Moto Z unboxing and first look review: With Lenovo’s intriguing new flagship smartphone touching down in Europe, we thought we’d unbox a UK version of the Moto Z to see what’s inside.
Motorola and Lenovo have been keeping their packaging designs clean a tidy for generations now, but the Moto Z’s packaging go so far as to drop an image of the product, instead offering up just a shot of colour, the Motorola logo and a few other choice pieces of information, with highlights pointing to the Moto Mods – the company’s modular accessory range for all of the Z-family handsets.
Read next: Moto Mods hands-on review (featuring Hasselblad True Zoom mod)
Pulling the top off you’re presented with the phone itself, laden with a temporary screen protector adorned with some of the highlights of the phone’s hardware including its front-facing fingerprint sensor and TurboPower fast charging technology.
The phone itself is impeccably thin; a 5.19mm thick wafer of metal with the distinctive Moto Mods connector on the back, a slightly raised camera module housing a 13-megapixel camera aided by a laser autofocus array and textured hardware controls along one side. It’s a sizeable handset too as a result of what turns out to be a beautifully colourful and crisp 5.5-inch Quad HD AMOLED display but it’s easy enough to hold thanks to that narrow profile.
Underneath the phone is a removable card shelf, which hides a card container in which you’ll find the standard bumf of warranty and quick-start information.
What lies beyond that, though, is the biggest surprise of the unboxing experience, a translucent bumper and an official Moto Style Shell. The latter is one of the simplest forms of Moto Mod, letting you quickly customise the look of your Moto Z and add a little protection, whilst also eliminating the aforementioned camera bump. Once it’s magnetically attached to the phone’s back, the bumper simply snaps on from the front, helping protect the edges of the phone’s precision metal frame.
Before the iPhone 7 was sending Apple fans into a tizzy over its loss of a headphone jack, the Moto Z was causing the same stir Stateside surrounding its move to Type-c USB and only Type-C USB. That sylphlike profile comes at the cost of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, but to side-step the issue, every Moto Z also comes with a Type-C USB to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter, which features an additional loop so that it and your traditional headphones aren’t ever separated.
Interestingly, Lenovo opted for a hard-wired Type-C USB-based power adapter in place of a separate power brick and cable, perhaps to ensure the reliability of the aforementioned TurboPower fast-charging functionality. The Moto Z’s SIM tray removable tool also can be found individually packaged in the bottom of the box. It’s notably thinner than most other SIM tray tools, so don’t lose it, as a paper clip or a toothpick won’t make suitable substitutes in this instance.
The Moto Z has a lot of promise with its mix of beautiful design and powerful hardware, which we can’t wait to put to the test. Stay tuned for a full review soon.
Read next: Moto Z hands-on review: The 2016 flagship comes to Europe
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