The Moto G4 Play just wants to have some fun. It isn't necessarily the most skilled at any one thing, but it's hard to look away from a deal this good.
Sitting at the bottom of the G4 totem pole in terms of specs, the G4 Play is generally lacking in marquee features compared to the Moto G4 and Moto G4 Plus.
But does that make it a bad phone? Nope, just one that's definitely not for everyone. Still, going for as low as $99 price point, everyone can afford this unlocked smartphone. At that, it sits at the top of the G-series in terms of value.
Moto G4 Play price and release date
Months after the Moto G4 and Moto G4 Plus hit shelves across the globe, it's now time for the G4 Play.
This budget smartphone will be available online at Best Buy, B&H, and on Motorola's own site for $149 (£129, AU$249). It can also be purchased through Amazon for the same price, or a discounted rate of $99 in the US, which will come pre-loaded with ads on the lockscreen.
Verizon will be offering the Moto G4 Play on a prepaid plan, but regardless of where you buy it, it will work with all major US carriers.
Design and display
Although this phone is targeted towards those on a budget, you wouldn't guess it just by looks alone. The Moto G4 Play looks a lot like the Moto G4, even down to the ruggedized plastic back and rounded edges. But it also takes design cues from high-end phones in the Moto family.
A few examples are the silver trimmed speaker, the deep grey trim and textured power button that are found on higher-end models like the Moto Z. Obviously, cheaper build materials are used here, but the effect is in full-force.
In terms of features, you'll find your usual suspects on the G4 Play, like a 3.5mm headphone jack, front and rear-facing cameras, and a microUSB port for charging. What you won't find are some slightly more big-ticket inclusions, like Gorilla Glass, a fingerprint reader, or a charge input with any sort of quick-charging technology built-in.
The 720p display has a pixel density of 294ppi (pixels per inch). While that's by no means impressive compared to many QHD (2,560 x 1,440) Android smartphones, it totally does the job for this smaller, much more affordable device.
Specs and performance
By the look of the Moto G4 Play, it strives to provide the essentials and not much more. And its specs tell a similar story.
Stocked with a Snapdragon 410 quad-core processor and the Adreno 306, it's the same system on a chip (SoC) that can be found in modern Android Wear smartwatches. The Moto G4 Play also comes with 2GB RAM and 16GB of onboard storage, with the option for expansion available thanks to the microSD slot.
Using the Moto G4 Play feels relatively snappy for a device at this price point, which is partially a testament to Moto's only slight modification to the stock Android experience. There are a few touches inserted into the mix, but most of them are good, like the Moto Display function, which shows you pertinent notifications when your hand hovers over the phone.
It should be mentioned that the G4 Play isn't a gaming powerhouse. One of our favorites games as of late, Giant Boulder of Death, runs smoothly, but the game more or less relies on a gyroscope, a part that this phone doesn't have. Many smartphone games rely on tilt functionality, but you won't be able to enjoy them on this phone unless they support alternate control schemes.
This aside, Moto's G4 Play should provide a generally passable experience whether you're watching a movie or playing the occasional game.
Focusing on a few other features, the Moto G4 Play features a 2,800mAh removable battery, which rests under the plastic back. It shares the rear with an 8MP sensor that has an aperture of f/2.2. If you want to shoot video, this phone can record in 1080p at 30 frames per second (FPS). Over on the front, the selfie camera is 5MP and also has an aperture of f/2.2. Again, nothing too eye-opening here, but the essentials are on the table.
We look forward to digging into some deeper testing with the Moto G4 Play, including photo samples and battery impressions.
Early verdict
The Moto G4 Play, like the other G-series phones, operates with a value-first mindset. If you're looking for the most phone for the least amount of money, you'll have a hard time finding a better deal than this.
While it's easy to think that this phone is missing some key features, it's not. That's why the Moto G4 Play is so cheap. The Moto G4 Plus, for an extra $100, packs in the fingerprint sensor, bump up in screen resolution and a Snapdragon 617. If those specs don't matter much to you, Moto's low-end G4 phone might be just what you need.
The Huawei MediaPad M3 is a small tablet. It's slim, it's light, and it's handy – and the 4G version can even double as a gigantic phone, as long as you don't mind all your calls coming out at speakerphone volume.
For years the MediaPad series has pootled along in the background, never winning the acclaim, or the sales figures, of a Samsung tablet or an iPad.
This is comfortably the sleekest MediaPad to date; however, by matching an ultra high-res screen with a so-so processor, Huawei has ensured that the M3 can't keep up the demands of the prettiest games that well.
So is this just another also-ran from Huawei's tablet department, or something more impressive that could make potential buyers – and the competition – sit up and take notice?
Design and features
Build is one of the Huawei MediaPad M3's strongest elements. A very slim, low-flex aluminium casing makes the tablet feel expensive and strong. It's like an iPad mini in this sense, but the shape is a little different – a widescreen aspect ratio makes the M3 a bit less stubby-looking than the 4:3 iPad.
It's a good design, once again proving that 8-inch tablets like this are a great size for most people: big enough to offer a much larger display than any phone, but still light and small enough to take with you everywhere.
The MediaPad M3 is also light enough to hold in one hand, perhaps for reading an article or two on the way to work, to make your work commute that bit more bearable. Our review model weighs just 322g.
The fingerprint scanner is the clue that tells you the MediaPad M3 is a tablet of 2016 rather than, say, 2014. Looking quite a lot like the one used on the Samsung Galaxy S7, this sits below the screen as part of a button.
It's not a clicky button, though, just a touch-sensitive pad. Used while the MediaPad M3 is awake, it's a back button; when the device is asleep, of course, it wakes the little guy up.
This isn't the fastest fingerprint scanner Huawei has ever produced, taking around a second to turn the tablet on from sleep, but it's reliable.
There are just a couple of bits to the Huawei MediaPad M3 that are a little less high-end than similar-looking features you might see in a top-end Huawei phone. For example, the band that holds the rear camera seems to be topped with plastic rather than Gorilla Glass. Crucially, though, the M3 still gives off the whiff of a top-end tablet.
Huawei sent us the 4G version of the MediaPad M3, which has a SIM tray on the bottom edge that also takes a memory card, enabling you to add to the 32GB of built-in storage.
With a SIM inserted you can almost treat the M3 like a phone – the only thing holding you back is the lack of a proper call speaker.
The MediaPad M3 does have good tablet speakers, though. On the top and bottom edges are little 7-pip grilles that let the stereo Harman Kardon drivers sing.
Getting an audio brand involved is no guarantee of good sound quality, but here you get some of the loudest speakers we've heard in a tablet. It's the kind of volume you'd expect from something much larger, like a laptop. The case vibrates a bit at higher volumes, which is hardly surprising.
At the highest volumes the upper mid-range can become a little searing with some material too, but the sound is relatively thick and full; it's impressive stuff for a small, slim tablet. And as the grilles are set to one side, rather than slap-bang in the middle of the top and bottom edges, they're not too easy to block with your hands.
That's your lot in terms of extra hardware, though. There's no IR transmitter, which has featured in some previous Huawei devices – one of these would enable the MediaPad M3 to be used as a universal remote.
Screen
The big change compared to the 8-inch MediaPad M2 is that the Huawei MediaPad M3 has a true high-res screen. It's an 8-inch 2560 x 1600-pixel screen, with an IPS LCD panel. The upshot is that pixel density and sharpness are both excellent, and even up close the screen looks sharp.
Brightness is also very good, and there's an ambient light-sensing Auto mode, a feature that's sometimes omitted from tablets. Viewing angles are strong, with minimal brightness loss when you view the screen from an angle.
Huawei has plugged loads of customisation into the MediaPad M3's screen too. First, there are two colour modes. Normal is a classic sRGB mode that looks quite natural, while Vivid mode amps up the colours for a little more energy at the expense of colour accuracy.
As on most of Huawei's phones you can also fiddle with the colour temperature, which changes the character of the M3's screen quite a bit. There's an Eye Comfort mode as well, which, like the iPhone's Night Shift mode, makes the screen more yellow in order to cut down the amount of blue light emitted.
Contrast isn't as good as that of the OLED Samsung Galaxy Tab S2's display, but this is a good screen.
The Huawei MediaPad M3 runs Android 6.0 behind Huawei's Emotion UI interface, which is used in just about every Huawei and Honor mobile device – Android 7.0 Nougat was released right before the M3 was announced, so we wouldn't have expected Huawei to have been able to include it.
And, as it happens, EmotionUI actually adds one of the main features of Android 7.0: multi-window app multitasking. Long-press the square soft key and you can boot up two apps at once. Not every app can be launched like this, but Netflix, for example, can – so you could watch a movie while keeping one eye on your Facebook feed.
It works in portrait or landscape orientation too – the landscape option is particularly useful for taking notes while you read something.
The rest of the Huawei MediaPad M3's software is standard Huawei fare. That means you don't get a separate apps menu, just a bunch of home screens onto which all your apps drop. If you want to keep organised, you can lump apps into folders. It's really the only way to avoid using loads of home screens, unless you don't use that many apps.
Some people end up really disliking Emotion UI in phones, but we find it a bit less contentious in a tablet. We tend to flick between apps a bit less rapidly than when using a phone.
Despite Emotion UI altering the look of Android quite a bit, the Huawei MediaPad M3 isn't weighed down by lots of superfluous apps. There's a set of 'Tools' apps including a voice recorder, virtual mirror and compass, but they're filed away in a separate folder, designed to be more-or-less ignored unless you need them.
The WPS office suite is installed too. This isn't something Huawei has created, just one of the more popular Android office suites.
The other more Huawei-specific element of the MediaPad M3's software is themes. This is an important feature of Emotion UI, but on this tablet you only get two choices, a black theme and a blue one; more may become available to download through the Themes app after a software update, but right now you can only use these locally-stored ones.
Performance
Some versions of Emotion UI can make a phone or tablet feel pretty slow to use, but the Huawei MediaPad M3 is pretty fast in day-to-day operation. It packs a generous 4GB RAM, and uses the HiSilicon Kirin 950 CPU.
The Kirin 950 is a fairly high-end member of the HiSilicon CPU family, with four Cortex-A53 everyday cores and four Cortex-A72 performance cores, which are matched with a Mali T880 GPU.
We found the Huawei MediaPad M3 nippy enough when using everyday apps and just flicking through the Android interface. However, things started to come apart when we tried playing high-end games.
Despite the impressive-sounding specs, the Kirin 950 just doesn't seem powerful enough to keep up with serious polygon-flinging given the demands of the high-res 2560 x 1600 screen.
At the default High graphics setting Asphalt 8 is painfully slow, and choppy enough to make the game much less fun to play. Even at the Very Low setting there's the occasional frame rate dip.
As one of Android's prettiest games, Asphalt 8 is a pretty reliable way to test a tablet's limits; however, there are signs of slow-down in less demanding titles too.
Gameloft's Modern Combat 5 suffers from some juddery moments during intense action scenes, and even Dead Trigger 2's frame rate is less than optimal – and Dead Trigger 2 tends to scale very well to different devices.
The Huawei MediaPad M3 should be a great tablet for gamers, but it isn't.
Camera
These days some tablets have cameras as good as those in phones – the iPad Pro 9.7 is a good example. However, the Huawei MediaPad M3's rear camera is rather pedestrian.
It's an 8-megapixel sensor with an f/2 lens: fine for a tablet, but probably not as good as your phone camera, unless you have a fairly old mobile.
In bright sunlight you can get some decent pictures, but images become quite noisy in lower light – and there's no flash to help out.
The Huawei MediaPad M3's camera is also pretty prone to chromatic aberration, or colour fringing – this is where high-contrast edges are outlined in colour, in this case purple. If you shoot into the sun lens flare can cause discolouration in large areas of images too.
You can minimise these issues by avoiding very high-contrast subjects and direct sunlight, but we've been using the Huawei MediaPad M3 alongside the Honor 5C phone (Honor is basically a Huawei sub-brand), and its 13-megapixel camera is a significant step up.
The M3's camera can be fun to use, though. There's a half-second shutter lag, but the camera app features loads of extra modes to play with.
You may only ever touch half of them, but there are a few interesting options. All Focus lets you select the focus point after shooting by taking several shots in rapid succession at different focus ranges, Pro mode offers manual control over settings such as shutter speed, and Light Painting lets you take those shots in which the lights of moving vehicles become colourful trails.
All these features would be more effective in a slightly higher-quality phone camera, but they've nice to have anyway.
The Huawei MediaPad M3's front camera is very similar to the rear one, but where the sensor makes a so-so rear camera, it's a pretty good selfie one. Self portraits have lots of detail, and fairly lifelike colours.
Focusing is the big difference between the two cameras. The back camera has standard autofocus, while the front one has a fixed-focus lens.
Having a higher-res front camera also lets you video chat at 1080p resolution, rather than just VGA or 720p, not to mention making your Snapchats look a bit better. There's no 4K video capture with either camera, though.
Battery life
Thanks to its ultra high-resolution screen the Huawei MediaPad M3 was always unlikely to have amazing battery life – it's not one of those low-end 1280 x 800 tablets that can play the whole Lord of the Rings movie trilogy off a single charge.
The TechRadar battery test, which involves playing a 90-minute video at maximum brightness with accounts syncing over Wi-Fi in the background, drained 19% from the M3's battery. This suggests you should be able to enjoy between seven-and-a-half and eight hours of video off a full charge.
This sort of test is low-drain on the CPU side, but maxing-out the brightness means the screen sucks a decent amount of juice. To switch things around, we tried Real Racing 3 using Auto brightness rather than maximum brightness; 20 minutes of play took 6% off the battery, suggesting around five and a half hours of gaming off a full battery.
Neither of these results is remarkable, but the gaming numbers in particular show that the Huawei MediaPad M3 lasts a respectably long time under strain.
Huawei has nailed a few elements in the MediaPad M3, but the tablet falls short when it comes to gaming performance, making a few other tablets out there better options for gamers.
We liked
One of the best things about the Huawei MediaPad M3 is its build. The slim, light aluminium frame looks and feels good while being seriously practical.
The screen is good too. It's sharp, and has colour modes that provide both more natural and saturated tones. The speakers are another high point, delivering impressive volume for a tablet this slim.
We disliked
The big problem with the Huawei MediaPad M3 is that its chipset doesn't seem to be able to make Android's fanciest games run well. Many run much slower than they should.
Its rear camera is nothing special either. We're not huge fans of tablet photography when most phone have better sensors, but some users will demand better phone performance than this from their slates.
Verdict
The Huawei MediaPad M3 is a tablet with lots of admirable qualities. High screen resolution, ultra-low weight and speakers that go loud enough to become an anti-social menace in some situations earn a big thumbs-up.
It's a pity, then, that the M3 is thrown off balance quite so dramatically by oddly poor gaming performance with high-end titles. The casual games everyone gets obsessed with for weeks at a time run fine, but those with console-like graphics tend to struggle to an extent that's quite rare for a tablet of this quality.
You'll need to think carefully about whether this is going to be an issue for you before choosing the Huawei MediaPad M3 over an iPad mini, Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 or cheaper ASUS ZenPad Z580C.
ZTE Axon 7 Mini takes a lot of what we liked about the shockingly good ZTE Axon 7 and shrinks everything down to a more compact size without too much compromise.
It's a little easier to hold in one hand if you don't have meaty paws and it's slightly easier on your wallet, too, thanks to its more affordable price point.
Smallness is what's this phone is all about. But it doesn't skimp on too many features. It has Snapdragon processor, 3GB of RAM and a 32GB of storage inside.
There's, a microSD card slot that provides more space if you need it, or it becomes a dual SIM slot. There's Hi-Fi audio, front-facing speakers and and a fingerprint sensor to top it all off.
This mini variant isn't designed to be the fastest phone on the market, but it's going to get you through the day with true mid-range specs and decent battery life.
Price and release date
The best part about the ZTE Axon 7 Mini is it brings the same exact phone design to everyone for a cheaper price. It costs $299 in the US and €299 in Europe.
Although there's no Axon 7 Mini UK pricing available, the price is likely to be £250, since the straight up conversion from Euros to pounds is £253.
The ZTE Axon 7 Mini release date is happening throughout September, depending on where you are in the world. Expect it in the US first, and everywhere else by late September, according to ZTE.
Just a word of warning to anyone ordering this phone in the US: while it has CDMA bands to make it work with Verizon and Sprint, it's not compatible with either network just yet.
Both CDMA networks need to certify this phone to make full use of their network. AT&T, T-Mobile and all GSM carriers will have no problems whatsoever out of the box.
Design and display
It's becoming easier to find a mid-range Android phone that's made of something other than plastic in 2016, and the ZTE Axon 7 Mini adds another suitable option to the growing list.
This is an affordable, all-metal phone that competes with much higher-priced handsets from Samsung, LG, HTC and Apple. The design will fool everyone into thinking it costs more than it does.
What's great about the ZTE Axon 7 Mini is that it's light at 153g and therefore easier to hold in one hand - one of our few gripes about the bigger and even more slippery ZTE Axon 7.
The back of the phone remains a bit slippery since it's made of the same aluminum material, but it's easier to wrap your hands around the entire thing thanks to its smaller screen.
The screen now measures 5.2 inches, giving you an alternative to the 5.5-inch display of its bigger brother. The resolution has also been dialed back to 1080p instead of 2K.
The AMOLED display still looks fantastic at Full HD and the brightness is the same if not better on the Mini version. 1080p is all you need on a phone of this size since it's not Google DayDream VR compatible anyway.
The Mini's fingerprint sensor is on the back and remains quick way to unlock the phone, while the front-facing speakers make a powerful statement on the otherwise minimized phone face.
ZTE was able to combine the Hi-Fi DAC and ADC audio chips into a single AKM 4962 chip, and from our music playback testing, it sounds just as good from this smaller phone as it does on the larger Axon 7.
Specs and Interface
The Axon 7 Mini also dials back its Qualcomm-made chipset. It still uses a newer Snapdragon processor, but it's the second-tier Snapdragon 617 chip.
Qualcomm is always adamant that its 600 series is still powerful, only not its over-the-top best. That's what we expect from the ZTE Axon 7 Mini performance.
It's coupled with 3GB of RAM, down from 4GB, and boasts 32GB of internal storage, backing down on the generous 64GB offering we liked so much about the ZTE Axon 7.
The good news is that there's still a microSD card slot to cover you for 256GB of expandable storage, and it doubles as a second nano SIM card slot. That's really helpful for frequent travelers.
We're looking forward to seeing how these mid-range specs perform under pressure in our full review testing. We can tell you about the interface right now, though.
ZTE Axon 7 Mini runs Android Marshmallow with ZTE's MiFavor operating system skin on top of it. This doesn't deviate from stock Android too much, like some Chinese phone makers do.
In fact, ZTE's default theme for the phone is called Stock Android, with its MiFavor skin playing second string within a submenu. It's a good decision.
Since this is an unlocked phone without carrier restrictions in the US, there are only a couple of pre-loaded non-Google apps here, like ZTE's helpful My Voice software. It helps you snap photos and unlock the phone with your voice and works well enough to keep turned on.
Camera and battery life
The ZTE Axon 7 camera had a strong camera in daylight and it was its weakest point as soon as the sun set or you stepped indoors. We don't expect that to change with the Mini.
It has a 16MP camera with a f/1.9 aperture. It lacks the 20MP and OIS of the bigger Axon 7, but carries EIS and PDAF to steady shots and a sapphire lens to keep the camera protected.
Also missing is 4K video recording and a dual tone flash – there's dual LED, but it's just single tone here. The front camera stays the same with an 8MP, f/2.2 snapper that records video in 1080p.
Battery life also requires further testing since its capacity is called down to 2705 mAh from the Axon 7's 3250 mAh battery.
You may get a fewer hours from the ZTE Axon 7, though its smaller 5.2-inch display and 1080p resolution may even things out in the end.
Early Verdict
Smallness is what the ZTE Axon 7 Mini is all about. It won't stretch your hand or budget, yet still gives you a completely metal phone that you expect to cost more.
The Mini isn't going to rival the performance of flagship devices, but you won't find many of its best features on higher priced setups. It's a fully capable Android phone, with a bright AMOLED display, front-facing speakers with Hi-Fi audio and a microSD card slot that doubles as a second SIM card slot. Best of all, it's affordable and comes unlocked, meaning everyone is invited.
