sharp. That being said, I do think that if you're going to want to do any kind of photo editing or cropping, the Z Force is the way to go. It takes slightly brighter pictures, which could be beneficial for low-light shots, and has more detail overall.
**Picture Quality**
When it comes to picture quality, there's a noticeable difference between the two devices. The Z Force takes slightly brighter pictures with better color rendering, making it ideal for HDR scenes. However, in extremely low lighting situations, both phones perform relatively similarly. It's worth noting that the Z Force does have a slight edge in terms of detail, but this is more pronounced when you pixel peep.
**Color Rendering**
We also noticed that the colors on both devices look nice and accurate, without any major over-saturation issues. However, if you're looking for a phone that can accurately render colors, the Z Force might have a slight edge over the Z. Both phones do a good job of keeping scenes looking natural, but if you're going to want to edit or crop your photos, the Z Force is still the way to go.
**Scenes in Lower Lighting**
In terms of low-light performance, we found that both phones perform relatively similarly, with the Z Force being only slightly brighter. However, when it comes to noise reduction, the Z Force does have a slight edge over the Z. This is likely due to the fact that the Z Force's camera sensor is more advanced than the Z's.
**Scenes in Extremely Low Lighting**
In extremely low-light situations, both phones are able to bring back details and shadows, but we did find that the Z Force has a slightly wider aperture lens, which can be beneficial for capturing more light.
**Point and Shoot Performance**
As point and shoots go, both phones perform relatively well. They're both capable of taking decent photos in a variety of lighting conditions, although it's worth noting that they do have some limitations when it comes to zooming or capturing wide-angle shots.
**Modularity**
One of the standout features of these two devices is their modularity. The Z Force has a more extensive range of modularity options available, including different styles and accessories. However, we did find that the modularity on both phones was not without its drawbacks. For example, the Z's larger size can make it feel cumbersome to carry around.
**Style**
When it comes to style, both phones are pretty stylish. The Z Force has a more compact design, which makes it feel more premium than the Z. However, if you're looking for a phone that will appeal to a wide range of users, the Z might be the better choice.
**Battery Life**
Both phones have relatively long battery life, but we found that the Z Force's larger battery gave it an edge over the Z. This is likely due to the fact that the Z Force has more efficient hardware and software.
**Charging Speed**
When it comes to charging speed, both phones are relatively quick. However, we did find that the Z Force charges slightly faster than the Z, thanks to its Qualcomm QuickCharge 2.0 support.
**Fingerprint Sensor**
One of the standout features on both phones is their fingerprint sensors. The Z's sensor is accurate and fast, but it hasn't been turned into a home button... yet. However, we did find that the Z Force's sensor was slightly more accurate than the Z's.
**Display**
When it comes to displays, both phones have high-resolution screens that are easy on the eyes. However, we found that the Z Force's screen had a slight edge over the Z in terms of brightness and color accuracy.
**Design**
In terms of design, both phones are pretty stylish. The Z has a more compact design than the Z Force, but it also feels slightly less premium due to its modular design. The Z Force, on the other hand, feels like a traditional smartphone that happens to be modular.
**Verdict**
So, which phone is right for you? If you want a phone that's going to be able to handle all of your photography needs, including HDR and low-light shots, the Z Force might be the better choice. However, if you're on a budget or don't need all of those advanced features, the Z could be a more affordable option.
**Conclusion**
Ultimately, both the Z and the Z Force are solid options in the world of modular smartphones. While they share some similarities, there are also some notable differences between the two devices. If you want a phone that's going to deliver excellent performance and picture quality, the Z Force is the way to go. But if you're on a budget or don't need all of those advanced features, the Z could be a more affordable option.
**Rating**
* **Z:** 8/10
* **Z Force:** 9/10
We hope this review has helped you make an informed decision when it comes to choosing between these two modular phones. Happy shopping!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody this is Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff and it is time for the full review of the Moto Z and the Moto Z4 keep in mind that the Moto Z force is only going to be available exclusively on Verizon it's not going to come unlocked like the Moto Z but these are two really interesting modular phones I like them hopefully I can help you decide if they are for you so let's go ahead and check them out so looking at these phones I love how Lenovo has dealt with modularity the structure and the Integrity of the structure doesn't have to be messed with here you have modules and still a really nice feeling phon so I feel that they've done modularity the right way so looking around both of these phones they are both fairly similar first thing that sticks out to me is that they're both incredible fingerprint magnets it just looks really nasty very quickly I've done my best you guys n really not so nice both of these are made out of aluminum and they both have these gold contacts here on the back both have magnets so that you can place the mods on the backs you can see they both have this nice lined design but without one of these backings on both of these phones look incomplete so I do recommend at least having one of these style shells looking at the right hand side they both have their power button and volume buttons in the same place left hand side is completely bear on both of them on the top you have your slot for the SD card and also for your sim we have a microphone here on the bottom we have a USBC Port no headphone jack on either of these I'm hearing reports that there are phones that are about just as thin that could still fit a headphone jack and I know on this one that they definitely could have fit a headphone jack so this looks just like a media headline to compete against Apple honestly but at least they include an adapter also on the back they both have this camera hump both have a dual LED flash although you can see that the lens is a little bit bigger on the force looking at the front of both of these devices both have a 5 megapixel front-facing camera their receiver and speaker are in the same place there's also a flash on the front for both of them both have a 5.5 in Super AMOLED Quad HD display both have a fingerprint sensor and all of their sensors at the bottom so that you can use Moto display and neither of them have capacitive buttons here on the front so it's just this gigantic chin and I can't really find a particular reason for it to be that way now as a side note this fingerprint sensor here does not double as a home button much to my frustration and to the frustration of many others you can see that it turns it on nice and quickly and accurately and also if you hold it down it turns off the display as well but as soon as you go into an application I am so tempted to keep pushing right here to act as a home button and it does nothing maybe in the near future it will do something or somebody will be able to make a mod for it but for right now it just feels pretty underutilized also you can see that the navigation bar is on screen and it never goes away so I worry about burn in it just feels that this area is very underutilized especially when looking at something like the OnePlus 3 you've got the option with this phone to have an onscreen navigation bar or to use the capacitive buttons where they differ is in thickness you can see just how thin the Moto Z is it's almost ridiculous it's edging on feeling very edgy or very uncomfortable in order to enjoy holding this phone I really need to put one of the style shells in the back then it feels okay oddly I find that it feels better to not have any type of style shell or mod on this phone at all feels best just as it is Standalone that might be due to this slight curve that we have here on the side side it cradles my hand a lot better with a stal shell on or any other mods it just feels too thick and cumbersome the other difference we have is that this is a shatterproof display akin to plastic we will get into the displays and all that in a little bit and then this is Gorilla Glass 4 so when looking at our displays here the image looks very nice and close on the Moto Z very up close to the glass where the image feels a lot more recessed so it's going to have to be a matter of taste for you whether you prefer having the image look really close to your face or laid inset a little bit now there is a white model for both of these but I really do not recommend it because of the amount of sensors that we have here it ends up looking really quite ugly very very busy speaking a little bit more about the thicknesses let's go ahead and put this battery mod on the Z and the style shell on the force and still the Z is just a little bit thicker with that battery pack on but they almost feel pretty much the same thickness so this gives you an idea of just how thick this one is so now I wanted to take a second to thank my sponsors at brain tree so so much for making content creation possible brain tree is equated with easy mobile payments they are a payal company who has helped Uber Airbnb and GitHub get where they are today with their easy Mobile payment solution brain tree makes mobile payments so fast easy and seamless that your business will be up and running in no time and they're basically a major reason why you can press one button and pay for something add it to your app with just a few lines of code and you're instantly ready to accept Apple pay Android pay PayPal venmo credit cards even Bitcoin and if some other way to pay comes along brain tree will support that too they provide a single integration across all platforms with Superior fraud protection customers service and fast payouts this all means you'll always be ready whether you're earning your first dollar or your billionth see fewer abandoned carts and more sales with brain tre's best-in-class mobile checkout experience learn more at Braintree payments.com that's brain Tre payments.com let's talk about display durability a little bit so you've got gorill glass 4 on the Z and you've got a shatterproof display on the Z Force so we've essentially got a plastic display here it's composed of several different layers this outer layer is actually just like a really thick screen protector and they're going to be selling replacements for this so if it gets all scratched up don't worry about it don't even worry you can just go and replace this yourself if I wanted to I could slide up under here and peel this up so I think that that's really nice I could take this outside right now and drop it and the thing would be just fine if I was to take a hammer to it for example nothing's going to happen to this thing it might get a little bit marked up but you know it's fine I could probably do the same to this one and probably nothing would happen to it but I have a feeling that this is going to be a lot more trusting a lot more durable I would not be sitting doing this to my other phones now after doing that you can see that I've got some marks there they look like some screen protector indentations but the display is still perfectly functioning so I think that this is a win plus this is perfectly clear before this shatterproof screen kind of looked a little hazy and it wasn't perfectly clear and now this is so I am not bothered by this whatsoever sometimes from the side I can see a little bit of a rainbow effect but if this means that I don't ever have to worry about my display cracking and all I have to do is replace the top that's great they also say this has a redundant digitizer so if one fails the other touch layer will still work I don't know about you but I think this is pretty cool but since this is plastic yes it's going to scratch in everyday usage keeping it away from things like coins and knives I have a couple very light scratches here and there but nothing offensive it's obviously been hard coated with something if we want we can break out the knife once you do that obviously that's going to scratch it but coins and things sure after constant rubbing against it yes but I've been pretty impressed now checking out specs and performance both of these have the Snapdragon 820 so inside of these with 4 GB of RAM either 32 or 64 GB variations for internal storage with an SD card slot with official support up to 256 GB now both of these devices in my testing run quite warm it's about 107° at the hottest Point I've measured with these so talking about thermal throttling and sustained performance I have played with both of these extensively and benched mark them extensively I expected the Z's performance would throttle down more quickly because it is thinner and I often found that to be true but in overall testing they seem to perform quite similarly their performance both Throttle Down over time like other powerful phones just to keep them from getting too hot but in actual use like games I didn't find it to be extreme still looking side by side at their performance you can see that they Throttle Down over time here's Peak Performance and then they go downward but yeah the force is a thicker phone so expect it to do a bit better with heat dissipation still both are great performing phones and I haven't had much to complain about they rate at the top with other s820 devices and perform very well gameplay is very nice and smooth and they can handle whatever I throw at them they both just get very warm during gamep play or even during use during the day but the style cover does help cover up the back and make it more comfortable because of that heat so now looking into multitasking with both of these devices they've got 4 GB of RAM and in my testing I was able to load 17 applications in Ram and none of them shut down so it is an app switching champ both of these are also very fast at opening applications I found them to be faster than others even word on the street is that they have ufs 2.0 storage so no worries here you guys these are great performers now because these are both very close to vanilla Android with just a little bit of skinning they're very very quick the interface is Snappy and just feels very fast like it flies I don't feel stuttering or skipping or lagging that's what I've always really liked about lenovo's phones or Motorola in the past they leave the skin alone for the most part what they do add to 6.0.1 Android I find to be very useful so underneath display settings you see that we have a color mode so you can switch between vibrant and standard we will talk about how well these are calibrated so that's really nice to have this option I'm seeing more and more AMOLED phones come out with these options and then otherwise we've got the Moto app here so you've got Moto actions voice and display Moto display is probably the main integrated feature so anytime you move your hand over these sensors at the bottom it will give you the time and also any notifications that you have when there's a notification you can peek at it and you can go right into the notification from here or you can even dismiss it so it no longer shows up then with voice you can set launch phrases so that you can control your phone handsfree and then you've got actions so you've got approach which was the trigger for Moto Pho display you've got attentive display so while you're looking at it the display won't go off you can chop twice to turn the flashlight on do the same to turn it off flip for do not disturb so if you want to silence your phone just turn it upside down pick it up to make it stop ringing swipe to shrink the screen so you went up from the bottom so that's for one-handed use then touch here to make it go big again and then twist for quick capture and there you have the camera so not many modifications but the ones that are on on here are mostly app based and are very very useful so now let's move on to talking about the Moto mods which is the main part of this phone the whole purpose it seems is they really want people to use these modules and they've even given developers a $1 million incentive to create their own modules they've even said that these modules should work for future generations of the phone now I don't know if that's true we will just have to wait and see but this seems to be what the Zong L really is all about expanding functionality of the phone without having to change the phone in any way just simply adding it like a little pack sticks in place with a magnet very nice and secure so in general for all the mods I've played with in my kits they all connect securely and I'm not afraid that they're going to fall off maybe they will pop off if you drop them but I'm not willing to try that theory so you can see here I've got several things this is the projector we've got the JBL speaker and also a battery pack this one is not inductive charging there are ones that do have wireless charging so even though these mods fit nice and securely I am a little bit worried about some of the style shells you can see that there's a looks to be a little bit of a gap here where the materials are coming together so when I pop this on you can kind of easily get your thumbnail underneath it now depending on how your shell was put together in the Mater materials it may or may not be easy to remove like this so that's something just to look out for but still once it's in place it's not really going anywhere these are very nice and strong magnets you can see see it's pretty much staying there I'm not going to bounce it up and down but you get an idea that's on there pretty well and you can see that this isn't going to go anywhere because you've got a little nub it goes right in here and it stays put what I find so cool about the Moto mods is that they really are plug-and-play they're completely dummy proof there's no setup process at all unless you just have to accept some permissions but still that's like yes or no once you plug it in it makes a nice reassuring vibration and it already gives you options for settings right here nothing to install at all just so so for example battery mode it's already giving me some options of what to do with the battery right upon plugging it in and you can see I've got that reading there too so the way that they have done this is brilliant it just works I couldn't have asked for a better implementation so we're going to be talking about each and every one of these but the only device that these kind of makes sense with to me is the thin phone just the Moto Z because once you start adding them as I mentioned earlier onto this thicker phone it just becomes way too heavy and way tooo cumbersome they sure did decide to knock down the profile of this phone for the sake of adding mods to it so let's go ahead and start with the battery pack looking at the battery pack if I just touch right here it tells me that there is a charge this is a 2,220 mAh battery so you just plug it right here you can see that it fits perfectly with the profile of the phone it's like it's part of it and that's not going to come off in order to get this off you need to put your fingernails under here and lift upward so obviously with this Z phone I definitely recommend getting a battery pack of some kind whether it's one of these Moto mod ones or you go and invest in another battery pack my complaint about this battery pack is that it doesn't charge the phone very quickly and these are pretty expensive I believe this is 80 bucks yes it does really conform to the phone but is that worth it to you I don't know with this 2,220 mAh battery pack I did get to do some battery measurements to see what it was like and how long it lasted so my force was at 0% and I let this basically charg the phone up until the phone turned on so I got an hour and a half of heavy use with it and it also charge the phone up to 30% so this will help you in a bind I expect for the Moto Z for it to last an hour and a half to of heavy use but having more of a charge than 30% a cool option that you have with the battery pack are two different battery modes you've got default and efficiency mode so default mode is going to keep charging the battery it's going to try to keep getting it up to 100% but efficiency mode will only start charging the phone battery once the phone battery drops below 80% so that's going to essentially have this battery pack last a little bit longer in terms of charging this battery pack there is no port to plug this in the only way to charge it is to keep it backpacked onto the phone and in my testing I noticed that it doesn't charge very fast the phone will charge up much much quicker then the battery pack will so I hope that gives you a couple things to consider but if I've got the cash lying around or if there's a special deal on this I really would go for one of these so now let's look at the insta share projector this is a $300 little projector that you have here you've got a little kickstand so that it can sit and you're able to view at multiple angles but my beef immediately in is that there are other pico projectors out there for the same price or maybe even just for a little bit more that are more powerful than this is plus this is only going to work with just one device it's only going to work with the Moto Z and whatever other phones that Lenovo or Motorola decides to have this work for so I think it makes sense just to get a designated little Pico projector instead of a backpack also I'm sure a lot of people would prefer to have their phone be used as a controller for the p projector instead of having it like this where if you are having a presentation going on you kind of have to knock it about to change the slides so just looking at what the specs are of this it's got a 1,100 mAh battery to charge it it's got a fan to help keep it cool at worst you can hear it when it's quiet but otherwise when you have audio going you can't hear the fan you've got a slider here to bring it to focus this turns on the projector so to turn on the projector press and hold and then you can press down again and it gives you a couple of projector settings so you see you have the option for your Keystone so the trapezoidal Distortion when it's at an angle you can fix to your heart's content yourself or you can do it automatically I tend to just keep it on auto unless it's at a very strange angle then you can control the brightness as well so this is a 50 Lin projector not very bright you can put out an image up to 70 in 480p so it's it's not very high resolution only a 400 to1 contrast ratio so the contrast looks very low colors look washed out so for sure this works for presentations when in a dim room or in a room that doesn't have a lot of ambient lighting it looks okay and notice you're really not going to be watching shows on this this is not going to be your allaround projector trust me and I don't think that's what they meant it for anyway nice little projector but really I would not pay the $300 for it I just couldn't justify it unless you are really a road warrior needing to have instant projection on the go and didn't want to have any other accessories or tripods or anything with you so the last Moto mod that I have here is the JBL sound boost speaker and honestly if you get any of the mods this is the one that I actually recommend so taking a look at it you can see that there is a kickstand here so you can prop your phone up and listen to music on the back is a charging port USBC and it has its own 1,000 Mah hour battery pack inside of it so it's not going to use the phone's battery the battery will run down on this and then it can use the phone's battery so you don't have to worry about this draining your phone there's also a battery indicator on here press that lets you know if there's a charge it's so simple to set up you don't have to do any pairing process nothing it just becomes part of the phone yes it does add quite a bit of bulk but what you get with this is totally worth it so it's nice nice stereo sound you've got two drivers here this gets to be 80 DB that's pretty loud and I don't hear any Distortion either and I'm surpris there's actually some nice base to these it's just a huge improvement over the itty bitty little speaker that's on this right here so I'm sure that you could purchase a Bluetooth speaker that's cheaper and sounds even better I'm not going to argue with you on that one but in my experience with Bluetooth speakers and Android phones for whatever reason I always run into trouble with sound latency so I see that if I'm playing a game that the sound does not keep up with the animations and that gets insanely annoying it seems to be app specific and luckily with this phone my Bluetooth speaker YouTube and also Netflix don't have this problem but this is a very wide problem in Android so instead of dealing with sound latency you're having that possibility I always have nice sound here I don't ever have to worry about that so it adds bulk but it's really worth it you guys also as an added bonus this can function as a speaker phone so that's definitely nice and also you're probably going to notice how much this extends outward but luckily this does not interfere with the camera you're not going to see the sides at all so don't worry about that of course they paid attention to that no problem so now let's move on to taking a look at battery life of both of these devices so we've got a 2,600 mamp battery inside of the Z and 3,500 mAh battery inside of the zforce needless to say that's quite a bit different so if you are going to be a heavy user you're going to need to charge the Z sometime during the day that's just something you're going to need to expect it would be good to get yourself a battery pack of some kind but if you're not having a particularly heavy day you can make it through actually I was quite surprised I'm able to get up to 5 hours of on screen time on this wasn't expecting that between 3 and 5 hours if it's the absolute worst I Saw 2 hours or this one is going to last you into next year not really but it's going to last you at least a day or more I actually did a benchmark so that we could see the difference between both of these I basically set the brightness the same at about 200 nits so here we have PC Mark pulled up and I just ran this test until the battery died again same brightness about 200 knits so 6 hours and 14 minutes versus 10 hours and 8 minutes that is quite a difference that's a 4-Hour difference so this guy is the Energizer Bunny in comparison to this one no trouble you're going to have whatsoever with battery life on the zforce they both have quick charging as well Quick Charge 2.0 so even though this one is quite small it does take some of the edge off and remember this is supposed to be a modular phone so they're trying to keep it thin so that you don't have such a thick Beast so now how about the displays on these devices well we got a 5.5 in AMOLED display this is Quad HD over 530 pixels per inch that's pretty standard for more Flagship phones right now we're seeing a lot more AMOLED displays a lot of Quad HD displays and of course who do you think the manufacturer is it's Samsung so you've got that diamond Matrix pen tile but still this is a very nice sharp display very colorful display thankfully this comes with a different mode other than just the standard mode underneath display you can see that you've got the standard mode and the vibrant mode honestly with the vibrant mode I feel like stabbing my eyes out with a fork where the standard mode is actually pretty close to the srgb standard so I decide to keep it on the standard mode but if you like garish crazy Way Beyond oversaturated colors go for it more power to you so in terms of brightness when we are not using the automatic brightness mode it gets to be about 400 nits it's a little bit lower on the zforce but the peak brightness on both of them is over 500 knits and that's if you're using that automatic brightness mode so you should be able to see it in direct sunlight just remember to go in and use the Adaptive brightness mode because otherwise it's really hard to see that display the real pity between both of these devices is that I really wish that they would get darker in bed at night I don't want to disturb my husband if I don't feel like sleeping and this still is at a brightness that would disturb him it's about 15 nits where something like the Galaxy Note 7 gets down to less than two nits about 1.88 nits even my OnePlus 3 can get about as dark as my Galaxy Note 7 so I don't know what gives here so I did some measurements of both of these displays to see how well they are calibrated I only bothered with the standard mode because it conforms at least to some type of calibration standard the srgb calibration standard where the vibrant mode is just crazy garish for people who like very oversaturated colors so no point in measuring I can see that with my very own eyes but as far as how well it's calibrated to srgb I can see that they really were trying to Target srgb I think that the saturations aren't too far off I don't think the gamut is too far off either I also can see that they're trying to Target gamma 2.2 which is nice because it doesn't make the display look over contrasty or washed out it's just about right although I do see some weird variations going on there I suspect it'll be different between so many different panels also looks like their color temperature isn't too far bluish either it's 7,000 Kelvin it should be targeting 6,500 Kelvin but 7,000 is not overly bluish my one complaint really would be that their balance of red green and blue throughout the gray scale is really pretty bad there's just not enough red in there there's way too much green in there so you end up kind of with a greenish bluish looking white point so whites look kind of bluish greenish and unfortunately all colors end up with kind of a bit of a bluish greenish color c as well because of all that and honestly just changing it to the vibrant mode makes it worse so the standard mode is the only one that I can stand it's the first thing I noticed when picking up these displays something looked really bluish greenish to Me overall not horrifically calibrated but that's the one thing that keeps it from being a display that I really really like but still overall not too bad so now let's move on to talking about speaker audio telephony so here we have the speaker here this is the only speaker there is no speaker on the bottom so both your receiver and your speaker as far as quality I think that it gets loud enough for both speaker phone and for voice calls for media it mostly gets loud enough it's not the best sounding speaker it sounds a little bit thin but this is where it's really nice to pop on the JBL sound boost speaker on the back I also find it annoying that for ring tones it starts out very quiet and ascends upward I wish I could disable that but it's not a deal breaker it's just something I noticed I've noticed that with other types of audio too it'll be really quiet and then you hear it Ascend really loudly it's probably a software thing where it's switching from being the receiver to the speaker so how about the elephant in the room here there is no audio jack so of course you've got to use an adapter and they're nice enough to include an adapter in the box but the concern here is even with this adapter is that I know so many people who like to charge their phone at night before going to bed while listening to audio maybe they're charging their phone and they're watching a movie or something while not wanting to disturb their loved one beside them you can't do that anymore you've got one or the other so that's going to be a sore point for a lot of people but in terms of the audio quality I've been hearing pretty decent things I am not an audio file you guys but from all my research that I've done so far with what other bloggers and people are saying is that the audio sounds pretty good it's got a nice flat frequency response to it it gets pretty loud as well so nice loud clear audio I'm really not sure what the DAC amp pairing is on this I wouldn't be surprised if it's just the Snapdragon one if anybody knows please leave a comment in the comment section below but without having that headphone jack there it makes me wonder what types of audio components that they can fit here now maybe you can have a nice dedicated DAC and amp as for phone calls this works just fine as a phone as I mentioned speaker phone gets decently loud enough it's just fine seems to be nice and clear hearing people nice and clear no issues there Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS I haven't had any issues with any of them now both of these are Verizon phones they are unlocked so you can put SIM cards in from GSM networks although I just wouldn't recommend it I would seriously get the unlocked Moto Z if this is what you're going to really want the zforce is going to be a Verizon exclusive if you want to use it on other carriers I can show you what bands are supported and my experience so you can see it says 4G LTE you've got band to 3 4 5 7 and 13 so there is no band 12 for you T-Mobile people I was able to pop in my sim and get LTE on both AT&T and T-Mobile but wasn't really able to stay on LTE very well that could be due to my area as for the T-Mobile one could be due to not having ban 12 so just keep this in mind if you must have the force the last thing that I want to talk about in this review are the cameras so we have a 13 megapixel camera that's on the Z and we've got a 21 megap camera on the Z Force I have to say right away I really wish that the 21 megapixel camera was on the Z because it seems to best the Z's camera in every way so we'll talk about that but moving on with specs you can see that we've got a dual tone LED flash on both of these this helps with white balance we've got Optical image stabilization on both of them and laser assisted autofocus on the front we've got a 5 megapixel camera and a flash so if you're somebody who wants to take selfies in less than favorable lighting you've got that taking a look at the interface the interface is much better than it has been and that is because we now have a manual mode so if you touch here you can see you've got several modes this one right here is your manual mode so I can push this down here and it's going to open up all the settings or you can control them individually so you've got your focus control you've got your white balance control you've got your shutter speed it only goes up to half a second so don't be expecting to keep the shutter open for a really long time on this phone you've got your control for the iso and also exposure compensation so that is a setting that's really nice to have something we have not had before if you pull from the left you can see you've got some general settings shutter sound you can choose where you want to store photos quick capture which was that cool little twisty action that just makes it so handy to activate to take pictures I wish every phone had that photo size for the Z is 13 megapixel Max so 43 is the native aspect of the sensor and anything else is going to be a crop it's the same thing for the force as well except for its 43 at 21 megapixels video has several options I'm happy to see that not only do we have full HD at 30 frames per second but 1080p at 60 frames per second and of course you've got Ultra HD 4K otherwise you can change to the front-facing camera this lets you switch between several modes your automatic mode your slow motion mode panorama video and of course just automatic mode timer flash HDR setting it's touch to focus and then you can control the exposure compensation so nice little camera I do want to say though that in some situations both of these cameras can be pretty slow to take pictures it's usually in less than favorable lighting it takes a long time to take an HDR photo and it takes a pretty long time during the low light setting also notice that both of these have a tendency to take several photos in a row I think it's for the best shot feature it will try to pick the best shot in a string of photos and I can't find a way to disable that so that can get pretty annoying and who knows that might be a reason for why it can take so long sometimes to take a picture but in nice lighting it's quick to take a picture without any shutter lag it's decently quick to focus it's just still not my favorite but let's take a look at some picture quality a very subtle difference that I first noticed between the Z and the zforce is that the zforce takes a little bit brighter pictures I always see that the shutter is open a little bit longer what's more pronounced though is just how much more detail the zforce has in pictures over the Z even without pixel peeping the Z's images look so much more mushy and not as sharp as the Z4 is so if you're going to want to do any kind of photo editing or cropping the zforce is going to be the way to go in terms of color rendering between the two I really can't see meaningful differences between the way that the colors look they both look pretty Onkey I think the colors look nice the colors look pretty accurate not too oversaturated which I appreciate when looking at pictures compared to the Galaxy S7 for example the S7 just overs saturates things pretty crazily which becomes very obvious against a monotone background where the Z and the Z Force do a good job to keep the scene looking nice and natural during some HDR scenes though it can end up pushing that saturation so it ends up being overall a mixed bag of tricks but still with HDR mode I find that it does a good job to bring back details and shadows as for scenarios in lower lighting I find that the Z performs a little bit worse than the zforce I find that the zforce is a little bit brighter with a little bit less noise but then there comes a situation of extremely low lighting I find that they perform pretty much about the same except for maybe the zforce has a hair more light so as point and shoots go they're pretty good cameras I like the color rendering on both of them low light isn't horrific finally but I'm really not happy how the zforce just has so much more detail so now we are wrapping this up thank you guys so much for watching this has been Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff please rate comment and subscribe so in terms of modularity these are the best modular phones on the market hands down I think the modularity is more worth it for the smaller thinner Z phone just because of how thick and cumbersome it can be aside from being modular though both of these are nice powerful quick phones I really like that the interfaces don't have much to them it hasn't been fooled with and honestly I'm starting to like this more and more because it's not all laggy apps open nice and quickly it is a fantastic performer in the app switching and multitasking Department you do have a nice quick accurate fingerprint sensor on here which I'm really hoping they are able to turn into a home button somehow you've got nice displays on these really nice high resolution both of these have pretty decent cameras they're not the absolute best on the market but they're really going to get the job done they've got Qualcomm 2.0 quick charging so they're up to Snuff with other Snapdragon 820 devices out there on the market so the offer a lot more than just simply being a modular phone but they do add that aspect as well they're also looking pretty stylish as long as you add a style cover to it in all honesty though the one that I'm most interested in interestingly after playing with these is the zforce and aside from having one of these Styles shell covers I probably wouldn't get any of the mods at all unless it was the speaker this one's just such a more proficient phone in every way better camera you've got better performance because this one throttles down a little bit more quickly it's got such a bigger battery and unless you want to carry around a brick or buy one of these for 50 to 80 bucks well this also has a shatterproof display and that could be annoying to some but all you have to do is simply remove this outer part here buy a new $30 lens that they're going to sell and bada bing bada boom you're got a nice protected phone I'm not minding this shatterproof screen at all so for me this would be the way to go you guys I'm just angry that it's only available on Verizon so that kind of has turned me off quite a bit but oh well what can you do and if I'm betting on it they will probably end up having an unlocked version somewhere at some time don't quote me on that but it's just an assumption I don't see why they wouldn't or at least make some version of it that will be available unlocked so again this has been Erica the technology nerd like to film stuff I hope you enjoyed this review and I hope I have answered your questions let me know what you think of these phones which one would you get and goodbyehey everybody this is Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff and it is time for the full review of the Moto Z and the Moto Z4 keep in mind that the Moto Z force is only going to be available exclusively on Verizon it's not going to come unlocked like the Moto Z but these are two really interesting modular phones I like them hopefully I can help you decide if they are for you so let's go ahead and check them out so looking at these phones I love how Lenovo has dealt with modularity the structure and the Integrity of the structure doesn't have to be messed with here you have modules and still a really nice feeling phon so I feel that they've done modularity the right way so looking around both of these phones they are both fairly similar first thing that sticks out to me is that they're both incredible fingerprint magnets it just looks really nasty very quickly I've done my best you guys n really not so nice both of these are made out of aluminum and they both have these gold contacts here on the back both have magnets so that you can place the mods on the backs you can see they both have this nice lined design but without one of these backings on both of these phones look incomplete so I do recommend at least having one of these style shells looking at the right hand side they both have their power button and volume buttons in the same place left hand side is completely bear on both of them on the top you have your slot for the SD card and also for your sim we have a microphone here on the bottom we have a USBC Port no headphone jack on either of these I'm hearing reports that there are phones that are about just as thin that could still fit a headphone jack and I know on this one that they definitely could have fit a headphone jack so this looks just like a media headline to compete against Apple honestly but at least they include an adapter also on the back they both have this camera hump both have a dual LED flash although you can see that the lens is a little bit bigger on the force looking at the front of both of these devices both have a 5 megapixel front-facing camera their receiver and speaker are in the same place there's also a flash on the front for both of them both have a 5.5 in Super AMOLED Quad HD display both have a fingerprint sensor and all of their sensors at the bottom so that you can use Moto display and neither of them have capacitive buttons here on the front so it's just this gigantic chin and I can't really find a particular reason for it to be that way now as a side note this fingerprint sensor here does not double as a home button much to my frustration and to the frustration of many others you can see that it turns it on nice and quickly and accurately and also if you hold it down it turns off the display as well but as soon as you go into an application I am so tempted to keep pushing right here to act as a home button and it does nothing maybe in the near future it will do something or somebody will be able to make a mod for it but for right now it just feels pretty underutilized also you can see that the navigation bar is on screen and it never goes away so I worry about burn in it just feels that this area is very underutilized especially when looking at something like the OnePlus 3 you've got the option with this phone to have an onscreen navigation bar or to use the capacitive buttons where they differ is in thickness you can see just how thin the Moto Z is it's almost ridiculous it's edging on feeling very edgy or very uncomfortable in order to enjoy holding this phone I really need to put one of the style shells in the back then it feels okay oddly I find that it feels better to not have any type of style shell or mod on this phone at all feels best just as it is Standalone that might be due to this slight curve that we have here on the side side it cradles my hand a lot better with a stal shell on or any other mods it just feels too thick and cumbersome the other difference we have is that this is a shatterproof display akin to plastic we will get into the displays and all that in a little bit and then this is Gorilla Glass 4 so when looking at our displays here the image looks very nice and close on the Moto Z very up close to the glass where the image feels a lot more recessed so it's going to have to be a matter of taste for you whether you prefer having the image look really close to your face or laid inset a little bit now there is a white model for both of these but I really do not recommend it because of the amount of sensors that we have here it ends up looking really quite ugly very very busy speaking a little bit more about the thicknesses let's go ahead and put this battery mod on the Z and the style shell on the force and still the Z is just a little bit thicker with that battery pack on but they almost feel pretty much the same thickness so this gives you an idea of just how thick this one is so now I wanted to take a second to thank my sponsors at brain tree so so much for making content creation possible brain tree is equated with easy mobile payments they are a payal company who has helped Uber Airbnb and GitHub get where they are today with their easy Mobile payment solution brain tree makes mobile payments so fast easy and seamless that your business will be up and running in no time and they're basically a major reason why you can press one button and pay for something add it to your app with just a few lines of code and you're instantly ready to accept Apple pay Android pay PayPal venmo credit cards even Bitcoin and if some other way to pay comes along brain tree will support that too they provide a single integration across all platforms with Superior fraud protection customers service and fast payouts this all means you'll always be ready whether you're earning your first dollar or your billionth see fewer abandoned carts and more sales with brain tre's best-in-class mobile checkout experience learn more at Braintree payments.com that's brain Tre payments.com let's talk about display durability a little bit so you've got gorill glass 4 on the Z and you've got a shatterproof display on the Z Force so we've essentially got a plastic display here it's composed of several different layers this outer layer is actually just like a really thick screen protector and they're going to be selling replacements for this so if it gets all scratched up don't worry about it don't even worry you can just go and replace this yourself if I wanted to I could slide up under here and peel this up so I think that that's really nice I could take this outside right now and drop it and the thing would be just fine if I was to take a hammer to it for example nothing's going to happen to this thing it might get a little bit marked up but you know it's fine I could probably do the same to this one and probably nothing would happen to it but I have a feeling that this is going to be a lot more trusting a lot more durable I would not be sitting doing this to my other phones now after doing that you can see that I've got some marks there they look like some screen protector indentations but the display is still perfectly functioning so I think that this is a win plus this is perfectly clear before this shatterproof screen kind of looked a little hazy and it wasn't perfectly clear and now this is so I am not bothered by this whatsoever sometimes from the side I can see a little bit of a rainbow effect but if this means that I don't ever have to worry about my display cracking and all I have to do is replace the top that's great they also say this has a redundant digitizer so if one fails the other touch layer will still work I don't know about you but I think this is pretty cool but since this is plastic yes it's going to scratch in everyday usage keeping it away from things like coins and knives I have a couple very light scratches here and there but nothing offensive it's obviously been hard coated with something if we want we can break out the knife once you do that obviously that's going to scratch it but coins and things sure after constant rubbing against it yes but I've been pretty impressed now checking out specs and performance both of these have the Snapdragon 820 so inside of these with 4 GB of RAM either 32 or 64 GB variations for internal storage with an SD card slot with official support up to 256 GB now both of these devices in my testing run quite warm it's about 107° at the hottest Point I've measured with these so talking about thermal throttling and sustained performance I have played with both of these extensively and benched mark them extensively I expected the Z's performance would throttle down more quickly because it is thinner and I often found that to be true but in overall testing they seem to perform quite similarly their performance both Throttle Down over time like other powerful phones just to keep them from getting too hot but in actual use like games I didn't find it to be extreme still looking side by side at their performance you can see that they Throttle Down over time here's Peak Performance and then they go downward but yeah the force is a thicker phone so expect it to do a bit better with heat dissipation still both are great performing phones and I haven't had much to complain about they rate at the top with other s820 devices and perform very well gameplay is very nice and smooth and they can handle whatever I throw at them they both just get very warm during gamep play or even during use during the day but the style cover does help cover up the back and make it more comfortable because of that heat so now looking into multitasking with both of these devices they've got 4 GB of RAM and in my testing I was able to load 17 applications in Ram and none of them shut down so it is an app switching champ both of these are also very fast at opening applications I found them to be faster than others even word on the street is that they have ufs 2.0 storage so no worries here you guys these are great performers now because these are both very close to vanilla Android with just a little bit of skinning they're very very quick the interface is Snappy and just feels very fast like it flies I don't feel stuttering or skipping or lagging that's what I've always really liked about lenovo's phones or Motorola in the past they leave the skin alone for the most part what they do add to 6.0.1 Android I find to be very useful so underneath display settings you see that we have a color mode so you can switch between vibrant and standard we will talk about how well these are calibrated so that's really nice to have this option I'm seeing more and more AMOLED phones come out with these options and then otherwise we've got the Moto app here so you've got Moto actions voice and display Moto display is probably the main integrated feature so anytime you move your hand over these sensors at the bottom it will give you the time and also any notifications that you have when there's a notification you can peek at it and you can go right into the notification from here or you can even dismiss it so it no longer shows up then with voice you can set launch phrases so that you can control your phone handsfree and then you've got actions so you've got approach which was the trigger for Moto Pho display you've got attentive display so while you're looking at it the display won't go off you can chop twice to turn the flashlight on do the same to turn it off flip for do not disturb so if you want to silence your phone just turn it upside down pick it up to make it stop ringing swipe to shrink the screen so you went up from the bottom so that's for one-handed use then touch here to make it go big again and then twist for quick capture and there you have the camera so not many modifications but the ones that are on on here are mostly app based and are very very useful so now let's move on to talking about the Moto mods which is the main part of this phone the whole purpose it seems is they really want people to use these modules and they've even given developers a $1 million incentive to create their own modules they've even said that these modules should work for future generations of the phone now I don't know if that's true we will just have to wait and see but this seems to be what the Zong L really is all about expanding functionality of the phone without having to change the phone in any way just simply adding it like a little pack sticks in place with a magnet very nice and secure so in general for all the mods I've played with in my kits they all connect securely and I'm not afraid that they're going to fall off maybe they will pop off if you drop them but I'm not willing to try that theory so you can see here I've got several things this is the projector we've got the JBL speaker and also a battery pack this one is not inductive charging there are ones that do have wireless charging so even though these mods fit nice and securely I am a little bit worried about some of the style shells you can see that there's a looks to be a little bit of a gap here where the materials are coming together so when I pop this on you can kind of easily get your thumbnail underneath it now depending on how your shell was put together in the Mater materials it may or may not be easy to remove like this so that's something just to look out for but still once it's in place it's not really going anywhere these are very nice and strong magnets you can see see it's pretty much staying there I'm not going to bounce it up and down but you get an idea that's on there pretty well and you can see that this isn't going to go anywhere because you've got a little nub it goes right in here and it stays put what I find so cool about the Moto mods is that they really are plug-and-play they're completely dummy proof there's no setup process at all unless you just have to accept some permissions but still that's like yes or no once you plug it in it makes a nice reassuring vibration and it already gives you options for settings right here nothing to install at all just so so for example battery mode it's already giving me some options of what to do with the battery right upon plugging it in and you can see I've got that reading there too so the way that they have done this is brilliant it just works I couldn't have asked for a better implementation so we're going to be talking about each and every one of these but the only device that these kind of makes sense with to me is the thin phone just the Moto Z because once you start adding them as I mentioned earlier onto this thicker phone it just becomes way too heavy and way tooo cumbersome they sure did decide to knock down the profile of this phone for the sake of adding mods to it so let's go ahead and start with the battery pack looking at the battery pack if I just touch right here it tells me that there is a charge this is a 2,220 mAh battery so you just plug it right here you can see that it fits perfectly with the profile of the phone it's like it's part of it and that's not going to come off in order to get this off you need to put your fingernails under here and lift upward so obviously with this Z phone I definitely recommend getting a battery pack of some kind whether it's one of these Moto mod ones or you go and invest in another battery pack my complaint about this battery pack is that it doesn't charge the phone very quickly and these are pretty expensive I believe this is 80 bucks yes it does really conform to the phone but is that worth it to you I don't know with this 2,220 mAh battery pack I did get to do some battery measurements to see what it was like and how long it lasted so my force was at 0% and I let this basically charg the phone up until the phone turned on so I got an hour and a half of heavy use with it and it also charge the phone up to 30% so this will help you in a bind I expect for the Moto Z for it to last an hour and a half to of heavy use but having more of a charge than 30% a cool option that you have with the battery pack are two different battery modes you've got default and efficiency mode so default mode is going to keep charging the battery it's going to try to keep getting it up to 100% but efficiency mode will only start charging the phone battery once the phone battery drops below 80% so that's going to essentially have this battery pack last a little bit longer in terms of charging this battery pack there is no port to plug this in the only way to charge it is to keep it backpacked onto the phone and in my testing I noticed that it doesn't charge very fast the phone will charge up much much quicker then the battery pack will so I hope that gives you a couple things to consider but if I've got the cash lying around or if there's a special deal on this I really would go for one of these so now let's look at the insta share projector this is a $300 little projector that you have here you've got a little kickstand so that it can sit and you're able to view at multiple angles but my beef immediately in is that there are other pico projectors out there for the same price or maybe even just for a little bit more that are more powerful than this is plus this is only going to work with just one device it's only going to work with the Moto Z and whatever other phones that Lenovo or Motorola decides to have this work for so I think it makes sense just to get a designated little Pico projector instead of a backpack also I'm sure a lot of people would prefer to have their phone be used as a controller for the p projector instead of having it like this where if you are having a presentation going on you kind of have to knock it about to change the slides so just looking at what the specs are of this it's got a 1,100 mAh battery to charge it it's got a fan to help keep it cool at worst you can hear it when it's quiet but otherwise when you have audio going you can't hear the fan you've got a slider here to bring it to focus this turns on the projector so to turn on the projector press and hold and then you can press down again and it gives you a couple of projector settings so you see you have the option for your Keystone so the trapezoidal Distortion when it's at an angle you can fix to your heart's content yourself or you can do it automatically I tend to just keep it on auto unless it's at a very strange angle then you can control the brightness as well so this is a 50 Lin projector not very bright you can put out an image up to 70 in 480p so it's it's not very high resolution only a 400 to1 contrast ratio so the contrast looks very low colors look washed out so for sure this works for presentations when in a dim room or in a room that doesn't have a lot of ambient lighting it looks okay and notice you're really not going to be watching shows on this this is not going to be your allaround projector trust me and I don't think that's what they meant it for anyway nice little projector but really I would not pay the $300 for it I just couldn't justify it unless you are really a road warrior needing to have instant projection on the go and didn't want to have any other accessories or tripods or anything with you so the last Moto mod that I have here is the JBL sound boost speaker and honestly if you get any of the mods this is the one that I actually recommend so taking a look at it you can see that there is a kickstand here so you can prop your phone up and listen to music on the back is a charging port USBC and it has its own 1,000 Mah hour battery pack inside of it so it's not going to use the phone's battery the battery will run down on this and then it can use the phone's battery so you don't have to worry about this draining your phone there's also a battery indicator on here press that lets you know if there's a charge it's so simple to set up you don't have to do any pairing process nothing it just becomes part of the phone yes it does add quite a bit of bulk but what you get with this is totally worth it so it's nice nice stereo sound you've got two drivers here this gets to be 80 DB that's pretty loud and I don't hear any Distortion either and I'm surpris there's actually some nice base to these it's just a huge improvement over the itty bitty little speaker that's on this right here so I'm sure that you could purchase a Bluetooth speaker that's cheaper and sounds even better I'm not going to argue with you on that one but in my experience with Bluetooth speakers and Android phones for whatever reason I always run into trouble with sound latency so I see that if I'm playing a game that the sound does not keep up with the animations and that gets insanely annoying it seems to be app specific and luckily with this phone my Bluetooth speaker YouTube and also Netflix don't have this problem but this is a very wide problem in Android so instead of dealing with sound latency you're having that possibility I always have nice sound here I don't ever have to worry about that so it adds bulk but it's really worth it you guys also as an added bonus this can function as a speaker phone so that's definitely nice and also you're probably going to notice how much this extends outward but luckily this does not interfere with the camera you're not going to see the sides at all so don't worry about that of course they paid attention to that no problem so now let's move on to taking a look at battery life of both of these devices so we've got a 2,600 mamp battery inside of the Z and 3,500 mAh battery inside of the zforce needless to say that's quite a bit different so if you are going to be a heavy user you're going to need to charge the Z sometime during the day that's just something you're going to need to expect it would be good to get yourself a battery pack of some kind but if you're not having a particularly heavy day you can make it through actually I was quite surprised I'm able to get up to 5 hours of on screen time on this wasn't expecting that between 3 and 5 hours if it's the absolute worst I Saw 2 hours or this one is going to last you into next year not really but it's going to last you at least a day or more I actually did a benchmark so that we could see the difference between both of these I basically set the brightness the same at about 200 nits so here we have PC Mark pulled up and I just ran this test until the battery died again same brightness about 200 knits so 6 hours and 14 minutes versus 10 hours and 8 minutes that is quite a difference that's a 4-Hour difference so this guy is the Energizer Bunny in comparison to this one no trouble you're going to have whatsoever with battery life on the zforce they both have quick charging as well Quick Charge 2.0 so even though this one is quite small it does take some of the edge off and remember this is supposed to be a modular phone so they're trying to keep it thin so that you don't have such a thick Beast so now how about the displays on these devices well we got a 5.5 in AMOLED display this is Quad HD over 530 pixels per inch that's pretty standard for more Flagship phones right now we're seeing a lot more AMOLED displays a lot of Quad HD displays and of course who do you think the manufacturer is it's Samsung so you've got that diamond Matrix pen tile but still this is a very nice sharp display very colorful display thankfully this comes with a different mode other than just the standard mode underneath display you can see that you've got the standard mode and the vibrant mode honestly with the vibrant mode I feel like stabbing my eyes out with a fork where the standard mode is actually pretty close to the srgb standard so I decide to keep it on the standard mode but if you like garish crazy Way Beyond oversaturated colors go for it more power to you so in terms of brightness when we are not using the automatic brightness mode it gets to be about 400 nits it's a little bit lower on the zforce but the peak brightness on both of them is over 500 knits and that's if you're using that automatic brightness mode so you should be able to see it in direct sunlight just remember to go in and use the Adaptive brightness mode because otherwise it's really hard to see that display the real pity between both of these devices is that I really wish that they would get darker in bed at night I don't want to disturb my husband if I don't feel like sleeping and this still is at a brightness that would disturb him it's about 15 nits where something like the Galaxy Note 7 gets down to less than two nits about 1.88 nits even my OnePlus 3 can get about as dark as my Galaxy Note 7 so I don't know what gives here so I did some measurements of both of these displays to see how well they are calibrated I only bothered with the standard mode because it conforms at least to some type of calibration standard the srgb calibration standard where the vibrant mode is just crazy garish for people who like very oversaturated colors so no point in measuring I can see that with my very own eyes but as far as how well it's calibrated to srgb I can see that they really were trying to Target srgb I think that the saturations aren't too far off I don't think the gamut is too far off either I also can see that they're trying to Target gamma 2.2 which is nice because it doesn't make the display look over contrasty or washed out it's just about right although I do see some weird variations going on there I suspect it'll be different between so many different panels also looks like their color temperature isn't too far bluish either it's 7,000 Kelvin it should be targeting 6,500 Kelvin but 7,000 is not overly bluish my one complaint really would be that their balance of red green and blue throughout the gray scale is really pretty bad there's just not enough red in there there's way too much green in there so you end up kind of with a greenish bluish looking white point so whites look kind of bluish greenish and unfortunately all colors end up with kind of a bit of a bluish greenish color c as well because of all that and honestly just changing it to the vibrant mode makes it worse so the standard mode is the only one that I can stand it's the first thing I noticed when picking up these displays something looked really bluish greenish to Me overall not horrifically calibrated but that's the one thing that keeps it from being a display that I really really like but still overall not too bad so now let's move on to talking about speaker audio telephony so here we have the speaker here this is the only speaker there is no speaker on the bottom so both your receiver and your speaker as far as quality I think that it gets loud enough for both speaker phone and for voice calls for media it mostly gets loud enough it's not the best sounding speaker it sounds a little bit thin but this is where it's really nice to pop on the JBL sound boost speaker on the back I also find it annoying that for ring tones it starts out very quiet and ascends upward I wish I could disable that but it's not a deal breaker it's just something I noticed I've noticed that with other types of audio too it'll be really quiet and then you hear it Ascend really loudly it's probably a software thing where it's switching from being the receiver to the speaker so how about the elephant in the room here there is no audio jack so of course you've got to use an adapter and they're nice enough to include an adapter in the box but the concern here is even with this adapter is that I know so many people who like to charge their phone at night before going to bed while listening to audio maybe they're charging their phone and they're watching a movie or something while not wanting to disturb their loved one beside them you can't do that anymore you've got one or the other so that's going to be a sore point for a lot of people but in terms of the audio quality I've been hearing pretty decent things I am not an audio file you guys but from all my research that I've done so far with what other bloggers and people are saying is that the audio sounds pretty good it's got a nice flat frequency response to it it gets pretty loud as well so nice loud clear audio I'm really not sure what the DAC amp pairing is on this I wouldn't be surprised if it's just the Snapdragon one if anybody knows please leave a comment in the comment section below but without having that headphone jack there it makes me wonder what types of audio components that they can fit here now maybe you can have a nice dedicated DAC and amp as for phone calls this works just fine as a phone as I mentioned speaker phone gets decently loud enough it's just fine seems to be nice and clear hearing people nice and clear no issues there Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS I haven't had any issues with any of them now both of these are Verizon phones they are unlocked so you can put SIM cards in from GSM networks although I just wouldn't recommend it I would seriously get the unlocked Moto Z if this is what you're going to really want the zforce is going to be a Verizon exclusive if you want to use it on other carriers I can show you what bands are supported and my experience so you can see it says 4G LTE you've got band to 3 4 5 7 and 13 so there is no band 12 for you T-Mobile people I was able to pop in my sim and get LTE on both AT&T and T-Mobile but wasn't really able to stay on LTE very well that could be due to my area as for the T-Mobile one could be due to not having ban 12 so just keep this in mind if you must have the force the last thing that I want to talk about in this review are the cameras so we have a 13 megapixel camera that's on the Z and we've got a 21 megap camera on the Z Force I have to say right away I really wish that the 21 megapixel camera was on the Z because it seems to best the Z's camera in every way so we'll talk about that but moving on with specs you can see that we've got a dual tone LED flash on both of these this helps with white balance we've got Optical image stabilization on both of them and laser assisted autofocus on the front we've got a 5 megapixel camera and a flash so if you're somebody who wants to take selfies in less than favorable lighting you've got that taking a look at the interface the interface is much better than it has been and that is because we now have a manual mode so if you touch here you can see you've got several modes this one right here is your manual mode so I can push this down here and it's going to open up all the settings or you can control them individually so you've got your focus control you've got your white balance control you've got your shutter speed it only goes up to half a second so don't be expecting to keep the shutter open for a really long time on this phone you've got your control for the iso and also exposure compensation so that is a setting that's really nice to have something we have not had before if you pull from the left you can see you've got some general settings shutter sound you can choose where you want to store photos quick capture which was that cool little twisty action that just makes it so handy to activate to take pictures I wish every phone had that photo size for the Z is 13 megapixel Max so 43 is the native aspect of the sensor and anything else is going to be a crop it's the same thing for the force as well except for its 43 at 21 megapixels video has several options I'm happy to see that not only do we have full HD at 30 frames per second but 1080p at 60 frames per second and of course you've got Ultra HD 4K otherwise you can change to the front-facing camera this lets you switch between several modes your automatic mode your slow motion mode panorama video and of course just automatic mode timer flash HDR setting it's touch to focus and then you can control the exposure compensation so nice little camera I do want to say though that in some situations both of these cameras can be pretty slow to take pictures it's usually in less than favorable lighting it takes a long time to take an HDR photo and it takes a pretty long time during the low light setting also notice that both of these have a tendency to take several photos in a row I think it's for the best shot feature it will try to pick the best shot in a string of photos and I can't find a way to disable that so that can get pretty annoying and who knows that might be a reason for why it can take so long sometimes to take a picture but in nice lighting it's quick to take a picture without any shutter lag it's decently quick to focus it's just still not my favorite but let's take a look at some picture quality a very subtle difference that I first noticed between the Z and the zforce is that the zforce takes a little bit brighter pictures I always see that the shutter is open a little bit longer what's more pronounced though is just how much more detail the zforce has in pictures over the Z even without pixel peeping the Z's images look so much more mushy and not as sharp as the Z4 is so if you're going to want to do any kind of photo editing or cropping the zforce is going to be the way to go in terms of color rendering between the two I really can't see meaningful differences between the way that the colors look they both look pretty Onkey I think the colors look nice the colors look pretty accurate not too oversaturated which I appreciate when looking at pictures compared to the Galaxy S7 for example the S7 just overs saturates things pretty crazily which becomes very obvious against a monotone background where the Z and the Z Force do a good job to keep the scene looking nice and natural during some HDR scenes though it can end up pushing that saturation so it ends up being overall a mixed bag of tricks but still with HDR mode I find that it does a good job to bring back details and shadows as for scenarios in lower lighting I find that the Z performs a little bit worse than the zforce I find that the zforce is a little bit brighter with a little bit less noise but then there comes a situation of extremely low lighting I find that they perform pretty much about the same except for maybe the zforce has a hair more light so as point and shoots go they're pretty good cameras I like the color rendering on both of them low light isn't horrific finally but I'm really not happy how the zforce just has so much more detail so now we are wrapping this up thank you guys so much for watching this has been Erica the technology nerd likes to film stuff please rate comment and subscribe so in terms of modularity these are the best modular phones on the market hands down I think the modularity is more worth it for the smaller thinner Z phone just because of how thick and cumbersome it can be aside from being modular though both of these are nice powerful quick phones I really like that the interfaces don't have much to them it hasn't been fooled with and honestly I'm starting to like this more and more because it's not all laggy apps open nice and quickly it is a fantastic performer in the app switching and multitasking Department you do have a nice quick accurate fingerprint sensor on here which I'm really hoping they are able to turn into a home button somehow you've got nice displays on these really nice high resolution both of these have pretty decent cameras they're not the absolute best on the market but they're really going to get the job done they've got Qualcomm 2.0 quick charging so they're up to Snuff with other Snapdragon 820 devices out there on the market so the offer a lot more than just simply being a modular phone but they do add that aspect as well they're also looking pretty stylish as long as you add a style cover to it in all honesty though the one that I'm most interested in interestingly after playing with these is the zforce and aside from having one of these Styles shell covers I probably wouldn't get any of the mods at all unless it was the speaker this one's just such a more proficient phone in every way better camera you've got better performance because this one throttles down a little bit more quickly it's got such a bigger battery and unless you want to carry around a brick or buy one of these for 50 to 80 bucks well this also has a shatterproof display and that could be annoying to some but all you have to do is simply remove this outer part here buy a new $30 lens that they're going to sell and bada bing bada boom you're got a nice protected phone I'm not minding this shatterproof screen at all so for me this would be the way to go you guys I'm just angry that it's only available on Verizon so that kind of has turned me off quite a bit but oh well what can you do and if I'm betting on it they will probably end up having an unlocked version somewhere at some time don't quote me on that but it's just an assumption I don't see why they wouldn't or at least make some version of it that will be available unlocked so again this has been Erica the technology nerd like to film stuff I hope you enjoyed this review and I hope I have answered your questions let me know what you think of these phones which one would you get and goodbye\n"