Over the past month I went on five business trips and attended three conferences. Battery life really matters when you are traveling or when you are at a conference where power plugs are rare. I decided to bring the new Moto Z Force Droid from Verizon along for my trips and found the phone could last days without a recharge – a remarkable accomplishment considering how much I use my phone.
The secret to the extreme battery life are the 16 gold pogo pins on the back of the phone. These points allow you to connect modular accessories onto the phone, turing it into a projector, a boombox, or the mega battery of your dreams. It reminds me of what Lenovo did with the ThinkPad Stack set of accessories, which makes sense considering that Lenovo is Moto’s parent company.
All you do is to snap the accessory you want onto the back of the phone. It has very strong magnets that hold it in place and the pogo pins allow the accessory to communicate with the phone. I used the Tumi battery shell during my trip which added a nice designer look in addition to the extreme battery life. On one of my three day trips, I was able to go without charging my phone the entire time when I used the Tumi battery pack.
The accessories are sold separately, but you can also use the phone without any of the additions. It comes with a basic shell or you can order others to easily give the phone a new look. The loaner device Verizon gave me had a wood grain back that gave the device a high end look.
When you use just the basic shell, the Moto Z Force Droid is very slim and easy to hold. The one tradeoff is that the Moto Z Force Droid does not have a headphone jack, but it comes with an adapter you can use to connect wired headphones. I mainly use bluetooth headphones or I connect the phone to my car for audio while driving, so I didn’t find this to be an issue.
The Moto Z Droid uses Motorola’s Shattershield design to keep you from cracking your screen, which found handy when I dropped the phone during one of my trips. It is also nano-coated to resist splashes. Despite the thin design, the Moto Z Droid is rugged enough to handle life’s accidents.
My favorite feature of this phone was the 21-megapixel rear camera which took great photos that were just as good as my DSLR. The images looked crisp on the device’s 5.5-inch AMOLED display which had a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. It feels like an understatement to say the phone has vibrant color when it boasts such an impressive display.
Verizon offers the Moto Z Force Droid for $30/month or $720 retail price. I have been a Verizon subscriber for years and am a fan of their reliable, nationwide service. It was fun to test this flagship phone during my trips around the country. The phone and the network never let me down.
