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Phones

Motorola Moto Z

6owners with an opinion
50%of verdicts positive
1/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for ergonomics and design; criticized for reliability and battery.

What people wrote

Likes it
Motorola's history is so unfortunate. They were a great brand, cool phones, one of early Android players. After being bought out by Google, Motorola had some of the best devices out there with stock android, especially in the budget segment (and loved among android devs).They had one of the best smartwatches in the game at the time - Moto 360 (2014!!). Then, after dropping the Nexus 6, Google stripped the patents and sold them to Lenovo. For a while it was ok, even dropping the relatively innovative Moto Z which had all the cool "modular" addons, played with it for a bit and seemed cool. And then, things seemed to start taking a turn for the worse as Lenovo kept enshitiffying it more and more, using the brand name as a wedge in the market in which they are basically forgotten. They have the Razr brand which is cool, but the segment that was their best (budget phones) is now ruined with adware so they can extract every bit of value from it. Such a sad ending for a company that was so early in the space.
Doesn’t like it
Yeah, Motorola (which are now a brand of Lenovo after Google bought and sold them a while ago) are good value for money. I owned the Motorola Milestone (Motorola Droid in the US), then the Moto X (smaller version of the Nexus 6), and finally the ultra-thin Moto Z - however I was a bit disappointed with that one because the battery management was totally screwed up after a few years - it used to shut down spontaneously while reporting 60% battery and I wasn't able to reset it.
Doesn’t like it
> where the internal battery has begun to fail Assuming the default failure mode of the battery is degraded capacity. Over the years I've had an alarming number of lithium-polymer batteries puff out in consumer devices ranging from my Dell XPS 13 (9343 model, battery was replaced three times) to the Moto Z Play phone (dislocated the screen, replaced twice by Asurion, third time they claimed it was a warranty issue and played support tennis with Verizon) to an iPod Touch (also popped the screen out).
Likes it
My last two phones are a Moto Z Play (5.5in) and a Pixel 4a (5.8in). While the Pixel 4a screen was larger, I found the larger Moto Z phone immensely more comfortable to use. The chins meant you could more comfortably reach the inside corners, and the different aspect ratio meant the phone could be used in landscape mode without the keyboard occluding the entire screen. The Pixel 4a, despite its ostensibly larger screen, actually felt like a step down because the keyboard usability is heavily dependent on how square the screen is. Imho the move to higher than 16:9 aspect ratios has really made it harder to talk about screen size.
Likes it
The lack of fingerprint sensor on latest iPhones is very disappointing. My trusty MotoZ4 has it directly in the screen and I love it so much that I refuse to buy myself any other phone that doesn't have fingerprint sensor on the front panel or built in the screen.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
5.6 mm? Pah! The Moto Z beat them by .4 mm almost 10 years ago: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/05/the-moto-z-was-so-a... And, more importantly, the Moto Z had a reason for being so thin: the ability to add "mods" that attached to the back of the phone magnetically. What I don't like about iPhones in terms of practicality is that the corner camera makes it impossible to lay them on a table without wobbling. Google does a better job with its Pixel phones.