Motorola is on the verge of releasing a number of smartphones this year. A handful of them — the Moto E5, E5 Plus, G6 and G6 Play — have already been announced and should make their way to retailers and carriers over the coming weeks. But the company is saving its more ambitious plans for the end of 2018, according to a juicy new leak that reveals the upcoming Moto Z3 Play from every angle.
The images come to us by way of VentureBeat's Evan Blass, and align perfectly with renders obtained by Android Headlines back in April. That would seem to indicate what we're looking at here is a pretty safe bet, which is a fortunate thing because the Z3 Play looks absolutely fantastic in this color.
Blass says it's called Deep Indigo, and it's a dark teal that doesn't look terribly different from the Ocean Depths limited edition of the Essential Phone that released earlier in the year. Sony's Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact also come in some elegant shades of green, so perhaps phone makers are collectively setting a new trend here.
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The Z3 Play's frame looks to be made of aluminum, but has received the same coat as the glass back. Of course, this being a Moto Z device, there's a strong possibility you'll never actually notice the color of the back because you'll probably have a Moto Mod attached, but it's the thought that counts.
Aside from probably being available in green, the exterior of the Moto Z3 Play will reportedly carry a large 18:9 display and narrow bezels, dual cameras on the rear with a pretty sizable hump, and most interestingly of all, a side-mounted fingerprint sensor/power button. The Moto Z2 Force and Z2 Play stashed their fingerprint sensors in the bottom bezel, but with the taller display on the Z3 Play, it had to go somewhere else. It couldn't go to the back because Motorola doesn't want to break compatibility with Moto Mods, so the company evidently decided it should sit on the right edge.
The Z3 Play would be far from the first phone to put its scanner on the side, as Sony's phones infamously did right up until this year. However, Sony was also forced to disable the side-mounted fingerprint sensor on its handsets in the U.S. ostensibly due to patent conflicts. Based on this leak, it would appear that Motorola was able to dodge such issues. With summer right around the corner, and Motorola having launched the Z2 Play last June, we should find out for certain very soon.
