Moto X Play first look: The smartphone comes with good feature set at a competitive price

Motorola has launched the third generation **Moto X Play** at an event in New Delhi on 14 September. Unlike the previous generation, this time around there will be two flavours of the Moto X, the other being Moto X Style which sports a 5.7 inch Quad-HD display. Moto X Play has been launched at Rs 18,499 for the 16GB variant and Rs 19,999 for the 32GB variant. The phones will start selling on Flipkart from 12am tonight, along with a raft of introductory offers. We spent some time with the Moto X Play and here are our first impressions. Build Quality and design The Moto X Play is beautiful to look at, although you will notice design changes as compared to the Moto X second generation. For instance, the camera section is placed on a rectangular strip of plastic with a minimal dimple, as opposed to the prominent Motorola dimple on second gen Moto X. Also the top portion has the dual SIM card and microSD card slot.  The phone is easy to hold thanks to thin bezel in the sides, but one handed use is not comfortable thanks to the 5.5inch display. The rear textured cover feels nice in the hand and gives a good grip. The left hand side of the Moto X Play is clean, whereas the right hand side has the power/ standby and volume rocker buttons. While the buttons have a good feedback, Moto could have done with a better build on them. The rear cover is removable, but the battery is concealed. Just like the Moto G 3rd gen, the Moto X Play also comes with the water resistant chops. Display The Moto X Play comes with a 5.5-inch full HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. The display looks crisp and we did not notice any backlight bleeding. Thanks to the thin bezels the Moto X Play has a respectable body to screen ratio. The phone did not have any video samples to check out so we cant comment on that, but text and app icons look sharp.  Chipset, storage, RAM The Moto X Play comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC with an octa core processor with one quad core cluster clocked at 1.7GHz and the other quad core cluster clocked at 1GHz, along with Adreno 405 GPU. This is paired with 2GB RAM. While preliminary use, the phone seemed to run smooth. There were no noticeable lags in animations, switching applications and so on. We will be putting the phone through its paces when we review it. The phone comes in two storage variants, 16GB and 32GB. Both variants give you the option to expand the storage using a microSD card slot to upto 128GB.  OS, Connectivity As we have seen with previous Moto devices launched this year the Moto X Play also comes with the latest Android 5.1 OS with barely any custom skin. Motorola does have its special app called Moto Assist which lets you interact with the phone via voice commands, set profiles according to locations, along with gesture support such as quick twist of the wrist to launch camera, Moto chop feature to launch the flashlight and so on. On the connectivity front you have a dual 4G nano SIM card configuration, Wifi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS with A-GPS.  Camera and battery Saving the two best features of the Moto X Play for the last. The phone comes with a 21MP rear camera and a 5MP front facing camera. The camera user interface is not very different from Moto G, ~but the camera comes with phase detect AF helping you quickly acquire focus~. We couldn’t test AF in the dimly lit demo zone. The rear camera has an f/2.0 aperture and can shoot up to full HD videos. Generally when shooting at 16:9 aspect ratio (full screen shooting mode) the resolution of the camera is cut by a certain amount, but with the Moto X Play you still get 16MP image size. We will have to test the camera to see if this camera delivers good image quality with the higher resolution as well. Battery is the other most important feature. The Moto X sports a non removable 3630mAh battery. That’s a high capacity and Motorola claims a 2 day battery life with this phone. We will have to test that claim and also the one where Motorola states that you can extract 8 hours worth of talk time with just 15 minutes of Turbo charging.  Conclusion Motorola has certainly packed in a lot on the Moto X Play and is offering it at a highly competitive Rs 18,499 price tag. The 21MP camera and 3630mAh capacity battery give the Play an edge over competing devices. A stock Android experience and the ability to expand storage will also win the phone extra brownie points. But will the phone deliver as an everyday workhorse? We will only be able to conclusively tell that once we properly review the Moto X Play. But first impressions certainly look good.