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3 days with the Moto X Play: I love it, but…

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Just a few days ago, Motorola sent me its latest smartphone, the Moto X Play. It’s a sort-of halfway house between its super-affordable but awesome Moto G and the more premium unreleased Moto X Style/Pure. Although it’s not available in the US yet, it is available to buy in the UK and Canada, and evidence suggests it’ll be rebranded as a Verizon DROID of some kind. It costs under £300 in Britain, putting it in the same price range as devices like the OnePlus 2 and the 4GB Zenfone 2. In fact, it’s slightly more expensive than either of those.

I’ve been using the device as my daily driver since I unboxed it, and for the most part, but almost every part of my experience could be described as ‘I love it, but…”  Each part of the phone almost has something not quite right. It’s not perfect, but I still think it’s great overall.


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Ex-Apple John Sculley unveils Obi Worldphones, two attractive and affordable Android devices

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Obi Worldphones — a company co-founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley — has unveiled its first two affordable and aesthetically striking smartphones. Both phones are named after California cities: SF1 named after San Francisco and SJ1.5 named after San Jose and feature similar designs, although there are clear differences in specifications and performance.


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Moto X Play unboxing and first impressions [Video]

Motorola announced a handful of new devices at an event just last month. The now Lenovo-owned company unveiled the new Moto G and two versions of the Moto X: Play and Style (or Pure). The Moto X Play is Motorola’s attempt at bringing a competitively-priced phone to the market with near-flagship specifications. For just under £280 in the UK you get a device with a full HD (1080 x 1920) 5.5-inch display, an octa-core processor and a gigantic 3,630mAh battery. It’s water-repellent, has a 21MP camera and — best of all — runs an almost vanilla version of Android 5.1.1 Lollipop.


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Moto X Play available in Canadian retail stores this Friday, August 21 (Update: $420 CAD)

Update: Canadian mobile operator TELUS has just posted its pricing for the Moto X Play, and it will be $50 CAD on a 2-year plan or $420 CAD unlocked.

Are you a Canadian eagerly awaiting the day when you can finally get Motorola’s new Android-powered Moto X Play in your hands? Well, this weekend is going to be great for you, as Motorola Canada has just announced that will be available in retail stores starting this Friday.

[tweet https://twitter.com/Motorola_CA/status/633735528110649348 align=’center]

Earlier today we saw Motorola begin to accept orders for the Moto X Play online through its Moto Maker personalization tool for approximately $400 USD. Orders through that system have been displaying an estimated delivery date of the 26th and 27th for some of the 55 countries (Europe, Latin America, and Canada) that the new phone is being sold in. Motorola Canada’s website has yet to be updated with pricing information, and the company has traditionally only sold its phones through carriers in Canada — not unlocked. There’s no word on when the Moto X Play will make it to retailers in the other 54 countries.

The Moto X Play is quite similar to the Moto X Style, also unveiled at the same time, but compromises on internal specifications in favor of a water-repellent design and quoted 48 hours of battery life. Where the Moto X Style is more beastly than the X Play is in its display, processor clock-speed, and total RAM — the X Style has a 5.7-inch Quad HD display, a 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 808, and 3GB of RAM, whereas the X Play has a 5.5-inch Full HD display, a 1.7GHz Snapdragon 615, and 2GB of RAM. You still get the same 21 megapixel camera, 5-megapixel front-facing camera, and the battery capacity is 3630 mAh versus 3000 on the X Style.

As with all Motorola smartphones these days, expect a very light Android experience (Lollipop until Android Marshmallow comes out) with almost no Motorola-preinstalled software save for well-regarded features like Moto Assist. That is, after all, one of the main selling points of Motorola phones today aside from their reasonable prices off-contract.

Motorola Canada’s The United States was left out of this phone’s release, but Motorola says that it will be bringing more new offerings stateside sometime in the near future.

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There’s a new title-holder in the world’s slimmest smartphone race – and it’s just 4.75mm thick

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Just when you wondered how much slimmer smartphones could get, Chinese brand Vivo has set a new record with the X5Max at just 4.75mm thick, beating the 5mm thin iPhone 6 clone Gionee Slim 5.5. Astonishingly, it has achieved this while still managing – just – to fit in a standard 3.5mm headphone socket. It does, though, the now-standard cheat of allowing the camera to protrude by 2mm.

headphoneIt’s also no slouch in the specs department, with a 64-bit octacore Snapdragon 615 processor, 5.5-inch 1080p display, 13MP main camera, 5MP front camera, 2GB RAM and 16GB internal storage – with a clever dual-SIM tray that allows you to substitute a microSD card of up to 128GB for one of the SIMs … 
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Regulatory filing shows Samsung A7 will be Samsung’s slimmest ever Galaxy phone

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The Samsung Galaxy A7, which made its way through the FCC last week, has been revealed by a Chinese regulatory filing to be Samsung’s thinnest ever Galaxy smartphone, at just 6.3mm thick. To put that into perspective, the company’s flagship Galaxy S5 is 8.1mm thick … 
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