Moto Z Force Droid review: Toughened up

Gallery

The Moto Z Force relies on stock Google apps for viewing photos, video playback, and the music player. The Gallery in question is part of Google's Photos service. If you are familiar with Google Photos, then you'll be quite familiar with the interface.

Camera roll views can be changed with pinch-to-zoom

The stock offering also offers many basic editing features to help you crop, rotate, and adjust basic levels. There's also an "auto enhance" feature which automatically adjusts the photo the way Google's software thinks it should look.

Various photo editing tools

Video playback is just as simple as the photo viewer. There is also an "edit" button but it only allows you to crop the video's length. Unfortunately, the stock video player doesn't come close to 3rd party video players that you can find on the Play Store with features like additional format and subtitle support.

Video playback: tools • options • editor

Google Play Music

The Moto Z Force uses Google Play music as the stock music player which offers a free music streaming service (think YouTube, but for music and ad-supported). These days, it's more common to either subscribe to a music service or stream music from a free service. The days of loading 20GB of music to a microSD card are slowly being left behind in the past.

Album art: Now Playing • notification • lockscreen

Google Music: home • settings • equalizer

When using Google Music, you'll be shown a YouTube icon which will take you to that song's music video on YouTube (if it has one). Besides the "Now Playing" screen, album art can be seen in the notification shade (along with music controls) and the lock screen also features the album art in a full-screen version.

Great audio output

Unsurprisingly, the Motorola Moto Z Force Droid matched the audio output of the regular Moto Z almost perfectly. That’s good news too, since it means that the flagship delivers perfectly accurate audio with an active external amplifier and matches them with nicely high volume.

Headphones don’t cause much damage either - nothing besides a well contained hike in stereo crosstalk. Another great performance by the Moto family.

And now here go the results so you can do your comparison.

Motorola Moto Z Force Droid frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.

Loudspeaker test

The Droid Turbo 2 (Moto X Force) featured a similar loudspeaker setup as the Moto Z Force does now. There is a single loudspeaker on the front of the phone which also doubles as the earpiece during phone calls. The speaker on the Moto Z Force Droid turned out louder.

The loudspeaker is strong enough to casually watch a video or listen to music. But could potentially struggle to be heard in a crowded restaurant. Although, Motorola made sure the speaker was loud and clear enough for sounds with more upper-mids and treble sounds (which are qualities that most ringtones have). The speaker makes just the right amount of compromise while still making sure that you won't miss any important calls.

While the Moto Z scored just a few dB higher in the ringtone test, the difference between the two loudspeakers is negligible.