Moto Z

Last summer Motorola introduced its new premium Moto Z smartphone family. More than a simple redesign with the latest components stuffed inside, the Moto Zs added a modular component. Motorola’s optional Moto Mods snapped onto the phones’ flat backs with powerful magnets, making it easy to swap from a large speaker to a pico-projector to a battery pack all without requiring a reboot or any software fiddling. Among the small group of modular phones, Motorola’s solution is clearly the best, but it still comes with some compromises. The phones can feel bulky and heavy with Moto Mods attached, for example. Motorola tried to address this with the Moto Z (the middle child of the family) by making it as thin as possible (only 5.19mm...