 Hey, it's Ashley Carman here with The Verge, and today we are checking out the Moto Z3 Play, Motorola's newest phone in their Z lineup. You can immediately tell they've made some obvious hardware changes to make the phone look a little more expensive, even though it's still keeping that mid-range cost. And so far, I'm having a lot of fun playing with it. You'll immediately notice some obvious hardware changes. Dual rear-facing cameras, the missing home button, a side fingerprint sensor, and a taller display. Motorola clearly designed the device to look like a higher-end phone, particularly with those minimized bezels, aluminum body, and glass back. But there's no notch. Sorry to all you notch lovers out there. The new phone looks nice, although the glass back gathers lots of fingerprints and doesn't serve a real purpose like allowing for wireless charging. You'll need a Moto Mod if you want to do that. Speaking of which, the Z3 Play still supports Moto Mods and is backwards compatible with any you might have purchased for prior models. As for these hardware updates, the display is a 6-inch Full HD Plus Super AMOLED with the new 18 by 9 aspect ratio. In my brief handling of the phone, the display quality wasn't great. It wasn't very bright when I took it outside, and I didn't feel it could accurately represent colors, especially skin tones. It also wasn't extremely clear and didn't wow me immediately. The side fingerprint sensor seems to work well enough, although Sony was really the only other company using side sensors, and even they recently gave up on it. But Monorella didn't really have a choice here, because a rear fingerprint sensor would be covered by mods, which the company definitely wants you to buy. So if it wants a fingerprint sensor, it has to go with the side placement. Inside, the phone features a Snapdragon 636 processor with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of expandable storage. The phone charges over USB-C and supports fast charging. The battery is 3000 mAh, which is the same as last year's model, but smaller than the original Z Play. This should still be enough to get you through the day, though. Of course, you can also always buy a battery mod if you want more juice, and if you purchase the unlocked Z3 Play in the US, it will be bundled with a battery mod that will give you up to 40 hours of use. The cameras underwent the biggest changes. The dual cameras on the back include a 12 megapixel sensor and a 5 megapixel depth-sensing lens that's mostly used for portrait mode. The front-facing camera has an 8 megapixel sensor. There are a couple new software features, like portrait mode for the front-facing camera, but my favorite is the Cinemagraph mode. It lets you record a video of a scene and choose which parts of it keep moving and which stay still, like these balloons or this flag. It's super gimmicky, but I enjoyed playing with it. Would I continue to use this feature after a few days? Probably not. The phone also features Google Lens built right into the camera. The Z3 Play runs Android 8.1 and mostly sticks with Google's stock Android. But because there's no home button, you can gesture on the screen through Motorola's one-button navigation. It allows you to swipe left to go back, right for recent apps, or tap to go back home. If you press and hold, Google Assistant will launch. The phone will be shipped with this feature turned off and the standard navigation buttons on. Honestly, this didn't free up much screen space, and I kept getting confused about which gestures did what. It's personal preference, though, and some people will probably like this feature while others won't. Okay, so the phone will be out this summer exclusively through U.S. Cellular and Sprint in the U.S. or you can get it unlocked through various retailers, but if you do that, you're going to get a bundle. In the U.S. it will come bundled with a battery mod, and abroad you can either get a battery mod with the phone or a speaker mod. Those bundles will cost $499. We don't have pricing yet just on the phone by itself through the carriers, but hopefully we'll have that information soon. Thanks for watching, and as always, stay tuned to TheVerge.com and The Verge's YouTube channel for a full review of the Z3 Play and all our other tech coverage.